Specialization:
c. 1800-1945, c. 1945-present, British Literature, Environment and Ecocriticism, Global Literatures
Education:
University of Colorado, Boulder, 2003
Bio:
Russell Samolsky is associate professor of Anglophone literature in the English Department here at UCSB. His research interests include South African literature, Modernism, Graphic Novel, Jewish Studies, Animal Studies, Deconstruction, Materialisms, and the Global Humanities. His book, Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee (Fordham UP), takes account of the complex relationship between past apocalyptic texts and future catastrophic events and works to offer a messianic counter-time against apocalyptic futures. He is currently working on a monograph on J.M. Coetzee as well as projects concerning animality and contemporary literature, and reading in the age of the Anthropocene.
Research:
Publications:
“Wrestling with Death: Delayed Decoding from Heart of Darkness to Age of Iron,” South African Modernism: A Critical History (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
“The Good Empty,” Comics and Catharsis (University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming)
“Borges and AI,” Poetics Today (2024) (with Rita Raley)
“Hosting the Critic: J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K,” Cultural Critique Online (2023)
“Coetzee’s Mitteleuropa and Austro-Hungary,” The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee, eds. Lucy Graham and Andrew van der Vlies (Bloomsbury, 2023)
“Rocket Theory,” Left Theory and the Alt-Right, eds. Jeffrey Di Leo and Sophia McClennen (Routledge, 2023) (with Rita Raley)
“Against AI?” Critical Inquiry Forum (June 2023) (with Rita Raley)
“The Book of Ashes: Authorial Instructions, Incorporations, and House Rules in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” Narrative 31:2 (May 2023)
“Does AI Have a Future?” Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, eds. Aaron Jaffe, Michael F. Miller, and Rodrigo Martini (Bloomsbury, 2021) (with Rita Raley)
“Shades of the Archive: J. M. Coetzee, the Paradox of Poetic Sovereignty and the Lives of Literary Beings,” J.M. Coetzee and the Archive: Fiction, Theory, and Autobiography, eds. Marc Farrant, Kai Easton, and Hermann Wittenberg (Bloomsbury, 2021)
“Killing Dogs: Animality and Trauma in Waltz with Bashir and Deogratias,” Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization, eds. David Kelman and Jennifer Ballengee (Routledge, 2020)
“Inter Alia: Aliens and AI,” PUBLIC: Art/Culture/Ideas (2019) (with Rita Raley)
Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee (Fordham UP, 2011)
“Acts of Mourning: Art and the Lives of Animals in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello,” J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory, eds. Elleke Boehmer, Katy Iddiols, and Robert Eaglestone (London: Continuum, 2009)
“The Time is Out of Joint: Hamlet, Messianism, and the Specter of Apocalypse,” English Language Notes 46:1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 29-46.
“Animal Ethics,” The European Legacy 12:4 (2007)
“On Teaching South African Literature in the Age of Terror,” Safundi: The Journal of South African & American Comparative Studies (October 2004)
“Ghostly Letters: Hamlet, Derrida and Apocalyptic Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 25 (2003)
“Metaleptic Machines: Kafka, Kaballah, Shoah,” Modern Judaism 19:2 (1999)
“Writing Violence: Bodies and Signs in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 1:1 (1993)
Courses:
ENGL 128AF: Animal Fictions
ENGL 128GN: Graphic Novel & Trauma
ENGL 128JG: The Jewish Graphic Novel
ENGL 165AE: The Graphic Novel: Animals and Ecology
ENGL 197: Upper-Division Seminar J.M. Coetzee: Ethics and the Other
ENGL 234: J.M. Coetzee: Art, Ethics, and Politics