Jules Law

Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature

University Hall Room 313
Telephone: (847) 491-5526
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: jlaw@northwestern.edu

Jules Law is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His essays on Victorian literature, James Joyce, and literary theory have appeared in PMLA , Critical Inquiry , SIGNS , NLH , ELH , Nineteenth Century Literature , and other journals. His book The Rhetoric of Empiricism traces the philosophical figures of surface, depth, and reflection throughout the aesthetic theory of the 18th and 19th centuries. He is currently completing two books, one on the politics of fluids in the Victorian novel, and the other on the epistemology of narrative figures. He has received numerous teaching awards, most recently the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence.

Publications by Jules Law

Books

The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception From Locke to I.A. Richards

Work in Progress:

The Secret Life of Fluids: Body, Space, and Social Control in the Victorian Novel.

Articles:

"Transparency and Epistemology in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda," Nineteenth-Century Literature 62 (September 2007): 250-277.

"Being There: Gothic Violence and Virtuality in Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Days," ELH 73 (Winter 2007): pp. 975-996

"Cultural Ecologies of the Coast: Space as the Edge of Cultural Practice in Mary Kingsley," in Nineteenth Century Geographies, ed. Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 109-122.

"The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labor," Signs 25.2 (Winter 2000): pp. 407-450.

"Political Sirens," in Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives, ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 150-166.

"Sleeping Figures: Hardy, History, and the Gendered Body," ELH 65 (1998): pp. 223-257.

"A 'Passing Corporeal Blight': Political Bodies in Tess of the D'Urbervilles," Victorian Studies 41 (Winter 1997): pp. 245-270.

"Wittgenstein," in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism and Theory, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreisworth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 737-740.

"Water Rights and the 'Crossin o breeds': Chiastic Exchange in The Mill on the Floss," in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 52-69.

"'Pity They Can't See Themselves': Assessing the 'Subject' of Pornography in Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly 27.2 (Winter 1990): pp. 219-239.

"'Resetting the Agenda': A Response to Jacques Derrida's 'Paul de Man's War'" (with John Brenkman), Critical Inquiry 15:4 (Summer 1989): pp. 804-811.

"Reading with Wittgenstein and Derrida," in Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction and Literary Theory, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 140-168.

"Simulation, Pluralism, and the Politics of Everyday Life," in Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, ed. Morris BÈja and Shari Benstock (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 195-205.

"The Home of Discourse: Joyce and Modern Language Philosophy," in New Alliances in Joyce Criticism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 48-55.

"Uncertain Grounds: Wittgenstein's On Certainty and the New Literary Pragmatism," New Literary History 19.2 (Winter 1988): pp. 319-336.

"Joyce's 'Delicate Siamese' Equation: The Dialectic of Home in Ulysses," PMLA 102.2 (March 1987): pp. 197-205.

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