Garry Leonard

Biography

In the most general terms, I am interested in the relationship between modernity and the various attempts to represent it-modernism, certainly, but also more popular discourses such as advertising and cinema. In terms of cinema, I am fascinated with the "shape" various genres took (the Western, Melodrama, Film Noir, etc.) and how that shape reflects various myths of modernity that help us locate ourselves in its aggressively secular milieu. Perhaps it is how we cope with the diminsment of the sacred in the secular that drives much of my work. My first book on James Joyce, Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective, looked at the stylistic shifts in Joyce's fiction in light of a dominant contemporary psychoanalytic theory. My second book on Joyce, Advertising in the Fiction of James Joyce, took a more cultural theory approach and showed how advertising discourse was crucial for Joyce in his exploration of where "sacred" discourse had been appropriated by various dominant discourses of modernity. In article form, I have pursued this interest in a variety of writers and filmmakers. I explored Sylvia Plath's relationship to Mademoiselle magazine, Hitchcock's Lacanian gender constructions in Vertigo, connections between the theories of Eisenstein concerning montage and the Illustrated books of William Blake, and similarities in the construction of the modern "self" and the invention of the internal combustion engine in works by Eliot and Stein. Most recently, I have looked at the depiction of modernity from a Heideggerian perspective in Kubrick's 2001, the relationship of capitalism and the ideology of "true love" in the genre of Hollywood Romance, the parallel of the Hollywood horror genre with the "monstrous" indifference of laissez-faire economics. Current work argues that the shape of Hollywood genre contains a modernist element that can be usefully juxtaposed to the better known modernist techniques of Eliot, Woolf and Joyce, to name a few. I am a member of the English Department, an adjunct to the Comparative Literature Department, and a member of the faculty of the Innis Graduate School in Cinema. In the most general terms, I am interested in the relationship between modernity and the various attempts to represent it-modernism, certainly, but also more popular discourses such as advertising and cinema. In terms of cinema, I am fascinated with the "shape" various genres took (the Western, Melodrama, Film Noir, etc.) and how that shape reflects various myths of modernity that help us locate ourselves in its aggressively secular milieu. Perhaps it is how we cope with the diminsment of the sacred in the secular that drives much of my work. My first book on James Joyce, Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective, looked at the stylistic shifts in Joyce's fiction in light of a dominant contemporary psychoanalytic theory. My second book on Joyce, Advertising in the Fiction of James Joyce, took a more cultural theory approach and showed how advertising discourse was crucial for Joyce in his exploration of where "sacred" discourse had been appropriated by various dominant discourses of modernity. In article form, I have pursued this interest in a variety of writers and filmmakers. I explored Sylvia Plath's relationship to Mademoiselle magazine, Hitchcock's Lacanian gender constructions in Vertigo, connections between the theories of Eisenstein concerning montage and the Illustrated books of William Blake, and similarities in the construction of the modern "self" and the invention of the internal combustion engine in works by Eliot and Stein. Most recently, I have looked at the depiction of modernity from a Heideggerian perspective in Kubrick's 2001, the relationship of capitalism and the ideology of "true love" in the genre of Hollywood Romance, the parallel of the Hollywood horror genre with the "monstrous" indifference of laissez-faire economics. Current work argues that the shape of Hollywood genre contains a modernist element that can be usefully juxtaposed to the better known modernist techniques of Eliot, Woolf and Joyce, to name a few. I am a member of the English Department, an adjunct to the Comparative Literature Department, and a member of the faculty of the Innis Graduate School in Cinema.

Research Interest

Twentieth Century British and Irish Literature.