Christopher Coffman

Teaching Interests

Literature, film, philosophy and rhetoric

Research Interests

Contemporary American fiction and poetry, esp. William T. Vollmann and Thomas Pynchon; Literary Aesthetics; Popular music, esp. The Grateful Dead

Selected Publications

Books

Editor. After Postmodernism: The New American Fiction. Routledge, 2021. Rpt. of spec. issue of Textual Practice vol. 33, no. 2 (2019): 195–337. (with Theophilus Savvas)

Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature. Lehigh UP, 2019.

Editor. William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion. U of Delaware P, 2015. Pbk rpt. 2016. (with Daniel Lukes)

Editor. Framing Films: Critical Perspectives on Film History. Kendall / Hunt, 2009. (with Natalie McKnight, Cheryl Boots, and Christopher Fahy)

Recent Articles and Essays

“Literary Sources for Puccini’s Le Villi: Translating Alphonse Karr’s ‘Les Willis.’” The Opera Journal vol. 57, no. 1, 2024, pp. 1–25.

“The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975): Edward Abbey.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics, edited by Bryan M. Santin, Cambridge UP, 2023, pp. 307–317.

“Clowns in the Burying Ground: Ovid, William Shakespeare, and the Grateful Dead.” Literary Matters, vol. 15, no. 3, 2023. https://www.literarymatters.org/15-3-clowns/.

“Pins: Texts and Textiles from Shakespeare to Moralioğlu.” The Smart Set. https://www.thesmartset.com/pins/. 6 April 2023.

“‘All that’s still unsung’: Agamben’s Potentiality and the Grateful Dead.” Grateful Dead Studies vol. 4, 2019–2020, pp. 60–85.

“Ecology and the Environment.” Thomas Pynchon in Context, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 187–194.

“Another Apocalypse: Digital Ecologies and Late Pynchon.” The New Pynchon Studies, edited by Joanna Freer, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 124–140.

“The Sentence Is Most Important: Styles of Engagement in William T. Vollmann’s Fictions.” Enthymema no. 23, 2019, pp. 20–35. doi: https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-2426/11919.

“Feverish Fictions: William T. Vollmann and American Literary History after Postmodernism.” Textual Practice vol. 33, no. 2, 2019, pp. 245–262. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2018.1509270. Rpt. in After Postmodernism: The New American Fiction. Edited by Christopher K. Coffman and Theophilus Savvas, Routledge, 2020, pp. 51–68. (with Theophilus Savvas)

“American Fiction after Postmodernism.” Introduction. Textual Practice vol. 33, no. 2, 2019, pp. 195–212. doi: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1505322. Rpt. in After Postmodernism: The New American Fiction. Edited by Christopher K. Coffman and Theophilus Savvas, Routledge, 2020, pp. 1–18. (with Theophilus Savvas)

“The Center is not Holding: Joan Didion and the California Dreamer.” A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture, edited by Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice and Agata Zarzycka, McFarland, 2017, pp. 15–24. (with Kathleen Vandenberg)

“Lonely Atoms.” Introduction. William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, edited by Christopher K. Coffman and Daniel Lukes, U of Delaware P, 2015, pp. 1–21.

Recent Presentations and Talks

“On A Lost Prelude: When Robert Hunter Directed the Grateful Dead.” Grateful Dead Studies Association, Popular Culture Association, Chicago, Illinois, 03/2024

“Reversed Remediation and the Poetics of War in Robert Hunter’s A Strange Music.” Grateful Dead Studies Association, Popular Culture Association, Chicago, Illinois, 03/2024

“Like an Angel: Robert Hunter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the Problematic Muse.” Grateful Dead Studies Association, Popular Culture Association, San Antonio, Texas, 04/2023

“Finnegans Wake of the Flood: James Joyce’s Grateful Dead.” Grateful Dead Studies Association, Popular Culture Association, virtual conference, 04/2022
“William T. Vollmann Changed My Life, or, Vollmann and the Rilkean Imperative,” public talk at the Conversations with William T. Vollmann book launch, Unnameable Books, Brooklyn, NY, 02/2020

“German Romantic Philosophy, Georgic Poetry, and ‘Weather Report Suite, Part 2 (Let It Grow).’” Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, Southwest Popular / American Culture Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 02/2020

“On Robert Hunter’s Elegiac Verse.” Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, Southwest Popular / American Culture Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 02/2020

“Ovid, William Shakespeare, and the Grateful Dead.” Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, Southwest Popular / American Culture Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 02/2019

“Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, and the Figure of the Artist,” invited talk at the 16th Dublin International Symposium on Jonathan Swift, Dublin, Ireland, 11/2017

“Global Literatures and Anglophone Fiction after Postmodernism,” Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers Annual Convention, The Catholic University of America, 10/2016

“Global and Local: Some Problems for American Literatures in the Post-National Era,” A Sense of Inexhaustibility: A Colloquium on William T. Vollmann, BU, 10/2016

Introduction, A Sense of Inexhaustibility: A Colloquium on William T. Vollmann, BU, 10/2016

Introduction and Response to “Transgression in the Fictional World of William Vollmann,” by Qian Cheng, BU, 02/2016

“William T. Vollmann and American Literature after Postmodernism,” BU, 02/2015

“Love, Death, and Documents: Horror fiction and le mal d’archive,” Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, University of Connecticut, 03/2016

“Haunted Reportage: Vollmann’s Ugly American and Journalistic Exception,” Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, University of Connecticut, 03/2016

“On William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion,” public talk at the 11th St. Bar, New York City, NY, 02/2015

Other Recent Professional Activity

Editorial Board Member for Impact, the journal Grateful Dead Studies, and the Grateful Dead Studies Working Papers Series.

Submissions Reviewer for PMLA, Irish Studies Review, Cambridge University Press, Atlantis.

Organizer of the “Writing, the State, and the Rise of Neo-Nationalism: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Concerns” conference at BU–London, UK, 06/2018 (with Thomas Finan)

Organizer and Chair of the “American Fiction after Postmodernism” panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, Johns Hopkins University, 03/2017

Organizer of “A Sense of Inexhaustibility: A Colloquium on William T. Vollmann” conference at BU, 10/2016

Book Reviews Editor for Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

Mentor to Visiting Scholar from Nanjing Normal University, China, 2015–2016