Synecdoche

This is the weblog of Kyle James Matthews, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University and Lecturer in Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. This site is for short- and long-form reflections on literature, criticism, politics, culture, teaching, and my research. These will often, though by no means always, be a reflection of my thought processes on the subjects I take up, often in a hasty, unfinished fashion. As an academic it is often striking to realize how coherence is just refined incoherence, and how the prerequisite for writing well is writing at all, and often. Sometimes one needs a place to unapologetically confess how much there is yet to learn. This is a space for me to record, question, and track my own thoughts —ephemeral and provisional as they may be— and, perhaps, engage in dialogue with other voices.

My dissertation research is concerned with the deployment of bodies in narratives of nation in the Mexican New Historical Novel. These novels are full of bodies: human bodies, textual bodies, carnivalesque bodies, and dead bodies. It is my proposal to study the ways these bodies reflect, order, narrate, question, and perform modern concepts of national unity and disunity. My other broad interests include modern critical theory, and Jewish Latin American authors. If you are interested in me professionally, have a look at my teaching portfolio.

If you got here by mistake, you can also find me on Twitter. If you are a student, you are probably looking for my course web sites that do not yet exist. I have also maintain and had a hand in redesigning the web sites for the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Transatlantic Project, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at Brown University.

Comments, inevitably, will be moderated for the unacceptable and inexcusable, though never for relevant content.

The picture at the top of the site is the top of a partially-excavated pyramid in the Grupo C area of the archaeological site in Palenque, Chiapas, México. This site’s design and its implementation are mine. Design is always something of a work-in-progress, and I like to tinker. I apologize if things are sometimes broken.