Mark Shechner Office: 513 Clemens Office Hours: 2006-2007, Thursday 3-6 and by appointment Phone: E-mail: shechner@buffalo.edu

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I started my career as both a Joyce scholar and a psychoanalytic critic, a combination of interests led to my first book, Joyce in Nighttown in 1974.  After that, I slowly drifted away from both disciplines, in the direction of Jewish studies -- secular Jewish studies -- as embodied in the writing of the great Jewish writers of the post World War II period: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and a host of other fascinating figures -- who now remembers Isaac Rosenfeld? -- from whom I drew a particular nourishment.  Their subject matter was out there on the world stage, while their voices seemed to come from someplace close to home, and I remembered, in reading them, what Alfred Kazin had said upon first seeing a play by Clifford Odets: that he thought he had seen his own family's kitchen up on stage. I didn't see the kitchen in these writers, but I heard a familiar voice released into American, and world, literature.  That particular constellation of interests led to several projects: an edition of the writing of Isaac Rosenfeld, Preserving the Hunger; the book After the Revolution, about Jewish self-transformation under the pressure of history, and a collections of essays, The Conversion of the Jews.  All of these books were about those conversions of the Jewish spirit that had taken them on long and tortuous journeys from Judaism through leftism through therapeutic millenarianism (revolutionism transferred to the couch) to whatever came next. Curmudgeonism?

Yet, finally, I am an Americanist, in realization that my intellectual destiny is tied up with this country and this language. And so for the past twenty years or so I've been reading my way through contemporary American fiction, which is vast and features a number of writers who will last, and trying to formulate ideas about the revival of American realism and American fiction of the ordinary. The book, currently (as of 2006) in the works will be titled Literature Without History, a theory of the the American contemporary.   In the mean time, just published is a collection of readings of Philip Roth, titled Up Society's Ass, Copper.   That title, like the one before it, is self-explaining. 

These days I teach courses in contemporary fiction, James Joyce, and writing journalism.  Current book lists for courses I am teaching this Fall, 2006, can be found on my personal web site at http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~shechner, and I encourage you to visit it to see what I am doing these days in the classroom.   You will also find there a fairly updated edition of my vita.

Mark Shechner
August 30, 2006