Dr Patrick Hayes
Dr Patrick Hayes
Tutorial Fellow in English
Email: Dr Patrick Hayes
Teaching Interests
I teach literature in English from 1740 to the present day. This includes undergraduate papers on Romantic, Victorian and Modern literature, and an introductory course on literary theory. I supervise finalist and graduate dissertations on a range of subjects within this period, including the modernist novel, post-war American fiction, cultural criticism from the Victorian period to the present, World literature in English.
Research Interests
My research is on the debate over literary value in the modern period, especially on how 20th and 21st century writers have explored this debate and the ways their work has been received and evaluated. My interest is particularly in the modernist novel and its legacies in the post-war period, and current work is on the relationship between fiction and cultural criticism in post-war America. Right now I am working on a book entitled Portnoy's Politics: Philip Roth, Literature, and Cultural Criticism, which explores Roth's ongoing quarrel with public moralists and the ways in which literature is evaluated in the public sphere. An equal interest is the history and theory of the novel, and my recently published book J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett explores the inventive ways in which Coetzee has responded to the tradition of the novel, focusing on a range of figures from Cervantes, Defoe and Richardson, to Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett. My next project will be on the relationship between literature and the emotions, focusing in particular on the impact of post-Nietzschean arguments about the disciplining of affectivity on the modern novel.
