William Egginton

William Egginton

Department Chair, Decker Professor in the Humanities, Director, Alexander Grass Humanities Institute

Contact Information

Research Interests: Spanish and Latin American literatures, comparative European literature and thought

Education: PhD, Stanford University

Modern Languages and Literatures > People > William Egginton

William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. A scholar of literature and philosophy whose work ranges from early modern Europe to contemporary Latin America, he is the author of twelve books, most recently Alejandro Jodorowsky: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2024), which examines the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky. His books, which explore such topics as psychoanalysis, the Baroque, and the philosophy of physics, include How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is also the co-author, with David Castillo, of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022).

 

Egginton’s contributions to early modern scholarship have focused on the importance for cultural and intellectual history of the rise of the great theatrical institutions in Europe, most notably in Spain. His theory of theatricality posits the stage as a fundamental medium for the transmission of ideas that contributed to structuring a way of conceiving of and inhabiting space peculiar to early modernity. Theatricality theory paved the way for his later work on baroque and neobaroque culture, which spanned cultural production in the Americas as well as in Europe. In recent years he has increasingly written for a broader public in venues such as The New York Times, and in books for the general reading public. In this way the form as well as the content of his work have developed into a full-throated appeal for the essential role of the humanities—particularly literature and literary studies—in society today.

Professor Egginton teaches courses on a range of topics, including Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. Below is a partial list of his recent courses:

  • Great Books at Hopkins
  • The Cosmic Imagination
  • Baroque Literature and Thought
  • Horror in Spanish Literature
  • The Invention of Fiction
  • Borges, Derrida, Heidegger and the Paradoxes of Perception
  • Don Quixote
  • The Literature of Existence

Selected Books

  • The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Pantheon, 2023)
  • The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity, Inequality, and the Future of Community (Bloomsbury, 2018)
  • The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)
  • In Defense of Religious Moderation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)
  • The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)

Selected Edited and Translated Books

  • Guest editor, with Yi-Ping Ong, The New Politics of Existence, MLN 137.5 (2023).
  • Lisa Block de Behar, Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation, second edition and translation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014).
  • Co-editor with David E. Johnson, Thinking With Borges (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 2009)

Selected Articles and Chapters

  • “Kant, Existentialism, and the Anthropic Principle,” MLN 137.5 (2023): 917-930.
  • “The Psychosis of Power: A Lacanian reading of Roa Bastos’s I, The Supreme,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 5.2 (2021): 4-11.
  • “Cervantes’s Black Mirror,” Cervantes 40.2 (2020): 175–190.
  • “Hispanism and Humanitas in the Market University.” Co-authored with David Castillo. Hispanic Issues Online 6 (2016).
  • “Affective Disorder.” diacritics 40.2 (2012): 24-43.
  • “Religion – Conspiracy – Code.” MLN 126.4 (2011): 32-43.
  • “On Radical Atheism, Chronolibidinal Reading, and Impossible Desires.” CR: The New Centennial Review 9.1 (2009): 191-209.
  • “The Baroque as a Problem of Thought.” PMLA 124.1 (2009): 143-49.
  • “Performance and Presence, Analysis of a Modern Aporia.” Journal of Literary Theory 1.1 (2007): 3-18
  • “The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque.” SAQ 106.1 (2007): 107-128.
     
 

In addition to his scholarly work, Egginton also contributes frequently to The New York Times and other periodicals.

Interviews, lectures, and presentations on his book, The Man Who Invented Fiction, include:

  • Interview with Full Stop.
  • Panel at The Center for Fiction, with translators Edith Grossman and Natasha Wimmer as well as author Álvaro Enrigue.
  • Lecture, “Twilight of the Idyll: How Cervantes Pulled Fiction Out of the Grave of Pastoral,” delivered at Concordia University for a conference on Cervantes and the Public Humanities.