Prof Alex Houen, Pembroke

ah217@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I did a BA(Hons) and a two-year research MPhil at the University of Sydney before doing my PhD at King's College, Cambridge. After that I taught Modern Literature and American Studies at the University of Sheffield until 2009, when I took up a post back here in the Faculty of English. I am Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory, and a Fellow of Pembroke College.

 

Research Interests

Currently, my main research project is a monograph entitled Poets' Novels: from Inner Voice to Social Affect. The book focuses on a wide range of 20th- and 21st-century poets' novels -- novels by writers who began their careers as poets or are primarily known for being poets. 

My other current research project is on the relation of lyric poetry and Raymond Williams's concept of 'structures of feeling'.

General research interests include: the history and theory of literary criticism; modern and contemporary fiction and poetry (particularly poetry sequences and poets' novels); war literature; avant-gardes; post-structuralism; performativity; affects; sacrifice; aesthetics of suspension.

 

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Any of the research interests listed above. Authors, theorists, and philosophers of particular interest: Kathy Acker, Giorgio Agamben, Richard Aldington, Aristotle, Nadeem Aslam, W.H. Auden, John Balaban, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, George Barker, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Henri Bergson, Elizabeth Bowen, William S. Burroughs, Judith Butler, John Cage, Ciaran Carson, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Michel Foucault, Allen Ginsberg, René Girard, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Martin Heidegger, Lyn Hejinian, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, Fredric Jameson, Immanuel Kant, Ben Lerner, Emmanuel Levinas, Wyndham Lewis, Patricia Lockwood, Louis MacNeice, Norman Mailer, Curzio Malaparte, Frank O'Hara, George Orwell, Wilfred Owen, Ezra Pound, J. H. Prynne, Jacques Rancière, Claudia Rankine, Denise Riley, Lisa Robertson, Siegfried Sassoon, Stevie Smith, Stephen Spender, Spinoza, Juliana Spahr, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and W. B. Yeats

 

Selected Publications

 

Peer-Reviewed Monographs and Edited Collections

• Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss (Oxford University Press, 2024) [review].
• Editor, Affect and Literature (Cambridge Critical Concepts Series] (Cambridge University Press, 2020) [review].
• Co-editor (with Jan Schramm), Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2018) [review].
• Editor, States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2014) [review].
• Co-editor (with Dominic Janes), Martyrdom and Terrorism, Pre-modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014) [review].
• Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2012) [review].
• Editor, special Issue on 'Affects, Text, and Performativity' of Textual Practice 25:2 (March/April 2011).
• Terrorism and Modern Literature: from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford University Press, 2002) [review].

 

Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters

• 'Poets' Novels and Free Indirect Affect', forthcoming in Stephen Ahern (ed.), Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice, 2nd edn (Palgrave, 2026)
• 'Free Indirect Thought Felt and Lived' [short essay on Timothy Bewes's Free Indirect], C21 Journal (January 2026): https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/id/25944/
• 'On Inner Voice, Free Indirect Style, and Lyric', Textual Practice 35:6 (June 2021).
• 'Introduction: Affect and Literature', in Affect and Literature, ed. Alex Houen (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1-31.
• 'On Happily Reading John Cage', in Reading Experimental Writing, ed. Georgina Colby (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 51-73.
• 'Afterword', in Terrorism and Literature [Cambridge Critical Concepts Series], ed. Peter Hermann (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 505-14.
• 'Reckoning Sacrifice in "War on Terror" Literature', American Literary History 28:3 (2016), 574–595.
• 'Martyrdom and Hostage Executions in the Iraq War: The Cases of Kenneth Bigley and Margaret Hassan', in Martyrdom and Terrorism, Pre-modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014) [see above].
• 'States at War and Modes of War', in States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2014), 1-22 [see above].
• 'Sacrifice and Sublimity after 9/11', in The Edinburgh Companion to British, American, and Irish War Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries, ed. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
• 'Affecting Words', in special issue on 'Affects, Text, and Performativity' of Textual Practice 25:2 (March/April 2011).
• 'Pound and Anti-Semitism', in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira Nadel (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 391-401.
• 'The Novel and Politics', in The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, ed. Brian Shaffer (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 407-23.
• 'Sacrificial Militancy and the War on Terror', in Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. Stephen Morton and Elleke Boehmer (Blackwell, 2009).
• '"Back! Back! Back! Central Mind Machine Pentagon": Allen Ginsberg and the Vietnam War', Cultural Politics 4:3 (2008), 351-74.
•  'Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker', in Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and The Defence of Society, ed. Stephen Morton and Stephen Bygrave (London: Palgrave, 2008), 63-87.
• 'William S. Burroughs's "Cities of the Red Night Trilogy": Writing Outer Space', Journal of American Studies 40:3 (2006), 523-46.
• 'Novel Spaces and Taking Places in the Wake of September 11', Studies in the Novel (2004), 419-37.
• 'Walter Abish: Plotting a Terrorism of Postmodernist Fiction', in Modern Language Review: Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000):202-20.
• ' "Various Infinitudes": Narration, Embodiment, and Ontology, in Samuel Beckett's How It Is and Spinoza's Ethics', in Post-Theory, ed. Martin McQuillan et al. (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 178-87.
• 'Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent: Anarchism and the Thermodynamics of Law', ELH 65:4 (1998): 995-1016.

 

Novel, Poetry, and Poetry Editing

• Co-written with Geoff Gilbert, See You Through: A Novel (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).
• Malapartings [chapbook] (Equipage, 2021).
• Ring Cycle [full poetry collection] (Eyewear Publishing, 2018).
• Co-written with Geoff Gilbert, Hold! West [chapbook] (Eyewear Publishing, 2016).
• Rouge States [chapbook] (Oystercatcher Press, 2014).
• Co-editor with Adam Piette of Blackbox Manifold, an online bi-annual poetry journal (since 2008).