Brian Jansen
Assistant Professor
Department of English & Department of Communication and Journalism
417 Neville Hall / 430 Dunn Hall
University of Maine
Orono, Maine 04469-5752 U.S.A.
207.581.1938
brian.jansen@maine.edu
Office Hours – by appointment
Education
- PhD, English Literature, University of Calgary, 2018
- MA, English Literature and Creative Writing, University of Windsor, 2011
- BA (Honours), English Rhetoric and Professional Writing, University of Waterloo, 2009
Biography
Brian Jansen (he/him) is assistant professor at the University of Maine with a joint appointment between the Department of Communication and Journalism and the Department of English. A graduate of the University of Calgary with a PhD in English literature, Brian is a media studies and literary scholar in the qualitative critical cultural studies tradition, with an interest, broadly, in questions of “work” or labor–how we depict it, how we talk about it, how we find it fulfilling (or not). His work considers aesthetic production at the intersection of labor and capital, as well as the politics of American professional wrestling as a live performance artform which exists uneasily at the intersection of sport, theatre, stunt work, and serialized television. In particular, he is interested in pro wrestling as a lens for considering the tensions inherent in neoliberalism as a political project: the private sphere’s erosion of public life, the uneasy alliance of market-first and social conservatism, and the challenges of care work.
Brian has published on David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joshua Ferris, and Vladimir Nabokov, and young adult literature, with his work appearing or forthcoming in Comparative American Studies, the Canadian Review of American Studies, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, ESC: English Studies in Canada, the Journal of Popular Culture, the European Journal of American Studies, and other venues.
Publications
“‘The End of a Bright and Tranquil Summer’: Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and the Refusal of 9/11 Representations.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2020, pp. 103-27. doi:10.6240/concentric.lit.202003_46(1).0006.
“‘Oddly Shaped Emptinesses’: Capital, the Eerie, and the Place(less)ness of Detroit in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, vol. 16, no. 3-4, 2019, pp. 101-15. doi:10.1080/14775700.2019.1667695.
“‘It’s Still Real to Me’: Contemporary Professional Wrestling, Neoliberalism, and the Problems of Performed/Real Violence.” Canadian Review of American Studies, 2019, doi:10.3138/cras.2018.024.
(with Hollie Adams) “Good Work and Good Works: Work and the Postsecular in George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2018, doi:10.4000/ejas.13191.
“‘Yes!’ ‘No!’ . . . Maybe?: Reading the Real in Professional Wrestling’s Unreality.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 635-56.
(with the University of Windsor Graduate Creative Writing Workshop) “How Do You Interview a Poet? A Conversation with Robert Kroetsch.” Robert Kroetsch: Essays on His Work. Guernica Editions, 2017, pp. 205-22.
“‘Betch you’ bootsh!’: Yiddish Literary Traditions and Jewish Humour in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl.” Journal of the Short Story in English / Les cahiers de la nouvelle, vol. 66, 2016, pp. 285-302.
“Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, and Utopia as Process in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games: ‘It’s the First Gift That’s Always the Hardest to Pay Back.’” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 18-41.
“‘On the Porousness of Certain Borders’: Attending to Objects in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 40, no. 4, 2015, pp. 55-77.
“‘Imitation of Life’: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Constructing Augustinian Ethos.” Literature, Rhetoric, and Values. Edited by Randy Harris, Shelley Hulan, and Murray McArthur. Cambridge Scholars, 2012, pp. 237-52.
