Jonathan Eburne’s fields of specialization include the study of international modernism; surrealism, the avant-garde, and other intellectual movements and groups; literary and cultural theory; and U.S. literature since 1865.  He is author of Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Cornell University Press, 2008); his essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Symploke, Yale French Studies, Studies in the Novel, and Pleine Marge, among others.  He is currently preparing a special journal issue on “Contemporary Vanguard Cultures” (in process); he is also co-editor of a recent special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic” (2005). Current projects include a book on the use of hard-boiled fiction by twentieth-century intellectuals in the U.S. and France, as well as a book on the epistemology of unreason.

 

Awards

Penn State Institute for Arts and Humanities (IAH) Faculty Grant, 2009.
Penn State Comparative Literature Faculty Teaching Award, 2008.
PSU Institute for Arts and Humanities, Interdisciplinary Group grant co-recipient: “The Arts in Public Life,” 2008-2010
NEH Summer Seminar, “Modernist Paris,” July-August 2006
PSU Institute for Arts and Humanities, Teaching Across the Disciplines grant for team-taught course, 2006
Research Fellow, Harry Ransom Center
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory University
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Rice University (declined)
Bourse Chateaubriand Fellow, France

 

Book

Surrealism and the Art of Crime, Cornell University Press, 2008

*Reviewed in Harper’s, TLS, Choice, Art in America, H-France, Kultur, Exit Book, and Modern Fiction Studies.

 

Edited Journal Issues

Special Issue Co-Editor, with Rita Felski, “What Is an Avant-Garde?” New Literary History (forthcoming in 2010).

Special Issue Co-Editor, with Jeremy Braddock, “Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic” Modern Fiction Studies 51:4 (Winter 2005).

 

Articles

Journal Articles

• “The Chef-Drive: Cooking Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, special issue on food edited by Philippe Dubois and John Westbrook(forthcoming).
• “Anti-Menckenism: Nathanael West, Robert M. Coates, and the Provisional Avant-Garde,” Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming).
• “Adoptive Affinities: Josephine Baker’s Humanist International,” S&F Online, special issue on Josephine Baker, ed. Kaiama Glover.  Forthcoming in 2008.
• “Anti-Humanism and Terror: Surrealism, Theory, and the Postwar Left” Yale French Studies 109 (2006), 39-51.
• "Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic,” Introduction to “Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic,” with Jeremy Braddock.  Modern Fiction Studies 51:4 (Winter 2005), 731-740.
  
• “The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism, and the Série Noire” PMLA 120: 3 (May 2005), 806-821.
  
• “Violette Nozières et la réécriture alchimique du viol,” Pleine Marge 40 (December 2004), 61-77.
  
• "Chandler’s Waste Land,” Studies in the Novel 35: 3 (Fall 2003), 366-382.
  
• “That Obscure Object of Revolt: Heraclitus, Surrealism’s Lightning-Conductor,” Symploke 8: 1-2 (Spring 2000), 180-204.
  
• “Trafficking in the Void: The Consumption of Otherness in the Beat Generation.”  Modern Fiction Studies 43:1 (Spring 1997), 53-92.
  
  

Book Chapters and Other Contributions

• “Noir Fiction,” The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell, David Madden, and Justus Nieland. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming.
• “Misère de la pornographie: Du surréalisme à l’écriture féminine.” Plaisir, souffrance et sublimation, ed. Jean-Michel Devesa. Bordeaux: Pleine Page (2008).
• Assistant Editor, with Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism, Themes and Movements (London: Phaidon, 2004).
• “‘The Exact Representation of the World’: Leonora Carrington’s Labyrinth of Fear” (forthcoming in edition of conference procedings, Surrealism Laid Bare).
• “Locked Room, Bloody Chamber,” Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers, ed. Elza Adamowitz (Berlin: Peter Lang, forthcoming).
• “On Murder, Considered As One of the Surrealist Arts: Robert Desnos in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper,” Surrealism in the New Century: Celebrating Robert Desnos, eds. Marie-Claire Barnet, Eric Robertson, and Nigel Smith (Dublin: Philomel Press, 2004).
• Entries on Chester Himes, Marcel Duhamel, Philippe Soupault, and Benjamin Péret in Enclyclopedia of the French Atlantic, ed. Bill Marshall (Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2005).
• “Surrealism Noir,” Surrealism, Politics, and Culture, eds. Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2003).
• “The Cheerless Art of Industry: Marcel Duchamp and the Smithee Readymade,” Directed By Allen Smithee, eds. Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), 229-247.
  
  

Review Essays

• Review Essay: George Baker, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (MIT, 2007); Gen Doy, Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography (IB Tauris, 2007); David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp (Yale UP, 2007); Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Ashgate, 2007); Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (U California P, 2007); Ian Walker, So Exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography (Manchester UP, 2007).  In History of Photography (forthcoming).
• Review Essay: “Object Lessons: Surrealist Art, Surrealist Politics.” Texts Reviewed: Steven Harris, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche (Cambridge UP, 2004) ; Johanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (Oxford UP, 2004); David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Social Dissent (I.B. Tauris, 2004), and Jean Clair, Du surréalisme considéré dans ses rapports au totalitarianisme et aux tables tournantes (Mille et une nuits, 2003). In Modernism/ Modernity 12.1 (2005), 175-181.
• Review Essay: The Edges of Surrealism.” Texts reviewed: Katharine Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life (Nebraska UP, 2003); Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Duke UP, 2003); and Eric Zafran, Surrealism and Modernism (Yale UP, 2003), in Journal of Modern Literature 26: 3/4, Spring 2004.
• Review Essay, Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (U California P, 1998); and David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT Press, 1998). In Other Voices 1:2 (September 1998). http://www.othervoices.org/1.2
  
  

Reviews

• “Modernism’s Weird Sisters.” Review of Christine Coffman, Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film (Wesleyan UP, 2006), in Journal of Modern Literature (forthcoming).
• Review of Haim Finkelstein, The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought (Ashgate, 2007), in Symploke (forthcoming).
• Review of Isabelle Casta, Nouvelles mythologies de la mort (Honoré Champion, 2006), in Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate 61: 4 (2008), 503-505.
• Review of Grant Farred, Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (Temple UP, 2007), in The Center Daily Times (October 12, 2008), 4.
• Review of Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford UP, 2006), in CLS: Comparative Literature Studies 45:3 (Fall 2008), 396-398.
• Review of Willard Bohn, Marvelous Encounters: Surrealist Responses to Film, Art, Poetry, and Architecture (Bucknell UP, 2005), in The French Review 81:6 (Spring 2008), 1273.
• Review of Caroline Rupprecht. Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Northwestern UP, 2006), in German Quarterly 80:4 ((Fall 2007), 556-558.
• Review of Dafydd Jones, ed. Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde (Rodopi, 2006), in Symploke 14:1-2 (2006, appeared 2007): 344-346.
• Review of Susan Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art (Lund Humphries, 2004) in Papers of Surrealism 5 (Spring 2007). http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/
• Review of John Cullen Gruesser, Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literature Studies, and the Black Atlantic (Georgia UP, 2005) in Modern Fiction Studies 52:3 (2006), 748-752.

Translations

•  Robert Desnos, “The Third Manifesto of Surrealism,” “A Description of the Next Revolt,” and “Modern Imagery,” The Essential Writings of Robert Desnos, ed. Mary Ann Caws. Boston: Commonwealth Books (2008).

• Michel Fabre, “René, Louis, and Léopold: Senghorian Negritude as a Black Humanism,” with Randall Cherry.  Modern Fiction Studies 51:4 (Winter 2005).

• Louis Aragon, “A Note on Freedom” (1925); René Char, “Untitled [Violette Nozières]” (1933); René Crevel,  “Response to an Inquiry on Suicide” (1925) and “Notes toward a Psycho-Dialectic” (1933); Maurice Heine, “An Open Letter to Luis Buñuel" (1931); André Masson, “The Tyrrany of Time” (1926); Pierre Naville, “Fine Arts” (1925); Benjamin Péret, “Untitled [Violette Nozières]” (1933).  In Surrealism, ed. Mary Ann Caws (London: Phaidon Press, 2004).

 

Lectures and Conference Presentations

SELECTED INVITED PRESENTATIONS

•  “The Future of Irrevolution,” Courtauld Institute Symposium on “Surrealism, Post-War Theory and the Avant-Garde,” November 2009.
•  “Medium Sex”
  Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Seminar on “Surrealism and Non-Normative Sexuality,” July 2009.
•  “Breton’s Wall, Carrington’s Kitchen: Toward and Archeology of Surrealism,” Bryn Mawr College Colloquium Series in Visual Culture, October 2008.
•  “Anti-Menckenism,” Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, June 2008.
•  “Anti-Humanism and Terror: Surrealism, Theory, and the Postwar Left,” University of California, Santa Barbara, April 2005.
•  “‘Surréaliste dans la dialectique’: Héraclite et le coup de foudre matérialiste.” C.N.R.S. speaker series: “Aesthesis et Empathie,”  Paris, April 2000.
  
  

CONFERENCE PAPERS PRESENTED

“’A Work Whose Importance Still Escapes Us': Joyce. After Surrealism”
North American James Joyce Conference, Buffalo NY, June 2009.

“Outsider Theory”
American Comparative Literature Association, Cambridge MA, March 2009.

“The Blunt Instrument.”
Modern Language Association, San Francisco CA, December 2008.

Roundtable Participant, “A Singular Post-Modernity? The Logic of Between-ness in Contemporary Arts,” Modern Language Association, San Francisco CA, December 2008.

“The Sade Industry.”
Modernist Studies Association, Nashville TN, November 2008.

“Paranoiac Maps, Despotic Machines.”
20th and 21st C. French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, Washington DC, March 2008.

“‘No reprieve; no pardon; no release’: Hard-Boiled Writing After Scottsboro.”
Modernist Studies Association 9, Long Beach, CA, Nov. 2007.

“Breton’s Wall and the Archaeology of Surrealist Knowledge.”
International Symposium, “Surrealism Laid Bare: Living in Surrealism,” Chichester UK, May 2007.

 “Cartographorrhea: On Paranoiac Maps.” 
American Comparative Literature Association, Puebla MX, April 2007.

“Adoptive Affinities: Josephine Baker and Black Internationalism.”
International Conference on “Josephine Baker: 100 Years in the Spotlight,” Columbia University, NY, September 2006.  Invited speaker.

“Anti-Menckenism”
Modernist Studies Association, Tulsa OK, October 2006.

“Misère de la pornographie: du surréalisme à l’écriture féminine.” 
International Conference on “Plaisir, souffrance et sublimation du corps,” Université de Bordeaux 3, Bordeaux, France, December 2005.  Invited speaker.

“Beneath the Naked City: The Substrata of American Super-realism.”
Modern Language Association, Washington DC, December 2005.

“Is Philadelphia Paris?: Film Noir, Brotherly Love, and the Critique of Urban Geography.” 
International Conference on “Cold War France and America: New Perspectives,” Florida State University, Tallahassee FL, February 2005.

“Goodis, Truffault, and the Psychogeography of Brotherly Love.”
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia PA, December 2004.

“Persecution Mania: Surrealism, Marxism, Fascism.”
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia PA, December 2004.

“The Death of Nick Carter: Race and the American Dime Novel in Jazz-Age Paris.” 
American Studies Association, Atlanta GA, November 2004.

“True Crime, Imaginary Terror.”
Modernist Studies Association, Vancouver BC, October 2004.

“Hard-Boiled Ethics.” 
Modern Language Association, San Diego CA, December 2003.

“‘The Exact Representation of the World’: Leonora Carrington’s Labyrinth of Fear.”
International Symposium on “Surrealism Laid Bare,” The Edward James Foundation, Chichester, England, May 2003.

“X Marks the Spot: Sade, Surrealism, and the Exquisite Corpse.”
Colloque International Sade, Charleston SC, March 2003.

“Notes Toward a Psycho-Dialectic: Lacan, Crevel, Aimée.”
University of South Carolina’s Fifth Annual Comparative Literature Conference: “The Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism in the 21st Century,” Columbia SC, Feb. 2003.

“Jules Monnerot’s Red Surrealism.”
Modernist Studies Association, Madison WI, October 2002.

 “Violette Nozières et la récriture alchimique du viol.”
International Conference on “Ce que les femmes surréalistes ont écrit, dit, ou fait,” Université de Paris VII, March 2002.  Invited speaker.

“Chester Himes: French Surrealism and American Detective Fiction.”
International Symposium on “Americans in Paris/ Paris in Americans,” Paris, July 2001.

“On Murder, Considered As One of the Surrealist Arts: Robert Desnos in the Shadow of Jack the Ripper.” International Symposium on “Surrealism in 2000: Celebrating Robert Desnos,” University of London, November 2000.  Invited speaker.

“‘All the World’s Curtains Drawn’: Violette Nozières and the Surrealist Book.” 
Modernist Studies Association, Philadelphia, October 2000.

 “Poe, Lippard, and the Invention of Paranoia: Crime Fiction in Philadelphia.”
Poe Studies Association Sesquicentennial Conference, Richmond VA, October 1999; also presented at “The American City,” Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia PA, April 1999.

“Chandler’s Waste Land.”
Twentieth Century Literature Conference, Louisville KY, February 1999; also presented at the Northeastern Modern Language Association, Pittsburgh PA, April 1999.

“Jack Johnson, The Big Fight, and the Cultural Poetics of Boxing.” 
Northeast Popular Culture Association, Boston MA, October 1997.

Co-presenter, with David Kaiser, “Pulp Non-Fiction: Shifting Voices in the Popularization of Postwar Physics.”  Society for Literature and Science, Atlanta GA, October 1996.

“Trafficking in the Void”
19th Annual Spring Symposium in American Studies, Purdue University, April 1994.

CONFERENCES AND CONFERENCE SESSIONS ORGANIZED

Panel co-organizer, with Judith Roof.  “Uncertainty Principles: Toward an Epistemology of Unreason.”  American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, Cambridge MA, March 2009.

Symposium organizer.  “Chester Himes, 1909-2009: A Centennial Symposium.”  Penn State University, March 2009.

Panel organizer and chair.  “The Science of Magical Thinking.” Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Nashville TN, November 2008.

Panel co-organizer, with Katharine Conley. “Geographical Identities” 20th/21st C. French/Francophone Studies Conference, Washington DC, March 2008.

Seminar co-organizer and co-chair, with Katharine Conley. “Maps, Transnationalism, and the Material Text.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, Puebla MX, March 2007.

Panel co-organizer, with Lisi Shoenbach. “Progressivist Histories and the Ethics of Institutional Change.” Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Tulsa OK, October 2006.

Seminar co-organizer and co-chair, with Janine Mileaf. “The Avant-Garde and its Object.”  Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Chicago IL, October 2005.

Seminar organizer and Chair. “The Use-Value of the Avant-Garde.” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, State College PA, March 2005.

Special session organizer and Chair. “Paranoia, Theory, Paranoia.”  Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia PA, December 2004.

Panel co-organizer, with Laurie Monahan.  “Violence and the Event.” Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Vancouver BC, October 2004.

Special Session organizer and Chair. “Surrealism and the Sadean Woman.” Modern Language Association Annual Conference, San Diego CA, December 2003.

Panel organizer, Chair, and Respondent.  “Strikers, Communists, and Detectives.” American Studies Association Annual Conference, Hartford CT, October 2003.

Panel co-organizer, with Jeremy Braddock. “Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic,” Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Madison WI, October 2002.

Panel organizer. Double session: “The Surrealist Intervention I and II.” Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia PA, October 2000.