H. Porter Abbott

H. Porter Abbott

Areas of Interest

• Narrative
• 19th & 20th-century literature
• Autobiography
• Modernism
• Literature, cognition, evolution

Books and Recent Articles

• The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge, 2002; second edition, 2008)
• Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Cornell, 1996)
• Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Cornell, 1984)
• The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (U of California P, 1973)
• Editor,On the Origin of Fictions Special issue of SubStance (March 2001)

Selected Recent & forthcoming Articles

• “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader,” Style 43:1 (forthcoming, 2009)
• “Immersions in the Cognitive Sublime: The Textual Experience of the Extratextual Unknown in García Márquez and Beckett,” Narrative 17:2 (forthcoming, spring 2009)
• “Narrativity,” in Handbook of Narratology (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, forthcoming 2009)
• "Narrative," Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2009)
• “Garden Paths and Ineffable effects: Abandoning Representation in Literature and Film,” in Toward a Theory of Narrative Acts (University of Texas Press, forthcoming 2009)
• “The Legacy of Samuel Beckett: an Anatomy” in A Companion to Samuel Beckett (Blackwell, forthcoming 2009)
• “Narrative and Emergent Behavior,” Poetics Today 29 (2008)
• “I Am Not a Philosopher,” in Samuel Becket at 100 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
• “Story, Plot, and Narration,” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (Cambridge, 2007)
• “The Future of All Narrative Futures,” in The Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (Blackwell, 2005)
• “Murphy as Modernist novel” in The Blackwell Modernist Literature and Culture (Blackwell, 2004)
• “Egregious Omissions: Samuel Beckett and the Theory and Practice of Narrative Gaps,” in The Palgrave Guide to Beckett Studies (Macmillan Palgrave, 2004)
• “Unnarratable Knowledge: the Difficulty of Understanding Evolution by Natural Selection” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Stanford: CSLI, 2003)
• "Humanists, Scientists, & the Cultural Surplus," SubStance 94/95 (March 2001)
• “Beckett’s Lost Worlds: The Artful Exhaustion of a 19th-Century Genre,” Journal of Beckett Studies 11:1 (spring 2001)
• "What Do We Mean When We Say "Narrative Literature"? Looking for Answers Across Disciplinary Borders," Style 34:2 (summer 2000)
• "The Evolutionary Origins of the Storied Mind: Modeling the Prehistory of Narrative Consciousness and its Discontents," Narrative 8:3 (October 2000)
• "Beckett's Lawlessness: Evolutionary Psychology & Genre," Samuel Beckett Today/Ajourd'hui (2000)
• "Samuel Beckett & the Arts of Time: Painting, Music, Narrative" in Samuel Beckett & the Arts (Garland, 1999)
• "Extratextual Intelligence," New Literary History 28:4 (Fall 1997)
• "Old Virginia and the Night Writer: The Origins of Woolf's Narrative Meander" in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996)
• "Character and Modernism: Reading Woolf Writing Woolf" New Literary History 24:2 (1993)
• "Beginning Again: The Post-Narrative Art of Texts for Nothing and How It Is" in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge, 1993)
• "Writing and Conversion: Conrad's Modernist Autography," Yale Journal of Criticism 5:3 (1992)

Selected Earlier Articles

• “Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Toward a Taxonomy of Literary Categories,” New Literary History 19 (1988)
• “The Harpooned Notebook: Malone Dies and the Conventions of Intercalated Narrative,” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983)
• “Letters to the Self: the Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction,” PMLA 95 (January 1980)
• “Saul Bellow and the ‘Lost Cause’ of Fiction,” Novel 13 (spring 1980)
• “Organic Form in the Autobiography of a Convert: the Example of Malcolm X,” CLA Journal 23 (December 1979)

Current Projects

• Book: The Uses of Perversity: Reading Unreadable Stories.
• Book: Major Issues in Narrative Theory.
• Book: Darwinian Conversions: English Modernism and the Discourse on Human Change, 1880-1925.

Recent Course Offerings

• Autobiography
• Modernism in English
• Darwin and the Nineteenth-Century Novel
• The Literature of World War I
• Narrative Theory and Practice
• Introduction to Narrative