Research Interests
MODERN LITERATURE AND THEORY
Professor Andrew Gibson’s field is Modern Literature and Theory, that is, European Literature, Philosophy and Theory 1790-1990. He looks back as far as back as far as Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), which he sees as inaugurating some of the most crucial modern questions, and forward as far as what he describes as occasional instances of late modernist literature (Coetzee, Sebald, Jelinek, Morrison, Ernaux) in the age of technology and writing. The bulk of his research has been on twentieth-century literature, often in philosophical and/or theoretical and/or historical and/or narratological contexts, and twentieth-century philosophy, though he now also writes increasingly on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His major work has been on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and contemporary French philosophy, but the range of his interests and publications is much wider than that, including, for instance, Kant, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, German romanticism, Kleist, Schopenhauer, Tennyson, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Pound, Stevens, Woolf, Lowry, Henry Green, Hemingway, Compton-Burnett, Italian neo-realist fiction 1930-60, Rhys, Joseph Roth, Robbe-Grillet, R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson
JAMES JOYCE
Andrew is the author of Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in 'Ulysses', published by Oxford University Press on 16 June, 2002. He has also published a short biography of Joyce, James Joyce: A Critical Life (Reaktion Books, 2006; for both these books, see a separate page); and, with Len Platt, Joyce, Ireland and Britain, a collection of essays for the Florida Joyce Series, published by Florida University Press (2006). This collection of essays provides a theoretical account of a specifically Joycean historical materialism originating in Gibson and Platt`s work (sometimes known as ‘the London method’) in Joyce studies, situating it in relation to postcolonial and other forms of historical work on Joyce. The essays contained in the volume partly exemplify this method. The collection is the first substantially to address Joyce's work in the context of British and Irish history and politics together. Contributors include Richard Brown, Vincent Cheng and Anne Fogarty.
Andrew’s most recent monograph on Joyce, a study of his early writings, The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898-1915, was published in February, 2013. Gibson is also steadily accumulating materials for a book on Finnegans Wake, Ireland and Britain, but this is taking him deep into retirement.
Andrew was co-founder of the London University (Charles Peake) Seminar for Research into Joyce's Ulysses, whose director is now Joe Brooker, and co-founder and co-organizer of the London University Finnegans Wake Research Seminar, now directed by Finn Fordham. These seminars form part of the seminar programme of the Institute of English Studies in the University of London’s School for Advanced Studies. In the past, the Ulysses seminar has organized conferences and produced volumes of essays.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Andrew Gibson has also worked for many years and published extensively on Samuel Beckett. In particular, he spent some years thinking about the relationship between Beckett’s work and that of the major contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. He was awarded a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship specifically to write a book on this relationship. The book was published in 2006, by Oxford University Press, with the title Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Andrew also wrote the Afterword - 'Badiou, Beckett and Contemporary Criticism' - to Badiou on Beckett, the English translation of Badiou's complete writings on Beckett (Clinamen, 2003).
Andrew is now concerned with merging his philosophical work on Beckett with historical approaches. He wrote the Afterword to the Cambridge University Press volume on Beckett and Ireland edited by Séan Kennedy ― `“The skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara”: Beckett, Ireland and Elsewhere’ ― and has also written a short biography of Beckett, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Life, published by Reaktion Books. Both appeared in 2010, and both seek to ground certain aspects of the argument in Beckett and Badiou in historical and empirical factuality, Irish, on occasions English and German, but above all French. The biography seeks to place Beckett’s life and work in relation to the various socio-historical worlds that he successively inhabited. Andrew now insistently stresses the need to connect the established tradition of philosophical work on Beckett with the more recent and ground-breaking turn to historical research.
Thus, whilst he is particularly interested in ways of building bridges between the French and Anglophone traditions in Beckett criticism, he has an important stake in maintaining the perhaps supreme importance of the French Beckett, and his Beckett research now and for the foreseeable future will probably be chiefly on the French Beckett 1940-52. See for example his `Beckett, Vichy, Maurras and the Body: Premier Amour and [space] Nouvelles’, in Irish University Review 45.2 (Autumn/Spring 2015), pp. 281-301; `The French Beckett and French Literary Politics 1945-9’, in S.E. Gontarski (ed), Samuel Beckett: The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 103-16; and `Franco-Irish Beckett: Mercier et Camier in 1945–6’, in David Addyman and Peter Fifield (eds.), Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 19-38. His own position is that the philosophical and historical approaches to Beckett most notably engage with and complement each other through a certain application of particular forms of modern and contemporary thought (Badiou, Benjamin, Adorno, Jambet); but also that, at the current point in time, the historical work urgently needs to be done, particularly with reference to the French context.
J.M. Coetzee
Andrew’s J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Coetzee is the major English-language novelist of our times. Most of the best work on him thus far has lodged him securely in the context of his native South Africa. Yet Coetzee has been living in Australia since 2002. He has long addressed and indeed cultivated an international readership. He has spent several years in both the UK and the US and has worked and travelled in a wide range of different cultures. By now he looks as much a southern hemisphere writer with global concerns as a South African one. That is how this book approaches him. If we place Coetzee in a global context, however, then it is clear that the major part of his output has coincided with the rise and increasing dominance across the world of neoliberalism, neoliberal economics and culture and the specific concept and forms of a certain democracy that have accompanied them. Drawing widely on the growing body of often impressive critiques of neoliberal culture, the book asks how we might read Coetzee’s writings as a commentary on it, if sometimes an oblique one. It isolates various key features of neoliberal culture: the concept of the subject it constructs and promotes; eudaemonism and the injunction above all to `enjoy’; the belief in plenitude, what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls `the fantasy of lasting abundance’; the strategies whereby neoliberal democracy ensures that it can believe in its rectitude, credit itself as `within the good’; a secular theodicy, insisting, if often rather vaguely, that all is working towards the best ends we can hope for; and closure, a disavowal of the historical break or rupture and, with it, the unheralded, transformative event. It examines the many and various if often subtle ways in which, in each case, Coetzee’s writings takes the neoliberal ethos to task, or points us in very different directions to it. The book argues that, construed in this way, Coetzee’s fiction constitutes a major critical intervention in neoliberal culture, one that takes drastic issue, not least, with its tone.
Andrew hopes to extend both his work on Coetzee and his accounts of late modernist literature relative to our ongoing and still tenacious neoliberal culture in the future
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH PHILOSOPHY
Andrew Gibson has forty years’ experience of reading, meditating on and working with continental European philosophy and literary and critical theory, particularly modern French philosophy and theory. In the nineties, much of Andrew's work involved use of contemporary theory. This was particularly the case with his work on postmodernism. As the seemingly radical challenge of postmodernism subsided into an often rather vapid, shallow and conservative orthodoxy, however, so, from 1999, Andrew`s theoretical interests specifically focussed on new (post-Deleuzean) developments in French thought and became philosophically more demanding, less concerned with 'applications’ of theory. His work as a whole turned in a different direction in 1999, and he regards all of it as having been internally coherent since then. Apart from Alain Badiou, he is also well versed in the work of the contemporary French philosophers Jacques Rancière, Françoise Proust, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, and has a serious interest in the work of Clément Rosset and recent French (and British) ventures into nihilism and `speculative realism` (Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier). He also has major expertise in a more familiar tradition spanning a period from Kojève to late Derrida.
Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2012.
LITERATURE AND CULTURE OF THE IRISH AND CELTIC SEAS
Andrew has a longstanding interest in the literatures and cultures of the Irish and Celtic Seas. He was a member of and contributor to the Atlantic Archipelagos Research Project involving, amongst other institutions, the University of Exeter, the University of Galway and the University of Georgia, and also to the Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea project originating in the Humanities Institute of University College Dublin. His research in this field has so far focused on the poetry of Norman Nicholson. See ``At the Dying Atlantic’s Edge’: Norman Nicholson and the Cumbrian Coast’, in Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom and Jos Smith (eds.),Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2016; the podcast of this essay can be heard at www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/ scholarcast37.html). In September 2014, he also gave a presentation entitled `“Hope is a Geological Grace”: History and Geology in Norman Nicholson’s Non-Fictional Prose and Poetry of the Cumbrian Coast 1948-54’ at the Irish Sea Symposium organized by University College Dublin et al. In addition, he has a serious research interest in the work on R.S. Thomas, Jack Clemo and Derek Mahon, and Dylan Thomas’s time on the Cardigan coast, which he intends eventually to expand into essays. Here of course his interests overlap with his work on Joyce and Beckett.
CONTEMPORARY LONDON AND ITS LITERATURE
With the architectural historian Joe Kerr, in 2003, Professor Andrew Gibson published London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books). This substantial collection of new essays and photographs taken over the last quarter of the twentieth century reappeared in a revised second edition in 2012, and is an important work of contemporary social and cultural history. It was partly funded by a British Academy grant awarded to Andrew. He contributed an essay entitled ‘Altering Images', on London literature 1980-2003; and, with his former research student Jennifer Bavidge, an essay entitled 'The Metropolitan Playground: London's Children' (also published in abridged form in the Times Higher Educational Supplement, 4 December, 2003). Together with the Royal College of Art, the Museum of London and Reaktion Books, on behalf of the department, he also organized a major conference on contemporary London at the Museum of London (November 2003), to mark the launch of the book. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Londonicity, London’s first annual London Studies conference series.
CHILDREN'S FICTION
Professor Andrew Gibson has also written five novels and a collection of stories for children, published by Faber. See the Children's Fiction area of this website for more information.