柯瑞強 John Michael Corrigan

American Romantic Culture and its Legacies

Over the course of my fourteen-year career in Taiwan, first, at Ming Chuan University and, then, at National Chengchi University for the last decade, I have maintained a rigorous and ambitious research agenda which includes the following publications: two monographs with top university presses, a co-edited volume of essays with Routledge, ten journal articles, six book chapters, and over a dozen digital publications as a Senior Editor with one of the world’s leading projects in the Digital Humanities (http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu). My research approach is interdisciplinary in nature and often considers literary texts within an intellectual history of ideas with a special emphasis upon the development of the sciences. Of all my work, my two monographs are the most significant. Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2024) is the first of its kind in Faulkner Studies, an interdisciplinary account of the iconic modernist novelist that employs network theory and complexity studies to make the case that Faulkner's work can be best understood as a critique of the Information Age. My first monograph, American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry (Fordham University Press, 2012), although very different in scope, pursues a similar form of critical inquiry. The book examines the intercultural idealist thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and argues that he was attempting to synthesize religion and science, preserving spiritual heritages that span both East and West and incorporating them into what were then the most recent conceptions of biological and cultural evolution. Indeed, the idea of reincarnation or metempsychosis, to use the Ancient Greek term, was a particularly important starting point, first, for the Concord philosopher and, then for the poet Walt Whitman. Both writers were intent upon adapting the ancient concept to notions of material adaptation, calling for an evolved individual capable of reforming the modern world through heightened artistic and intellectual feats of proleptic self-knowledge.