Modern Literature & Culture Research Centre & Gallery

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Dr. Wrighton is a proud MLC Alumnus and no longer with the Centre.

With a PhD in English from Aberystwyth University (UK) in 2008, Dr. Wrighton explores twentieth-century American literature and culture, modernist and avant-garde poetry and movements, and the "turn to ethics” in literary theory. Extending theories at the critical edge of thinking about poetics and ethics, Wrighton’s "poethical trajectory” demonstrates how experimental poetry can welcome the other by way of a participatory and non-totalizing poetic innovation. As Ryerson University International Research Fellow in Modernism and Avant-garde, Wrighton is working at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center through to January 2013 under the supervision of Dr. Irene Gammel.

Research

Dr. Wrighton’s research projects include a monograph titled Traumatized Semiotics: The Radical Subjectivity of Modernist Women’s Poetry, articles exploring the ethics of performance, and a co-edited volume on Ethics, Avant-Garde, Modernity, exploring the nexus of ideas at the critical intersection of theories of modernity, ethical philosophy, and formal experimentation in avant-garde aesthetics.

Research Publications Intersecting with MLCRC Research

Dr. Wrighton’s book Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry was published by Routledge in 2009. For more information, click here

Dr. Wrighton is the editor of the Contempo: Centre for Contemporary Poetry online journal. 

University of Brighton Research Profile

Dr. John Wrighton is the author of Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry (Routledge, 2009), a book praised for its prominent contributions to the theorizing of the "ethical turn” in literary and cultural studies. Dr. Wrighton is Lecturer in English Literature, Faculty of Arts,University of Brighton. He is currently on secondment at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre.

The Great War in Literature and Visual Culture

MLC Themes

The Great War in Literature and Visual Culture

Amid the unprecedented social change of World War I, women renegotiated their identities by dramatically changing the way they engaged with the arts. But how did they do so? And how did everyday citizens engage with the war?

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

MLC Themes

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, considered by many to be the mother of Dada, was a daringly innovative poet and an early creator of junk sculpture. “The Baroness” was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances.

Modernism in the World

MLC Themes

Modernism in the World

Recent research has departed from the Euro-centric and national view of Modernism to include approaches and methods studying Modernism across national boundaries and across different art forms to include fashion, dance, performance, technology, and visual culture.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

MLC Themes

Lucy Maud Montgomery

L.M. Montgomery is perhaps Canada's most important literary export. She was prolific writer of over 500 short stories and poems, and twenty novels, including the beloved Anne of Green Gables.

Canadian Modernism

MLC Themes

Canadian Modernism

The works of numerous Canadian authors who lived during the modernist era may well constitute the most central and experimental articulation of Canadian modernism in prose, allowing authors to stage cross-cultural, controversial, and even conflicted identities.

Modernist Biography and Life Writing

MLC Themes

Modernist Biography and Life Writing

Life writing, including autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters and testimonials written or told by women and men whose political, literary or philosophical purposes are central to their lives, has become a standard tool for communication and the dissemination of information.