Department of English

Academic Specialty:

Modernism and Modernity; Gender, Race, and the Novel; Musical Culture; Transnational Approaches to Literature; Rhetoric and Modernism; Urban Modernism

Education:

• Ph.D., Louisiana State University

Years of Study:

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

Peer-Reviewed Publication:

• “E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-Romance in A Room with a View,” Journal of Modern Literature (forthcoming 2024).
• “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:

• [Article] “Clocked Chaos: Modernist Refrain, Modern Disruption in the Music of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled” (for Studies in the Novel / 5,000 words)
• [Article] “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)
• [Chapter] “Rethinking Resilience: Musical Isolation and the Natural World of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out” (7,600 words)
• [Book] Extreme Measures: Music and the Making of the New Woman (50,000 words) 
• [Book] Ishiguro’s Modernisms: Isolation through Kafka and Nabokov, Henry Miller and Baldwin, Woolf and Mansfield (6,500 words)

Recent Presentations:

Papers

• “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] “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 Visiting Assistant Professor, with specializations in modernism, gender studies, and musical culture. Prior to his appointment at ASU, 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 describes how modern writers re-examine art in everyday life and, consequently, alter the way implicit forms of narrative emphasize misrepresented and peripheral identities. 

His first book (in preparation), Extreme Measures: Music and the Making of the New Woman, looks at the works of Henry James, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, E. M.
Forster, Willa Cather, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and Truman Capote, joining the persisting art of classical music with the emergence of late-19th- and early-20th-
century female subjectivity to track how music—and modernism’s literary representations of musical life—disrupted the fixed embodiments of domestic femininity.

His second book project (in planning), Ishiguro’s Modernisms: Isolation through Kafka and Nabokov, Henry Miller and Baldwin, Woolf and Mansfield, extends current treatments of
Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrative negotiations and genre hybridity. Seen through readings of six transnational modernist precursors, Ishiguro’s writing is a signature cadence of
surrealist and modernist elements that cross issues in urban and artistic life with new experiments in narrative form. Describing the relationship between high art and the
social tensions of urban life, this book concludes with how uncommon musical and literary expressions and the materials of everyday social life paradoxically are isolating
and uniting forces.

Forthcoming from the Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press) is his article on female musicality and music’s counter-romantic subtext in the work of E. M. Forster which, in part, builds upon his review of British and Anglophone modernist writers’ thematic uses and representations of rhythm. His other chapter and article publication projects currently analyze music’s reconciliatory ability to harmonize and complicate perceptions of race, gender, and economics regarding public memory, urban life, cross-national identities, female autonomy, and eurocentrism in the works of authors such as Willa Cather, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Weldon Johnson, and Virginia Woolf.

See more at his webpage www.ryanjamesmcguckin.com