Thom Dancer

Biography

My work examines the relationship between works of literature (and literary theory) and a wide range of philosophical, scientific, and critical theory that has interrogated some of our most taken for granted assumptions about the relations between humans and nonhumans, society and nature, and epistemology and ontology. My book, Critical Modesty, attempts to characterize and consolidate a particular style of thinking and disposition shared across these various projects, which assume that critics are part of the phenomenon they study and therefore that they should aim to think with texts rather than about them. This style, I suggest, finds a powerful home in works of contemporary fiction that use the resources of narrative form to imagine new ways of thinking, acting, and reading in a posthuman world. I ask us to see that contemporary novelists do not just represent critical modesty in their writing but are, in fact, among its most adept practitioners.    My work examines the relationship between works of literature (and literary theory) and a wide range of philosophical, scientific, and critical theory that has interrogated some of our most taken for granted assumptions about the relations between humans and nonhumans, society and nature, and epistemology and ontology. My book, Critical Modesty, attempts to characterize and consolidate a particular style of thinking and disposition shared across these various projects, which assume that critics are part of the phenomenon they study and therefore that they should aim to think with texts rather than about them. This style, I suggest, finds a powerful home in works of contemporary fiction that use the resources of narrative form to imagine new ways of thinking, acting, and reading in a posthuman world. I ask us to see that contemporary novelists do not just represent critical modesty in their writing but are, in fact, among its most adept practitioners.   

Research Interest

20th and 21st century British and Anglophone literature; the contemporary novel; the history of literary criticism; literary theory and research methods; philosophy of science; philosophy and literature; pragmatism (philosophy); speculative philosophy; genre including the essay, novels, and comics.