| E-mail | mbroek (non Essex users should add @essex.ac.uk) |
| Qualifications | BA Georgia State; MFA Goodard College |
| Publications | Link to publications for Michael Broek |
| Thesis title | 'Were It a New-Made World': Hawthorne, Melville and the Un-Masking of America |
| Abstract | Supervisor: Richard Gray
This thesis explores issues of nationalism, aesthetics, and point of view, arguing that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were the first major fiction writers in America to challenge the myth of American Exceptionalism. This challenge, I argue, arises not from an overt criticism of American values or myths, but as the result of an aesthetic operation that places competing and contradictory expressions against each other. The resulting clash of perceptions and the subsequent revelation of a new, unique mode of understanding thus constitutes a direct challenge to static, context-free mythologizing, i.e. a direct challenge to nationalism. The thesis focuses specifically on Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Melville's Moby-Dick, placing these pieces within the context of a wide literary and political framework, inasmuch as such a framework evokes the myths of American Exceptionalism. |
| Conferences/presentations | '"Beauty" and the Beast: Re-visioning Aesthetics in a Pluralistic Age', International Symposium on New Directions in the Humanities, Columbia University (2007)
Presentation of Thesis, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, PhD Conference (2007)
'The Global Eye: Perspectives on a New Humanism', American Comparative Literature Association, Princeton University (2006)
'Maule's Curse: The Problem of American Exceptionalism', Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, London School of Economics (2006)
'The Veil of Perspective and The Blithedale Romance: Toward a Postmodern Formalism', ManuScript Conference, Postgraduate Journal University of Manchester (2005) |
| Additional information | Current position: Assistant Professor of English, Brookdale Community College (NJ, USA) |