What are your research interests?
Twentieth-century American fiction, masculinities, war representation, creative non-fiction/memoir
What was your last publication about?
Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night and its use of ambiguity. It’s a piece of participatory journalism that foregrounds Mailer’s subjective response to the Vietnam protests in 1968.
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What are you currently working on?
An edited collection provisionally titled Music, Memoir, Memory with YSJ colleague Rob Edgar. It’s a look at the narratives involved in writing about music and the current trend for nostalgia and memorialisation. Plus, I’m starting the process of turning my PhD thesis into a monograph.
Which modules are you teaching on this year?
At UG level I’m teaching on Reading Texts I, Forms of Narrative, American Literature Space & Place, Contemporary Writing, Gender & Writing, and American Literature in the Twentieth Century. On the MA I teach on Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, and Contemporary American Literature.
Is there a topic or text you especially enjoy teaching?
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It is genuinely the most moving novel I have ever read. Simultaneously, it’s a slippery devil full of postmodern trickery!
What do you read for pleasure, when you’re not researching?
Anything to do with music, especially the American underground or electronic music. I also wait for any new John Irving novels with insane levels of excitement.
Follow Fraser on Twitter: @FraserYSJ