Vivasvan Soni
Assistant Professor of English Literature
University Hall Room 325
Telephone: (847) 467-0699
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: v-soni@northwestern.edu
Vivasvan Soni (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) studies and teaches eighteenth-century British literature, as well as critical and literary theory. His book manuscript, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity, is currently under submission. In it, he traces the narrative transformations in the eighteenth-century which produce a modern conception of happiness, arguing that these transformations result in the erasure of happiness as a guiding idea in politics. He discovers in classical ideas of happiness, particularly Solon's proverb, the outlines of a concept of happiness that might sustain a utopian politics.
Soni's areas of interest include the rise of the novel, moral and political theory, narratology, theories of tragedy, utopian writing and theories of modernity. He is currently at work on two new projects. The first diagnoses a "crisis of judgment" in the eighteenth-century whose legacy is still with us. Read in this context, the novels of Fielding and Austen offer an exemplary pedagogy of judgment. Soni is currently editing a special issue of the journal ECTI on "The Crisis of Judgment." His second project, tentatively titled, The Utopian Imagination: Fiction and the Possibilities of Action, will examine the fate of utopian writing and thinking in modernity.
Soni has also taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and at Yale University where he held a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship (2000-2002).
Publications by Vivasvan Soni
The Trial Narrative in Richardson's Pamela: Suspending the Hermeneutic of Happiness. forthcoming in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 41.1.
Trials and Tragedies: The Literature of Unhappiness (A Model for Reading Narratives of Suffering). Comparative Literature 59.2 (Spring 2007): 119-39.
Communal Narcosis and Sublime Withdrawal: The Problem of Community in Kant's Critique of Judgment. Cultural Critique 64 (Fall 2006): 1-39.
