JOHN MICHAEL CORRIGAN
John Michael Corrigan earned his PhD from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. He currently teaches at National Chengchi University, a public research university in Taiwan. His books include Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness (Cambridge UP, 2023), American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry (Fordham UP, 2012), and the co-edited volume Romantic Legacies (Routledge 2019). He serves as a senior editor with the University of Virginia’s Digital Yoknapatawpha.
SONGS
The Night Shift
Judas
Vein of Fire
BOOKS
William Faulkner continues to be an author who is widely read, studied, and admired. This book provides a new and interdisciplinary account of Faulkner's legacy, arguing that his fiction is just as relevant today as it was during his own time. Indeed, Faulkner's far-reaching critique of his Southern heritage speaks directly to the anti-racism discourse of our own time and engages the dire threat to subjecthood in a technologically saturated civilization. Combining literary critique with network and complexity science, this study offers a new reading of William Faulkner as a novelist for the information age. Over the course of his career, we find an artist struggling to articulate the threat to human wellbeing in rapidly scaling social systems and gradually developing a hard-won humanism that affirms the individual and interpersonal life as a source of novelty and social change.
"The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human." With these words, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates the formation of American individualism: to evolve and become fully human requires a heightened engagement with history. Americans, Emerson argues, must realize history's chronology in themselves--because their own minds and bodies are its evolving record.
