Scholarship

Alex E. Blazer's poetry scholarship focused on the relationship between critical theory and American poetry in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the book "I Am Otherwise": The Romance between Poetry and Theory after the Death of the Subject. His research on the contemporary American novel examines the relationship between postmodern culture and existential madness. Recently, he has presented conference papers on the first volume of Mark Z. Danielewski's novel The Familiar and Chuck Palahniuk's graphic novel Fight Club 2 as well as the television shows Continuum and Black Mirror; he also published a journal article on the film Donnie Darko.

 

Abstracts of his conference presentations, journal articles, book chapters, and book are linked to his curriculum vita. His book chapters and book are available through Amazon. His open access journal articles are available here and here.

 

"A Phenomenological Approach to Donnie Darko"	"'blinded by the book': Between Metafictional Madness and Sublime Solitude in the Work of Paul Auster"
"American Psycho, Hamlet, and Existential Psychosis"	"The Phony 'Martyrdom of Saint Me': Choke, The Catcher in the Rye, and the Problem of Postmodern Narcissistic Nihilism"
"Glamorama, Fight Club, and the Terror of Narcissistic Abjection"	"I Am Otherwise": The Romance Between Poetry and Theory after the Death of the Subject
"The Matrix Trilogy and the Revolutionary Drive through 'The Desert of the Real'"	"Chasms of Reality, Aberrations of Identity: Defining the Postmodern through Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho"
"Charting Ironic Progress: The Reflexive and the Romantic in Barrett Watten's Progress"