William Egginton

William Egginton

Decker Professor in the Humanities
Director, Alexander Grass Humanities Institute

Program: Spanish
Gilman 470
Tuesday 1-3 p.m.
410-516-7510
egginton@jhu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website
@WilliamEgginton

William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. His research and teaching focus on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. 

Egginton’s current book project, The Rigor of Angels, which explores the respective conceptions of reality in the thought of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg, will be published by Pantheon. He also has two further books in the works. For Bloomsbury’s Philosophical Filmmakers series, he is writing a book on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of cinematic expression in the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky; and, with David Castillo, he has written a sequel to Medialogies, Alt-Realities: Reading Cervantes and the Spanish Baroque in a Post-Truth Age, to be published by McGill-Queens UP in 2021. His most recent book, The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity, Inequality, and the Future of Community (Bloomsbury, 2018), takes stock of the current college and university campus debates over identity and inequality, and argues that that individual freedom has always only been possible in the context of the larger community.

Egginton is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books on such topics as the relationship between psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy; religion and politics; and science and literature. Widely recognized for his work on early modern culture, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the baroque, he is the author of 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 (Columbia UP, 2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016), and, with David Castillo, Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is also the co-editor, with Mike Sandbothe, of The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (2004) and, with David E. Johnson, of Thinking With Borges (2009), as well as the translator of Lisa Block de Behar’s Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003). 

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 Splintering of the American Mind: Identity, Inequality, and the Future of Community (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Reviewed in The New York Times, National Review, and elsewhere; featured on PBS’s “The Open Mind.”

  • Medialogies: Inflationary Media and the Crisis of Reality. Co-authored with David Castillo (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)
  • The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)

Reviewed in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times of London, and elsewhere; starred review in Booklist; translations forthcoming in Taiwan, China, Turkey, Greece, and Spain.

  • In Defense of Religious Moderation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)

Reviewed in The Newark Star-Ledger and elsewhere.

  • The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)

Reviewed in CLIO, Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Teatro: Revista de estudios culturales, and elsewhere.

Selected Edited and Translated Books

  • 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

  • “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.