Department of English

Academic Specialty:

• American and British Literature - 19th Century to Present
• Modernism
• Musical Culture
• Gender, Race, and the Novel
• Kazuo Ishiguro

Education:

• Ph.D., Louisiana State University

Years of Study:

• Mannes School of Music, The New School, New York City

Peer-Reviewed Publication:

• “Temporal Limits: Music and Strangeness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.” Music in World Literature: From Tolstoy to Manga. Edited by David Racker and Julia Titus, Palgrave Macmillan (under contract).
• “E. M. Forster’s Nuclear Aesthetics: A Closer Look at JML 47.4.” Journal of Modern Literature (forthcoming).
• “E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-Romance in A Room with a View.” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2024 (forthcoming). 
• “Review of Helen Rydstrand’s Rhythmic Modernism: Mimesis and the Short Story.” Affirmations: of the modern, vol. 6., no. 1, pp., 2019, 125–29.

In Preparation:

Book

• Extreme Measures: Music and the Making of the New Woman

• Kazuo Ishiguro and the Literary Past

Anthology

• New Brave New World: Memory, Technology, and the Word in Kazuo Ishiguro  

Article

• “Stagnant Duets and the Literary Past: Listening to Music in Kazuo Ishiguro and Virginia Woolf” (2,000 words)

• “Ex-colored and Un-great: Exotic Dissipations in Black and White in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby” (2,000 words)

Recent Presentations:

Papers

• “(Im)possible Listening: The Paradox of Song in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” MLA: Modern Language Association (“Visibility”). New Orleans, Jan. 9–12.
• “Clocked Chaos: Modernist Refrain, Modern Disruption in the Music of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.” MLA: Modern Language Association (“Celebration: Joyand Sorrow”). Philadelphia, Jan. 4–7, 2024.
• “The Power of Distance: Musical Isolation in The Voyage Out.” 32nd Annual ICVW: International Conference on Virginia Woolf (“Virginia Woolf and Ecologies”).
• Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, June 8–11, 2023.“Reimagining the Unimaginable: The Inconclusive Music of E. M. Forster’s Nuclear Aesthetics.” CSSR: Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (“Rhetoric, Reckonings and Re-Imaginings”). CHSS: Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (“Reckonings and Re-Imaginings”). York University, Toronto, May 30–June 1, 2023.
• “Rethinking Resilience: Music and Isolation in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out.” CSSR: Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (“Rhetoric: Re-Conciliation, Resilience, Recovery”). CHSS: Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (“Transitions”). University of Alberta, Edmonton, June 1–3, 2022.
• “Disrupted Again: Kenneth Burke and Musical Life in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.” CSSR: Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (“Bridging Divides”). CHSS: Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (“Northern Relations”). University of Alberta, Edmonton, June 2–4, 2021.

Panels and Chairing

• [Co-authored Panel and Chair] “Ishiguro’s Peripheries: (Re)seeing Historical Perspective and Literary Practice.” MLA: Modern Language Association (“Visibility”). New Orleans, Jan. 9–12.
• [Co-authored Panel and Chair] “Shifting Worlds: Identity, Memory, and the Word in Kazuo Ishiguro.” MLA: Modern Language Association (“Celebration: Joy and Sorrow”). Philadelphia, Jan. 4–7, 2024.
• [Co-authored Panel] “Exploratory Waters: Navigating Ecological and Cultural Oppositions in The Voyage Out.” 32nd Annual ICVW: International Conference on Virginia Woolf (“Virginia Woolf and Ecologies”). Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, June 8–11, 2023.
• [Chair] “Inter-action & Assemblage.” 32nd Annual ICVW: International Conference on Virginia Woolf (“Virginia Woolf and Ecologies”). Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, June 8–11, 2023.
• [Chair] “Anger, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation.” CSSR: Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (“Rhetoric, Reckonings and Re-Imaginings”). CHSS: Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (“Reckonings and Re-Imaginings”). York University, Toronto, May 30–June 1, 2023.
• [Chair] “Musical Rhetorics.” CSSR: Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (“Rhetoric: Re-Conciliation, Resilience, Recovery”). CHSS: Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (“Transitions”). University of Alberta, Edmonton, June 1–3, 2022.
• [Chair] “Rhetoric and Nature.” CSSR: Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (“Bridging Divides”). CHSS: Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (“Northern Relations”). University of Alberta, Edmonton, June 2–4, 2021.

Biography:

Ryan James McGuckin is a Teaching Assistant Professor working in literary modernism and musical culture. Prior to his appointment at Appalachian State, he was Assistant Professor of English at Southern University and A&M College, Louisiana’s largest historically black college and university.

A native of New York and the surrounding Hudson Valley, his research and publications analyze music’s and art’s reconciliatory ability to harmonize and complicate perceptions of race, gender, and economics regarding public memory, urban life, cross-national identities, and female autonomy.

His first book (manuscript in preparation), Extreme Measures: Music and the Making of the New Woman, considers the works of E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, and James Weldon Johnson to compare late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century musical life to women’s independent dispositions, historically known as the “New Woman.” Utilizing areas of literary theory, musical reception, and cultural history, this book describes how music underscored modern female life and was a key medium for women to express a new kind of autonomy, a topic which remains pertinent to contemporary social issues regarding gender, race, and inclusion.

His second book (manuscript in planning), Kazuo Ishiguro and the Literary Past, extends current treatments of Kazuo Ishiguro’s musical negotiations in his fiction to re-examine the ways the literary past and present re-evaluate the difficult signatures of affinity in modern narrative. Placed in conversation with Virginia Woolf’s, J. D. Salinger’s, and Truman Capote’s literary depictions of musical life and uses of musical language,

Ishiguro’s writings thematically form a duet with each to analyze how his cadence of surrealist and epiphanic moments exemplify the modern signs of repetition and stagnation to expose how musical and literary materials of everyday life are paradoxically isolating and uniting forces, all which resurface as variations of the new in Ishiguro’s most musical works.

His latest article from the Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press) is on female musicality and music’s counter-romantic subtext in the work of E. M. Forster which, in part, builds upon his review in Affirmations: of the modern of British and Anglophone modernist writers’ thematic uses and representations of rhythm. 

His current projects are also laying the foundation for a planned, co-edited critical anthology, New Brave New World: Memory, Technology, and the Word in Kazuo Ishiguro. 

See more at his webpage www.ryanjamesmcguckin.com