Prof. Dr. Derek Attridge

University of York
English and Related Literature

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
October 2021 – December 2021

Website

E-Mail: derek.attridge@york.ac.uk

Last Update: 01.10.2025

Curriculum Vitae

I was born and raised in South Africa, and obtained my first degree from the University of Natal in 1965. Moving to the UK, I gained a further BA (1968) and a PhD (1971) from Cambridge University. A research fellowship at Oxford University followed (1971-3), then teaching positions at the University of Southampton (1973-1984), Strathclyde University (1984-88), and, in the USA, Rutgers University (1988-98). In 1998, having been awarded a Leverhulme Research Professorship, I returned to the UK and joined University of York, where I became Emeritus in 2016. At Strathclyde and York I was Head of Department, and Graduate Director at Rutgers.

Other fellowships and awards have included the first Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Prize, the ESSE Prize (for The Singularity of Literature), a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Camargo Foundation Fellowship, two National Center for the Humanities Fellowships, and an All Souls Visiting Fellowship. I have been Visiting Professor in France, Italy, the United States, Egypt, and Abu Dhabi, and I am a Fellow of the British Academy.

I have published sixteen books in the main areas of my research – modernist and contemporary fiction, South African literature, poetics and the history of poetry, and literary theory – and edited or co-edited fourteen books in the same fields. I am currently engaged in projects on the writing of J. M. Coetzee, the forms of poetry, and an extension of the arguments of The Singularity of Literature to other artforms.

Selected Publications

Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell University Press, 1988; reissued by Routledge, 2004)
J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago University Press, 2004)
The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004; reissued in Routledge Classics, 2017)
The Work of Literature (Oxford University Press, 2017)
The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (Oxford, 2019)
Forms of Modernist Fiction: Reading the Novel from James Joyce to Tom McCarth (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

FRIAS Projects

Singular Experiences: Literature, Visual Art, Criticism (2025)

Literary criticism is at a crossroads: after a period in which historical, archival, and ideological approaches have dominated literary studies, more and more attention is being paid to ethical, affective, and formal approaches, with a renewed focus on the role of the reader. The aim of this project is to bring together essays I have written and talks I have given, for the most part over the past five years, on various aspects of this debate, to produce a book for publication by a leading academic press. The essays will reinforce and extend the arguments put forward in my earlier publications, The Singularity of Literature (2004) and The Work of Literature (2015), and will be prefaced by an introduction addressing the evolution of my thinking. Among the issues to be considered are the relation between the experience of literature and the experience of visual art, the place of craft in aesthetic theory, the notion of the “experimental” in art, the philosophical pedigree of the notion of singularity, the distinction between “amateur” and “professional” responses to art, the role of context in literary interpretation, the place of emotion in literary reading, the ethical implications of representations of androids, and the question of untranslatability in literature. The book will make a strong case for the continuing value of literature, understood in terms of readers’ singular experiences.

The Challenge of Modernist Form: Innovative Style from Joyce to Coetzee (2021)

The formal innovations of James Joyce had a profound effect on the writing and reading of fiction, and its repercussions are still felt today throughout the world. Taking advantage of the recent surge of interest in questions of literary form, this project will seek to determine the exact nature of Joyce’s formal revolution, and trace its aftereffects in a number of later writers, including Samuel Beckett, Aidan Higgins, B. S. Johnson, W. F. Hermans, Caryl Churchill, Tom McCarthy, Eleanor Catton, Lucy Ellmann, and J.M. Coetzee. The majority of examples will be chosen from novels written in English, but some attention will be given to work in Afrikaans and Dutch and to the problems of translation that arise in such cases; one chapter will be concerned with drama. The examples will come from a number of national literary traditions, including those of the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, and South Africa. The project thus aims at a fuller understanding of the nature and history of modernist form as a global phenomenon.

An underlying theoretical question will be whether literary form and content are always inseparable, as is often argued, or whether it is possible for writers to successfully exploit formal devices as a separate element in the reader’s experience. The outcome will be a book to be offered to a university press.