Lytle Shaw
Associate Professor of English; Director of Graduate Admissions for EnglishPh.D. 2000 (English), University of California, Berkeley; B.A. 1991 (English), Cornell University
Office Address: 726 Broadway, 537 New York, New York (US) 10003
Email:
Phone: (212) 998-8818
Fax: (212) 995-4019
My work centers on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry and art. I’m interested in how texts and art objects mediate, transform, and disrupt (rather than simply “reflect”) the cultural and social possibilities of their moments. My first critical book, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, mounted a defense of O’Hara’s version of coterie writing as a paradoxically progressive mode. I hope that a theory of coterie can also help to focus the limits of Habermasian models of the public sphere and contribute to theories of radical democracy. Recently my teaching and writing have explored how concepts of place and site involve similar rhetorics of immanence (and consequent possibilities as “devices”). Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (out in April, 2013) traces a history of postwar poets and artists as on-location ethnographers and historians. Recent graduate courses have included “Theorizing the Archive,” “New York Poetry and the New Left,” and “Site-Specific Poetry and Historiography.” In general my teaching and writing will continue to focus on how recent poetry and art might not just relate to but in a sense become experimental versions of historicism, ethnography, documentary and landscape aesthetics.
Areas of Research/Interest
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature; Contemporary Poetry; Art History; Theory, Urbanism
External Affiliations
Contributing Editor, Cabinet; Founder/Co-editor, Shark; Founder/Curator, Line Reading Series at The Drawing Center
Fellowships/Honors
Elizabeth Agee Prize, University of Alabama Press (for Fieldworks, awarded annually to best MS in American literature); Visiting Lecturer, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, 2010-present; Visiting Lecturer, School of Architecture, University of Limerick, 2007-present; Holloway Poet, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2008; Getty Post-Doctoral Grant in Art History, 2003-2004; Millay Colony, 2001; MacDowell Colony, 2001; Vice Chancellor for Research Grant (UC Berkeley), 1998; Dean's Dissertation Fellowship (UC Berkeley), 1997-1998; Mellon Dissertation Fellowship (UC Berkeley), 1996-1997; Class of 1916 Honors Thesis Prize (Cornell), 1991.
Publications
Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetry. University of Alabama Press. Forthcoming.
Specimen Box. Periscope Books. Forthcoming.
19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology, ed./Introduced. The Drawing Center/Roof Books. 2007.
Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. University of Iowa Press. 2006.
“Fieldwork in New American Poetry,” The Oxford Companion to Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson, 2011
“Whitman’s Urbanism” in The Cambridge Companion to New York Writing, eds. Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell, 2010
“Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Situations,” in New York Cool, ed. Pepe Karmel. Grey Art Gallery, 2008.
“The Utopian Past,” in The Present Tense Through the Ages: on the Recent Work of Gerard Byrne. Koenig Books. 2007.
“Faulting Description: Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer and the Site of Scientific Authority,” in Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing Beyond “The New York School,” ed. Daniel Kane. Dalkey Archive. 2006.
“Smithson, Writer,” in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, eds. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly. DIA Center for the Arts/University of California Press. 2005.
“The Moral Storm: Henry Darger’s Weather Notebooks,” Cabinet, 3. 2001.
