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Nicola Nixon, PhD

Associate Professor, English


Nicola Nixon, PhD
Phone: (514) 848-2424 ext. 2359
Email: nicola.nixon@concordia.ca

I am currently working on a book project, provisionally titled “Money Talks: Finance and Form in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.” This project examines a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American writers, from Edgar Allan Poe and Susan Warner to Herman Melville, Henry James and Upton Sinclair, with a view to exposing the peculiar obfuscatory rhetoric and formal strategies U.S. authors deploy when they approach the representation of money and commerce in their texts. Although each author bemoans the problematic position of the literary author in the midst of a country whose seemingly sole preoccupation is with commerce and money-making, each is nevertheless oddly coy when it comes to revealing those particular investments fictionally. The sudden irruption of crude economics in their fiction, for example—and we need only consider the Parisian Prefect’s silent exchanging of his cheque for the Queen’s letter in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Ahab’s calculated nailing of the doubloon to the mast in Melville’s Moby-Dick, Hepzibah’s horrified fondling of her first earned copper in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables—presents an over-charged still point that temporarily halts the narrative flow.  Here financial transactions both reduce the delicate architecture of elevated sensibilities to the brute coin and encourage an investment of that base object with a profound symbolic complexity.  Just as particular objects are mobilized as unstable textual symbols, so too are the once firm relations between heroic producers and degraded consumers unbalanced; just as the brute coin spirals metaphorically toward the cultural abstraction already inherent in money, so too does the seemingly simply procedure of financial exchange end up obfuscating the relation between production and consumption.  Money and the business of its circulation might well, as Georg Simmel observes in The Philosophy of Money, make “comprehensible the most abstract concept” because both testify to a cultural “ability ... to construct symbolic objects.” And yet, as my chosen authors suggest, dollars, transactional business, and consumption in the nineteenth-century U.S. also demonstrate an equally strong susceptibility to being wholly mystified—to being renegotiated textually and politically. What makes that mystification especially curious, as I suggest, is how different it is from contemporary writers across the Atlantic, who, like Honoré Balzac and Charles Dickens, have no trouble whatsoever drawing attention fictionally to the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture.

Education

PhD (1993)—Department of English, University of Toronto
MA (1985)—Department of English, University of British Columbia
BA (1981)—Honours English, University of Western Ontario

Research and teaching interests

American Literature, primarily nineteenth and early-twentieth century fiction and poetry; American Gothic; science fiction; detective fiction

Grants / research projects / honors and awards

Fulbright Fellowship, Harvard University, 2001-2002
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Research Grant, 2000-04
Quebec Research Foundation (FCAR), Research Grant,1998-2001
FRDP, Start-up Grant, Concordia University, 1996-98
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 1993-95
Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), Doctoral, 1987-88
University of Toronto Doctoral Scholarship, 1988-91


Selected publications

Ptidej Team

http://www.ptidej.net/publications/

Personal

http://yann-gael.gueheneuc.net/Work/Publications/

DBLP

https://dblp.org/pers/hd/g/Gu=eacute=h=eacute=neuc:Yann=Ga=euml=l


Selected conference papers and invited talks

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