Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Current teaching

Contemporary Literature (3^rd year)

Previous teaching

Critical Debates and Methods (MA)

Dissertation (3^rd year)

Contemporary Literature (3^rd year)

Postcolonial Literatures (3^rd year)

Contemporary American Fiction (2^nd year)

Crime, Culture and Transgression (2^nd year)                              

Landscapes and Mindscapes (2^nd year)

World Literature (1^st year)

Critical Theory in Action (1^st year)

Culture, Criticism and Literature 1 (1^st year)

Culture, Criticism and Literature 2 (1^st year)

 

My research interests include:

• Contemporary literature
• Transnationalism
• Postcolonialism and globalisation
• Terror and terrorism
• Islamophobia
• Trauma theory
• Spatial theory
• Affect theory

Research group membership

Departmental memberships

'Networks and Localities' research cluster (cluster leader)

'Memory and Life-writing' research cluster

External memberships 

British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS)

Postcolonial Studies Association (PSA)

Modern Language Association (MLA)

Books

• O'Gorman D, Fictions of the War on Terror: Difference and the Transnational 9/11 Novel, Palgrave Macmillan (2015)
  ISBN: 9781349700844 eISBN: 9781137506184
  Website 
• O'Gorman D, Eaglestone R, Ed., The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction, Routledge ()
  ISBN: 9780415716048 eISBN: 9781315880235
  Abstract

  The study of contemporary fiction is a fascinating yet challenging one. Contemporary fiction has immediate relevance to popular culture, the news, scholarly organizations, and education – where it is found on the syllabus in schools and universities – but it also offers challenges. What is ‘contemporary’? How do we track cultural shifts and changes? The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction takes on this challenge, mapping key literary trends from the year 2000 onwards, as the landscape of our century continues to take shape around us. A significant and central intervention into contemporary literature, this Companion offers essential coverage of writers who have risen to prominence since then, such as Hari Kunzru, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Ali Smith, A. L. Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, and Colson Whitehead. Thirty-eight essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: Identity, including race, sexuality, class, and religion in the twenty-first century; The impact of technology, terrorism, activism, and the global economy on the modern world and modern literature; The form and format of twenty-first century literary fiction, including analysis of established genres such as the pastoral, graphic novels, and comedic writing, and how these have been adapted in recent years. Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of contemporary literature.

  Website 

Journal articles

• O'Gorman D, 'Speaking for the Muslim world: popular memoir and the "War on Terror"'
  European Journal of English Studies 22 (2) (2018) pp.142-153
  ISSN: 1382-5577 eISSN: 1744-4233
  Abstract This essay analyses two prominent memoirs by authors from Muslim backgrounds who use their writing to critique Islamist extremism: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2006) and The Islamist by Ed Husain (2007). The memoirs respond to an increased demand for narratives about Islam in the post-9/11 global book market. Although they offer valuable insights, they problematically position themselves as gatekeepers to the so-called ‘Muslim world’, a sweeping term frequently used in news reportage to refer to vast and diverse swathes of the globe. By taking on this role, the texts reinforce precisely the kind of ‘us vs them’ identity binaries that they ostensibly seek to challenge, and which have frequently underpinned dominant discourse about the ‘War on Terror’. This reinforcement of binaries is partially enabled by the memoirs’ heavy reliance on a ‘coming-of-age’ narrative style (borrowed from the literary form of the Bildungsroman), which sometimes creates an equivalence between the attainment of personal maturity and the adoption of what the authors describe as Western values. Through a comparative reading of the memoirs, the essay aims to challenge these authors’ claims to speak for a monolithic ‘Muslim world’ in the context of the ‘War on Terror’.Website 
• O'Gorman D, '"Dark Newnesses": The Failures of Joseph Anton'
  Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52 (3) (2016) pp.455-466
  ISSN: 0021-9894 eISSN: 1741-6442
  Abstract Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, marks a turning point in his career. While his earlier work celebrated “cultural translation” and the emergence of “newness” into the world, this book expresses reservations. “The arrival of the new was not always linked to progress”, Rushdie writes, “Men found new ways of oppressing one another, too, new ways of unmaking their best achievements and sliding back towards that primal ooze; and men’s darkest innovations, as much as their brightest ones, confused their fellow men”. These “dark newnesses”, as he calls them, “were innovations that came into being in the name of a totalizing ideology, an absolute ruler, an unarguable dogma, or a god”. However, despite this turn towards a more binary worldview, the complexity of Rushdie’s earlier writing refuses to be completely stifled, and this article argues that Joseph Anton is ultimately unable to persuasively follow through on its rhetoric of a world simplistically torn between newnesses “bright” and “dark”. Although frequently relying on binary language, it is precisely the memoir’s patent failure to convincingly represent the world in such starkly simplistic terms that, inadvertently, renders it valuable in foregrounding the nuances of post-9/11 identity politics that its author ostensibly seeks to deny.Website 
• O'Gorman D, 'Refiguring Difference: Imaginative Geographies and “Connective Dissonance” in Three Novels of the Iraq War'
  Critique 56 (5) (2015) pp.545-559
  ISSN: 0011-1619 eISSN: 1939-9138
  Abstract

  This article analyzes three contemporary novels that engage with the most recent Iraq war: Point Omega by Don DeLillo (2010), Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru (2011), and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (2012). It argues that the novels produce a kind of “connective dissonance” that works to redress what Judith Butler has described as a dehumanizing “derealization of loss” in the context of Western media representations of the war on terror.

  Website 
• O'Gorman D, '“[N]ew constellations for thinking about normativity”: Rethinking Butler’s “Frame” with reference to Dave Eggers’ What is the What'
  Textual Practice 29 (4) (2014) pp.653-674
  ISSN: 0950-236X eISSN: 1470-1308
  Abstract

  This article aims to critique Judith Butler’s recent use of the concept of the ‘frame’ in the context of the war on terror. While many of the questions that Butler raises about the ways in which violence is framed in the post-9/11 world are perspicacious, I argue that this conceptual reliance on framing actually stands in the way of her ability to answer them. Instead, it causes her to inadvertently exacerbate precisely the kind of framing process that she is ostensibly attempting to deconstruct. By making this argument, I do not mean to negate the ultimate goals of her project, nor the headway she makes towards them in other ways. Neither am I attempting to undercut her ideologically, by taking what some might interpret as a Badiouian position that rejects her as a proponent of a nihilistic ‘ethics of difference’.1 Rather, my aim is essentially to push her thinking further, holding her to account when she claims that her point is ‘not to paralyze judgement, but to insist that we must devise new constellations for thinking about normativity if we are to proceed in intellectually open and comprehensive ways to grasp and evaluate our world’. I suggest that Butler’s analysis of the frame does in fact involve a partial paralysis of judgement, which prevents these ‘new constellations for thinking about normativity’ from being as fully realised as they otherwise might be. With reference to Dave Eggers’ biographical novel, What Is the What (2006), a text that actively strives to challenge the media-driven post-9/11 framing of reality by telling the ‘real-life’ story of a marginalised figure, this article contends that literature can prompt its reader to think about the framing of contemporary reality in ways that may help more radical ‘new constellations’ to begin to emerge. I make this case in two parts. In the first, I analyse Butler’s understanding of the frame, showing why her approach to literature plays a key part in what is problematic about her theorisation. In the second, I explain how Eggers’ novel offers a more nuanced and radical approach to the process of framing post-9/11 reality; an approach that foregrounds the textuality of the frame and suggests that the reality it limns might be more open to interpretation than Butler’s analysis allows.

  Website 

Book chapters

• O'Gorman D, Eaglestone R, 'Introduction' in Daniel O'Gorman and Robert Eaglestone (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction, Routledge (2019)
  ISBN: 978-0-415-71604-8 eISBN: 978-1-315-88023-5
  
• O'Gorman D, 'The Future of Borders' in Robert Eaglestone and Gail Marshall (ed.), English: Shared Futures, Boydell and Brewer (2018)
  ISBN: 9781843845164 eISBN: 9781787443297
  Abstract

  In May 2014, the then-Education Secretary Michael Gove sparked controversy by proposing to effectively restrict the ‘Post-1914’ section of the GCSE English curriculum to ‘fiction or drama written in the British Isles’. The decision was met with anger from English teachers and literary scholars around the country. As Anna Hartnell argued, the policy – which would result in the cutting of texts such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Arthur Miller's The Crucible and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men – is ‘not just parochial and regressive’, but also fails to recognise the dynamics that make up modern Britain. It fails to understand that a large part of the value of reading literature lies precisely in the kind of empathic leap Scout makes at the end of Lee's novel, one that enables her to see herself through the eyes of an ‘other’ and so more fully comprehend her own identity.

  The ferocity of the debate surrounding Gove's decision brought to the fore something quite singular about English as a core subject at GCSE level: namely, its centrality to collective feelings about British national identity. In contrast to Science and Maths (and, at least until 2015, when English Literature was made an optional GCSE, more intensely than other Arts and Humanities subjects), the debates that take place in the English Literature GCSE classroom are debates that actively and substantively contribute towards the construction of our national imaginary; or, in Bendict Anderson's often-cited phrase, our ‘imagined community’. What's more, three years on, this political row has taken on an extra degree of significance: in the wake of his stint in the Department for Education, Gove has proceeded to become one of Brexit's most outspoken champions. This development, of course, reveals an unnerving warning of things to come in his earlier GCSE English policy change, but, more importantly than this, it also reflects how crucial a role the subject of English plays in the way we conceptualise our national borders: not just in terms of immigration and the economy, but also, on a deeper, more paradigmatic level, in terms of how we demarcate Britishness itself and the values we perceive it to contain.

  It is for this reason that English, and the decisions taken about the study of texts on school syllabi, occupy an important place in today's climate of uncertainty over the future of Britain's borders.

  Website 
• O'Gorman D, 'Global Terror | Global Literature' in Herman, P. (ed.), Terrorism and Literature, Cambridge University Press (2018)
  ISBN: 9781108498241 eISBN: 9781316987292
  Website 
• O'Gorman D, '‘Deconstructing “Fundamentalism” in Three Pakistani Post-9/11 Novels’' in Sadia Chaudhry and Sumita Mukherjee (ed.), in Islam and the West: A Love Story?, Cambridge Scholars (2015)
  ISBN: 9781443874458
  
• O'Gorman D, '‘Rushdie’s Non-Fiction’' in Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan (ed.), Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Bloomsbury (2013)
  Website 
• O'Gorman D, '“The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross”: Stepping Across Lines in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown' in Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (ed.), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now, Palgrave Macmillan (2013)
  
• O'Gorman D, '“His open-sesame, his passé-partout”: Deconstructing “Difference” in Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence' in Rebecca DeWald and Dorette Sobolewski (ed.), Bonds and Borders: Identity, Imagination and Transformation in Literature, Cambridge Scholars (2011)
  

Short pieces

• ‘The Future of Borders’, in Robert Eaglestone and Gail Marshall (eds), English: Shared Futures (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018). 3,000 words.
• ‘Editorial: Global Conflict’, Alluvium, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 2015), web. 2,000 words.
• ‘Overwriting the Globe? “Planetarity” and Post-9/11 Pakistani Fiction’, Alluvium, Vol. 1, No. 7 (Dec 2012), web. 2,000 words.
• ‘Empathy After 9/11’, Alluvium, Vol. 1, No. 1 (June 2012), web. 2,000 words.

Book reviews

• ‘The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. by Yogita Goyal’, Review of English Studies, published 15 September 2017. 1,000 words.
• ‘After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East, by Brian T. Edwards’, European Journal of American Culture, 35, No. 3 (2016). 1,000 words.
• ‘After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11 by Richard Gray’, Glasgow Review of Books, No. 1 (2013), web. 1,000 words.