Academic staff

Undergraduate

• American Vistas
• Cultures of Modernity
• Robots, Cyborgs and Digital Worlds
• Women and Modernism
• Critical Theory in Action

Postgraduate

• Queer Cities

Supervision

I am currently supervising PhD students working on technology, the avant-garde and the everyday, the fiction of Louis Golding, Getrude Stein and the Prose Poem, and hypertext performance. I have previously supervised PhDs on modernism and dance, diasporic modern poetry, Hart Crane, space and subjectivity in 1950s American Literature, modern and contemporary American Poetry, Edgar Allan Poe, technology and contemporary American Fiction, masculinity and contemporary culture, and Arab women's writing.

I work in the field of modernist studies, technology and literature and on American literature and culture. I have published books and articles on Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, American Modernism, New York Dada, technology and literature, jewish writing, contemporary poetry, modernist drama, and radio.

Research Interests

• Modernist Studies
• American Literature and Culture
• Modern and Contemporary Poetry
• Technology
• WWII Radio Drama and Features
• Sex and sexuality
• Women’s Writing

Research projects

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology - co-edited with Ian Whittington

Reading Black Mirror - co-edited with Antonia Mackay

Of Women and Other Animals: Twentieth-century Women's Poetry and the Non-Human Turn

Books

• Goody AA, Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements, Palgrave Macmilllan (2019)
  eISSN: 9781349959600 ISBN: 9781349959600 eISBN: 9781349959617
  Abstract

  Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city of New York, the book argues that the poetry of modernist women that engages with, examines or critiques the new leisure technologies of their era is fundamentally changed by the encounter with that technology. The chapters in the book focus on shopping, advertising, dance, film, radio and phonography, on city spaces such as Coney Island, Greenwich Village and Harlem, and on poetry that embraces the linguistic and formal innovations of modernism whilst paying close attention to the embodied politics of gender. The technologized city, and the leisure cultures and media forms emerging from it, enabled modernist women writers to re-imagine forms of lyric embodiment, inspired by the impact of technology on modern ideas of selfhood and subjectivity.
  

  Website 
• Goody A, Mackay A, Ed., Reading Westworld, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030145149 eISBN: 9783030145156
  Abstract

  Reading Westworld is the first volume to explore the cultural, textual and theoretical significance of the hugely successful HBO TV seriesWestworld. The essays engage in a series of original enquiries into the central themes of the series including conceptions of the human and posthuman, American history, gaming, memory, surveillance, AI, feminism, imperialism, free will and contemporary capitalism. In its varied critical engagements with the genre, narratives and contexts of Westworld, this volume explores the show’s wider and deeper meanings and the questions it poses, as well considering how Westworld reflects on the ethical implications of artificial life and technological innovation for our own futurity. With critical essays that draw on the interdisciplinary strengths and productive intersections of media, cultural and literary studies, Reading Westworld seeks to respond to the show’s fundamental question; “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” It will be of interest to students, academics and general readers seeking to engage with Westworld and the far-reaching questions it poses about our current engagements with technology. 
  

  Website 
• Goody A, Technology, Literature and Culture, Polity Press (2011)
  ISBN: 9780745639543
  Abstract Technology, Literature and Culture provides a detailed and accessible exploration of the ways in which literature across the twentieth century has represented the inescapable presence and progress of technology. As this study argues, from the Fordist revolution in manufacturing to computers and the internet, technology has reconfigured our relationship to ourselves, each other, and to the tools and material we use. The book considers such key topics as the legacy of late-nineteenth century technology, the literary engagement with cinema and radio, the place of typewriters and computers in formal and thematic literary innovations, the representations of technology in spy fiction and the figures of the robot and the cyborg. It considers the importance of broadcast technology and the internet in literature and covers major literary movements including modernism, cold war writing, postmodernism and the emergence of new textualities at the end of the century. An insightful and wide-ranging study, Technology, Literature and Culture offers close readings of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Ian Fleming, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Jeanette Winterson and Shelley Jackson. It is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike in literary and cultural studies, and also introduces the topic to a general reader interested in the role of technology in the twentieth century.
• Goody A, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein, Palgrave (2007)
  ISBN: 9780230500495 eISBN: 9780230288300
  Abstract This book explores the theoretical concerns of recent literary and cultural studies through a reappraisal of three innovative women writers of the modernist period: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein. In its provocative combination of cultural methodologies, it significantly expands on existing aesthetic cartographies of modernism.Website 

Journal articles

• Goody A, 'Nonhuman animals and decorative modernism in Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy. '
  Women: A Cultural Review x (2021)
  ISSN: 0957-4042 eISSN: 1470-1367
  Abstract

  With a focus on their depiction of the use of nonhuman animal materials this article examines how Barnes and Loy’s modernism specifically negotiates and disrupts the uncertain boundary between natural and cultural meanings in their engagements with fashion and the decorative. The article considers animal fashions and the limits of the human in Djuna Barnes’s writing, from early pieces such as ‘Vaudeville’ (1915) and ‘Madame Collects Herself’ (1918) to her late poetry, and in her journalism for New York newspapers, Vanity Fair, Charm and elsewhere. It also explores Mina Loy’s engagement with decoration and fashion through her poetry, in her essay on ‘Modern Poetry’ and in her work as a designer and inventor (including her design for a ‘Horse Ear Hat’). The article argues that, through motifs of animal decorations in women’s fashion, Barnes and Loy imagine animal-human confluences that deconstruct those dualisms and hierarchies that sustain an exploitative anthropocentric economy and a patriarchal cultural elitism. 
  

  Website 
• Goody A, 'BBC Features, Radio Voices and the Propaganda of War, 1939-1941'
  Media History 24 (2) (2018) pp.194-211
  ISSN: 1368-8804 eISSN: 1469-9729
  Abstract BBC Radio drama, and especially feature programmes, became a crucial vehicle at the beginning of the Second World War for articulating a sense of national unity and for providing accounts of the war that could counteract Nazi propaganda. This essay will explore the feature series Shadow of the Swastika (1939–40), Terence Horseley’s Narvik (1940) and Cecil McGivern’s The Battle of Britain (1941), examining how the aesthetics of this radiogenic genre developed through encounters with the propaganda politics of the British nation at the outbreak of war and in response to the reactions of radio listeners. For the writers of Shadow of the Swastika, the ‘sound alone’ of radio was crucial for creating an effective actuality in a feature, but the empathetic force of this sound actuality—its ability to stand as/for the real—raised important political and moral questions at a time of national crisis. Examining the broadcasts themselves, and drawing on audience responses to features, the essay will uncover the tensions between political and aesthetic conceptions of the radio feature between 1939 and 1941. As the essay will argue it was in this period, which spans the Phoney War and the first major British military campaigns, that friction arose between anxieties about the presence of the radio voice and its reception by listeners, and the BBC’s attempt to use the power of the radio medium to present a real account of the war. Political expediency, technology, radio aesthetics, the exigencies of war and the affectivity of sound were all negotiated through radio features as the Second World War escalated. By 1941, in response to these competing factors, the key parameters of BBC war features had solidified and they would go on to function, in the subsequent years of the war, as white propaganda binding the nation together in the struggle against Nazi Germany.Website 
• Goody A, '"The dance of the intelligence": dancing bodies in Mina Loy'
  Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 37 (1) (2018) pp.131-156
  ISSN: 0732-7730 eISSN: 0732-7730
  Abstract Mina Loy’s engagement with dance in her writings exemplifies how a woman writer could use this corporeal art as a means to articulate a feminist sensibility. In a period when dance was undergoing similar seismic shifts to those transforming the written and visual arts, Loy drew on ballet and modern dance, and their expressive kinaesthetics, to examine the gender politics of the dancing body and explore the performative energies of the written word. This article examines Loy’s published and unpublished work, from early poems on Italian futurism to her long poem on Isadora Duncan, and the dancing that inspired them. It argues that Loy draws on dance to interrogate and experiment with the way meaning is made with the body and how the body can be part of the meanings of language.Website 
• Goody AA, 'Technological Women and Artificial Erotics in the Late Nineteenth Century'
  Nineteenth Century Studies 26 (2017) pp.261-280
  ISSN: 0893-7931
  Website 
• Goody A, 'Radio At Home: BBC Drama and the Domestic Listener'
  Modernist Cultures 10 (1) (2015) pp.62-82
  ISSN: 2041-1022 eISSN: 1753-8629
  Abstract

  In the years before, and at the outbreak of, the Second World War radio drama on the BBC emerged as a genre through which particular questions about nation, home, decency and morality were articulated. At the same time listener research developed, under the auspices of Reith's BBC, as a vehicle for understanding the preferences, habits and situations of the radio audience. Drama and Features were the first areas of radio output subject to targeted research. The reports that were produced by the BBC Listener Research Section provide an invaluable picture both of the nature and responses of specific communities of listener, and of how the radio listener her/himself was conceived. Such evidence can be usefully analysed alongside the types of drama that were developed and broadcast during this period. This essay examines the different kinds of listening subjects there were for radio drama in Britain in the 1930s and early 1940s, how they intersected with contemporary conceptions of the listener, and what situations (both private and political) came to be meaningful in the event of listening.

  Website 
• Goody A A, '"High and aloof": Verse, Violence and the Audience in Djuna Barnes's The Antiphon'
  Modern Drama 57 (2) (2014) pp.339-363
  ISSN: 0026-7694 eISSN: 1712-5286
  Website 
• Goody A, 'Mina Loy and the Hollywood Industry'
  Literature and History 21 (1) (2012) pp.76-93
  ISSN: 0306-1973
  Abstract In one of her later, New York, poems ‘Film Face', the modernist poet and artist Mina Loy presents an image of the atypical Hollywood film star Marie Dressler. Associating Dressler's body with the outcast and underclass the poem serves, alongside Loy's other explorations of cinema, to engage with the possibilities of cinematic seeing whilst also interrogating the ideological function of mainstream cinema. This article contextualises ‘Film Face' and explores its implications by locating Loy's engagement with cinema within ongoing debates about the impact of cinematic perception on modernism, by considering modernism and the politics of popular media and by comparing Loy's version of cinema to the Hollywood industry in John Dos Passos's U.S.A. It demonstrates, through this reading of Loy's work, how visual technologies have political as well as aesthetic implications for the literatures of modernism.Website 
• Goody A, 'Spectacle, technology and performing bodies; Djuna Barnes at Coney Island'
  Modernist Cultures 7 (2) (2012) pp.205-230
  ISSN: 2041-1022 eISSN: 1753-8629
  Website 
• Goody A, 'Empire, motherhood and the poetics of the self in Mina Loy's Anglo-mongrels and the Rose'
  Life Writing 6 (2009) pp.61-76
  ISSN: 1448-4528 eISSN: 1751-2964
  Abstract The modernist poet Mina Loy often drew on personal experience in her writing, but these biographical aspects are coded and disguised in her complex poetry. Nevertheless many critics have attempted to relate the assumed identities of Loy's writing to the facts of her life. Informed by recent feminist scholarship on autobiography and engaging with a range of criticism on Loy, criticism that considers both the feminist and the racial aspects of her writing, this article considers how Loy's poetic sequence Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25) examines and transforms biographical material into feminist poetry. In this discussion the figure of the mother provides a useful frame for considering the relationship between the biographical impulse in reading Loy's writing and the autobiographical poetry that she writes. The representation of the maternal body in Anglo-Mongrels is explored and compared to accounts of language and the maternal body that feature in both Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15). What this analysis ultimately highlights is the role of the critic herself in constructing and reworking the self put forward in the discourse of autobiography.Website 
• Goody A, 'Murder in Mile End: Amy Levy Jewishness, and the City'
  Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006) pp.461-479
  ISSN: 1060-1503 eISSN: 1470-1553
  

Book chapters

• Goody A, 'The Theme Park of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld' in Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay (ed.), Reading Westworld, Palgrave Macmillan (2019)
  ISBN: 9783030145149 eISBN: 9783030145156
  Abstract

  This chapter focuses on the intertextual play that marks out Westworld as a distinctive example of Quality TV. The chapter argues that Westworld can be placed in a wider literary-theoretical framework that includes interactive fiction and hypertext which, in turn offers a different perspective on the key questions of the series concerned with the impact of technology on the human. The chapter specifically considers the motif of the maze or labyrinth as synecdoche of the nexus of formal, theoretical and textual explications of nonlinear and interactive and digital narratives that shed light on Westworld’s depiction of its intradiegetic and extradiegetic players or wreaders. By thinking through the history of hypertext, the narratives of interactive textuality and the way both hypertext and Westworld negotiate ideas of (post)human agency in relation to technology, this chapter unearths an alternate lineage for the themes and dynamics of Westworld.
  

  Website 
• Goody, A, 'Djuna Barnes on the Page' in Elizabeth Pender, Cathryn Setz (ed.), Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes's Modernism, Penn State University Press (2019)
  ISBN: 978-0-271-08220-2
  
• Goody A A, 'Poetry and Technology' in Linda A. Kinnahan (ed.), A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, Cambridge University Press (2016)
  ISBN: 9781107137561 eISBN: 9781316488560
  Abstract The twentieth century saw an exponential increase in the forms and functions of technology; in the experience of many the century culminated in a saturation of the economic, social, and cultural world by technology. Indeed, in various predictions the century supposedly would end in a techno-apocalypse on December 31, 1999, when the “millennium bug” Y2K would cause massive computer mainframe malfunction and the breakdown of networks and infrastructure. Across the century technologies underlying revolutions in communication, transportation, architecture, medicine, industry, war, and media offered models through which poetry was both read and written and posed particular questions and opportunities for women poets. The relationship of poetry to technology is a complex one, foregrounding for some writers the incompatibility of the lyric text with the machinic processes and perspectives of a technological and industrial world. The nineteenth century had seen the decline of the public function of poetry; the conventional academic reading of this trend discerns science and technological progress replacing poetry as the discourse that best engaged the contemporary public imagination. But, exploring the way that poetry developed across the long twentieth century, it becomes apparent that poetry is not in opposition to the technological; as Carrie Noland proposes, it is necessary to acknowledge the “extensive ties, both practical and epistemological, linking capitalist expansion and its corollaries, modern industrialization and electronic information processing, to poetic forms of subjective expression.” Poetry itself works dynamically with, in, and as technology in this century, and the position of women poets in this dynamic engagement is key to understanding the politics and aesthetics of their work. Twentieth-century poetry by American women does not simply enlist the technological as tool and discipline, though these aspects of technology are central to women's distinctive participation in digital poetics in the 1980s and 1990s. American women's poetry points, in a heterogeneity of modes, toward the novel ontological and epistemological frames generated by the twentieth-century technological imagination. Martin Heidegger's theorization of technology was an influential one for the twentieth century, and a paradoxically enabling one for the poet. For Heidegger technology itself is not dangerous, but its essence as enframing (Gestell) means that everything (the world and the individual) are ordered as a “standing-reserve” to be utilized, a mode of existence at odds with any kind of authentic existence as defined by Heidegger.Website 
• Goody A A, 'The "Impersonation" of Divinity: Language, Authenticity and Embodiment in Dorothy L. Sayer's The Man Born to Be King' in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Bloomsbury (2014)
  ISBN: 978-1-4725-1248-2 eISBN: 978-1-4725-4345-5
  Website 
• Goody A, ''Indeed everybody did come': parties, publicity and intimacy in Gertrude Stein's Plays' in The Modernist Party, Edinburgh University Press (2013)
  ISBN: 9780748647316
  
• Goody A, 'Empire, motherhood and the poetics of the self in Mina Loy's Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose' in Poetry and Autobiography, Routledge (2011)
  ISBN: 9780415617550
  Abstract The modernist poet Mina Loy often drew on personal experience in her writing, but these biographical aspects are coded and disguised in her complex poetry. Nevertheless many critics have attempted to relate the assumed identities of Loy’s writing to the facts of her life. Informed by recent feminist scholarship on autobiography and engaging with a range of criticism on Loy, criticism that considers both the feminist and the racial aspects of her writing, this article considers how Loy’s poetic sequence Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923/25) examines and transforms biographical material into feminist poetry. In this discussion the figure of the mother provides a useful frame for considering the relationship between the biographical impulse in reading Loy’s writing and the autobiographical poetry that she writes. The representation of the maternal body in Anglo-Mongrels is explored and compared to accounts of language and the maternal body that feature in both Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914/15). What this analysis ultimately highlights is the role of the critic herself in constructing and reworking the self put forward in the discourse of autobiography.

Reviews

• Goody A, review of Literature, Modernism and Dance, in Dance Research 33 (1) (2017) pp.144-145ISSN: 0264-2875
  Website 
• Goody A, review of Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity, in Literature and History 21 (2013) pp.103-104ISSN: 0306-1973 eISSN: 2050-4594
  Website 
• Goody A, review of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life, in Journal of American Studies 45 (2012) ISSN: 0021-8758 eISSN: 1469-5154
  Website 
• Goody A, review of Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes's Bewildering Corpus, in Modernism/modernity 18 (2011) pp.478-480ISSN: 1071-6068 eISSN: 1080-6601
  
• Goody A, review of Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, in Modernism/modernity 14 (2008) pp.775-777ISSN: 1071-6068
  
• Goody A, review of Women, Writing, and Fetishism, 1890-1950: Female Cross-gendering., in Journal of the History of Sexuality 13 (2005) pp.387-390ISSN: 1043-4070
  

I studied for my BA at the University of York and for my MA at the University of Leeds. My PhD on 'Mina Loy’s Modernist Aesthetic’ was awarded at the University of Leeds in 1997. My teaching career has taken me from Leeds to Falmouth University in Cornwall before arriving at Oxford Brookes University in 2002. I teach primarily on modernism, technology, American literature and culture, and on twentieth-century literature. I am on the Executive Committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies.