Carson Hammond

My dissertation reads anglophone memoir and fiction after 1989 with a view to the concepts of depression and the "end of history." Each of these concepts, I suggest, is inflected by a common "realist" narrative logic the immanent critique of which I pursue through a series of encounters with works ranging from William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) to Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). In this project and my research in general, I try to make sense of the "presentist" present of the post-Cold War era by attending to the oftentimes literalist and/or scientistic ways that we have come to understand and diagnose widespread feelings of exhaustion and despair in an overheating world where, supposedly, "there is no alternative" to capitalism.