David Witzling

I am currently working on a book project on attitudes toward property rights and economic freedom in twentieth-century United States culture and how those attitudes are manifested in literary narrative.

•  “Postmodern Prose and the Discourse of the ‘Cultural Jew:’ The Cases of Mailer and Foer.” Postmodernism and Racial Discourse. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.
• “Lockean Fundamentalism and the American Literary Tradition: The Case of James’s ‘The Jolly Corner.” American Political Fictions. University of Tennessee Press, 2014. Forthcoming.
• “Reflections on the ‘Ownership Society’ in Recent Black Fiction,” Kalfou 2:2, Fall 2014. Forthcoming.
• Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism. Routledge, 2008.
• “The Sensibility of Postmodern Whiteness in V. or Thomas Pynchon’s Identity Problem,” Contemporary Literature 47:3, Fall 2006.

Conference Papers:

• “Slavery, Capitalism, Postmodernist Fiction: The Rhetoric of Finance in Edward P. Jones’ The Known World.” April 2014, Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing, Missoula, MT.
• “Fluid Capital/Fluid Identities: The Contemporary Narrative of Slavery in the Early Twenty-First Century.” March 2013, MELUS Conference, Pittsburgh, PA.
• "Exporting 'Harlem:' Baldwin, Baraka/Jones, and the Internationalization of Black Cultural Representation." May 2012, American Literature Association Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA.
• “Property Nostalgia and the Fear of Global Capitalism in James and Hemingway.” November 2010, MMLA Conference, Chicago, IL.
• “Liberal Desires in Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa.” May 2009, American Literature Association Annual Conference, Boston, MA.
• “Living for the City: Post-integrationist Feeling in James Baldwin’s New York Essays.” March 2008, Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Conference, Berkeley, CA.

Professional Memberships

• Modern Language Association
• American Studies Association
• MELUS