George Mather

Research Interests:

My research is broadly concerned with speculative philosophy and materialism, in particular Hegel and Marx and their continuing legacy. I am interested in how speculative and materialist gestures inform the criticism of texts, societies and their interactions, with special focus on alternatives to post-structuralism and the revival of speculative thought from the 1980s to the present day.

My doctoral research focused on the concept of the infinite. More recent work is concerned with nothingness, especially in relation to formalisms, both old and new, manuscripts and archives, allegory, and the materiality of language. These concerns are often refracted through the literature of the British, American and European Left in the late 1920s and 1930s: the political stakes of modernism, the relation of literature to the labour movement, so-called ‘proletarian’ literature, the role of intellectuals, documentary poetics, and the institutional politics of literary criticism.

Besides Hegel and Marx, I have particular interests in the work of theorists including: Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gillian Rose, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, François Laruelle, and the tradition of speculative realism and/or materialism. 

Doctoral Thesis: Unlimited Inc: Literary Theory Beyond the Bad Infinite

Supervisor: Professor David Dwan

My doctoral thesis argued that, towards the end of the twentieth century, literary and cultural theorists repeated and reworked Hegel’s critique of Kant in service of new materialisms that challenged the newly-perceived idealism of deconstruction. This, I argued, entailed a new thought of the infinite, with important consequences for the criticism both of texts and cultural representations more generally. The argument re-examined the work of T.W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak and Alain Badiou via their engagements with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, amongst other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. 

Teaching:

I have designed and taught multiple papers in the following areas: 
•    Literary theory/critical practice;
•    Nineteenth-century English literature (1830-1910);
•    Twentieth- and twenty-first century English literature (1910-present)

I have also supervised a number of undergraduate dissertations on topics including Vladimir Nabokov and queer theory; working-class and proletarian literatures; Thomas Hardy and ideology.