Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Tim Bewes is Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in Modern Culture and Media. His published research has examined the relation between aesthetics and politics within a Marxist theoretical frame derived from the work of the Frankfurt School. His books include Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2002), The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Free Indirect: The Thought of Twenty-first Century Fiction (forthcoming, 2022). His current work continues this inquiry with a particular emphasis on the contemporary Anglophone novel.

The project he worked on during his Cogut Institute fellowship, titled “Recent Experiments in American Fiction,” was about fictionality, its affordances, and its limits. It also examined how and why a transformed relationship to fictionality was increasingly evident and influential in nonliterary discourses such as literary scholarship, historiography, and social and political theory.