About

I am a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. I am currently completing my dissertation on modernist literature and obscenity. The obscenity trials of James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover have long been recognized as crucial events in the literary history of the twentieth century. Too often, however, these trials are inserted within an uncomplicated narrative of liberalization and increasing freedom in the course of the twentieth century. The interactions between art, literature, and obscenity, however, involved questions about reception and value that exceed the comparatively binary question of whether a work should be censored. Indeed, modernist writers were often at pains to separate their work from the obscene works with which they were confused. Rather than a question of sexual explicitness, obscenity in the early-twentieth century condensed key questions about the function, value, and reception of art and literature. My dissertation traces the ways in which writers and artists in the modernist period engaged with, reacted to, and resisted obscenity in their work. It includes discussions of Wyndham Lewis, Walter Sickert, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence.

I am also interested in a number of matters that tend to be located under the catch-all term the “digital humanities.” These include an interest in text-mining and statistically grounded authorship attribution. At the intersection between my interst in the history of obscenity and the digital humanities is the September Morn Digital Archive, dedicated to making available and explaining the outpouring of copies and parodies of Paul Chabas’s painting Matinée de Septembre (1912) after it was at the center of a minor obscenity scandal involving vice crusader Anthony Comstock in New York.

I use this blog as a venue to share material related to these interests as well as information about other projects. I have written about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and some other matters. As a Linux user, I also occasionally post about my experiences with Linux. As a rule I try to post material which, by dint of Google or other powers, has at least the possibility of helping someone somewhere, or provoking conversation in a helpful or meaningful way. (The image which provides the banner image for this blog tries to capture the spirit in which these posts are offered.)

I can be contacted by email at cforster@virginia.edu and am present on twitter at @cforster.