University of California, Riverside
Graduate Student, Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages
Harvey Mudd College, Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts
Thesis Title: Moments of Realization: Meditations in the Reality of Fiction
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Joseph Childers
Sabine Doran |
About
Jonathan Rey Lee received his Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside, where he is currently in the dissertation phase of his Ph.D. His research largely focuses on the connection between signification and significance—how reflexive practices of representing, describing, speaking, reading, and writing condition the discursive context of (ethical) action. In particular, his dissertation argues that realization—the self-reflexive practices of characterizing ordinary experience in ordinary language that underlie realism—is an integral component of ethical thought. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines the philosophical critiques of Wittgenstein, Kant, and Spinoza and the close reading techniques of literary studies (applied to texts of Tolstoy, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, etc.), his dissertation focuses on the character and consequences of various discourses of realism. Critiquing certain formulations of each of these discourses in order to clarify how the discourses themselves condition the activity of reading realism, this project scopes the ethical potential of realist fiction in particular and of literary representation more generally.
Within literary studies, he focuses primarily on Nineteenth-century British and Russian novels, particularly with respect to the notion of realism. He is also interested in intertextuality, literary revision, the bildungsroman, and the role of the reader as both bearer and receiver of literary meaning. His primary philosophical interests center on language and its relation to agency and ethics, which he discusses through the traditions of Kant, the philosophy of language, ordinary language philosophy, and especially Wittgenstein. His research is particularly invested in comparative and interdisciplinary methodologies, which has extended into several currently developing projects on adaptation and performativity in popular multimedia and games.
He has conducted academic work in a variety of venues including the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz and The Global 19th Century Mellon workshop at UCR. He has also organized and moderated several conference panels including “Ambiguities of Presence: The Online Avatar as a Rhetorical Performance of Identity” (ACLA 2008), “Interdisciplinary Conventions: Literature and Philosophy” (PAMLA 2010), and “Literature (?) Philosophy” (ACLA 2011). In addition to his research, he has taught writing and composition at two institutions and served three terms as President of the Comparative Literature Graduate Student Association at UCR.
His article, “When Lions Talk: Wittgenstein, Kipling, and the Language of Colonialism,” is currently forthcoming in a special issue of Literature Compass.
