Casey Shoop
Statement
ACADEMIC AREAS: 19th and 20th Century American Literature; Critical Theory; Urban Theory; Literature and Culture of California; Film Studies
Teaching Philosophy
Literature is, among other things, the powerful aesthetic means by which we can access other minds, other experiences, other worlds. At the same time, it has the potential to estrange us from our own normative habits and conventions so that we can see our own present anew by the light of literary history. In small, student-driven seminars we will explore this double capability.
Past Courses
HC 221H The Tragic Mode of Knowledge
HC 221H Force and Law in Premodern Literature
HC 222H Rising, Passing and Classing: The Literature of Upward Mobility
HC 222H The Mystery You're Investigating May Be Your Own
HC 223H Endgame, Wasteland, and Apocalypse: Literature at the End of History
HC 223H Climate Change and the Problem of Representation
HC 223H Radical West: The Culture and Politics of the American West during the Sixties and Seventies
HC 421H The American Uncanny: The World of David Lynch in Film and Theory
HC 421H The Literary Lives of Animals
Academic Background
Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 2008
M.A., English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, 2001
B.A., English (highest honors), University of California - Berkeley, 1999
Professor Shoop served as a Lecturer at the University of Southern California, where he was also affiliated with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University before joining the Clark Honors College in 2013. He has acted as a Peer Reviewer for journals California History and College Literature.
Research Interests & Current Projects
Professor Shoop is currently working on writing two book manuscripts. The first, Radicalism, Reaganism and Postwar Literature in the American West, is a book on literature in the Reagan era. His second book will focus on global detective fiction.
Awards & Fellowships
- 2008 - 2010: Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Huntington Library-USC Institute on California and the West
- 2008: Summer Course Design Proposal Winner, "The Encyclopedic American Novel: Herman Melville and Thomas Pynchon" (Columbia University)
Selected Publications
For a complete publication list see Professor Shoop's Curriculum Vitae.
Book Chapters and Articles
- 2016, "Joan Didion’s Style: A Revisionist Western," A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 31.3.
- 2016, "The Bones in the Concept: Big History, Theodor Adorno and Second Nature," History of the Present, 6.1.
- 2015, "'Gravid with the Ancient Future': Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Deep History," (Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan) SubStance, 44.1.
- 2015,"'The Scene of the Crime is the Crime': The Southern Border in the Crime Fiction of Cormac McCarthy and Don Winslow," A World of Crime: Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (edited by David Schmid and Andrew Pepper), Palgrave.
- 2012, "Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism and the Rise of the New Right," Contemporary Literature, 53:1. Reprinted in Revisiting the Sixties (edited by Laura Bieger and Christian Lammert), Campus Verlag (2013).
- 2011, "Corpse and Accomplice: Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler, and the Representation of History in California," Cultural Critique, 77.
Book Reviews
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2012, "Too Much Otherness?" Review essay of The Deliverance of Others by David Palumbo-Liu. Los Angeles Review of Books (December 12, 2012)