Benjamin Widiss

Benjamin Widiss specializes in American literature and film since 1900. He is the author of Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Stanford, 2011) and is nearing completion of a second book, provisionally titled Material Effects: Bodies, Books, and Films at the Tipping Point. The project examines literature and cinema from the first decade of the 21st century, a moment poised between the late era of mass-produced cultural artifacts and the early rise of digital intervention and distribution. Widiss argues that works across diverse genres and forms in this period locate aesthetic, interpretive, and political stakes in carefully choreographed encounters between the residual materiality of artworks and human corporeality. As the study unfolds, these stakes evolve from investments in the relative immutability of analog media to bodily reframings of analogical thinking and the “linguistic turn,” and finally to engagements with the somatic traces of earlier styles and contents in reconsiderations of race and gender.

Recent Courses Taught

Dream/Life
U.S. Modernisms
Literary Theory and Literary Study
Contemporary American Fiction
Poetry and Poetics
Faulkner and The South
Ambivalent Inheritance: Faulkner across the Americas
Contemporary Graphic Narrative

Selected Publications

• Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2011).
• “Thesis Improv.” The Pocket Instructor: Writing. Edited by Amanda Irwin Wilkins and Keith Shaw (Princeton University Press, 2024).
• “Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake,” in the “Formalism Unbound” special issue of Post45, January 2021.
• “Reverse Entropy.” In The Pocket Instructor: Literature. Eds. Diana Fuss and William Gleason (Princeton University Press, 2015)
• “Faulkner and Post-45 American Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. ed. John T. Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• “Comics as Non-Sequential Art: Chris Ware’s Joseph Cornell.” In Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art. ed. Jane Tolmie (University Press of Mississippi, 2013).
• “Autobiography with Two Heads: Quimby the Mouse.” In The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking. eds. David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2010).

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Professional Affiliations

Modern Language Association
Modernist Studies Association
American Comparative Literature Association
Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

Appointed to the Faculty

2014

Educational Background

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
B.A., Yale University