New Member Feature Alyson Brickey

CRiCS would like to introduce another new member: Alyson Brickey. Dr. Brickey holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, an MA in English from the University of Manitoba, and a BA in English from the University of Winnipeg. She teaches courses in American literature, critical theory, the novel, and short fiction. Dr. Brickey’s research is focused on the relationship between experimental late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century American fiction and continental philosophy. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book called Aesthetic Unrest: Lists in American Literature, where she reads aesthetically “excessive” authors such as Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and Allen Ginsberg, and argues for the ethical significance of enumerative prose as a non-narrative form.

In her new book project, America’s Walls, Dr. Brickey traces American literary representations of thresholds—including doors, walls, windows, fences, borders, and gates—as a way to engage contemporary American political conversations around incarceration, border security, immigration, citizenship, and abortion rights. The United States as a concept and a nation, this book contends, was calibrated from the very start through continual and interlocking processes of wall-building and border maintenance. The cultural and juridical processes that create and uphold various kinds of segregations are exposed and critiqued in works by writers such as Herman Melville, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy, Eudora Welty, and Gloria Anzaldua. If we re-read America’s walls through its literature, she suggests, we can begin to think around and outside of them.

Welcome, Alyson!

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