托马斯Heise is an assistant professor of 英语 at 宾州州立大学阿宾顿分校.
阿宾顿,爸爸. -作者的一本新书 托马斯Heise，香港大学副教授 英语 at 宾州州立大学阿宾顿分校, was published recently as part of the Columbia University Press Literature Now series, 当代文学研究的顶级印记之一.
"中产阶级化情节: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel" was ranked on amazon.com作为No. 1 new release for 20th-century literary criticism and city planning and urban development. 一位评论家称这是一本开创性的书. 节选自 LitHub的CrimeReads 另一个正在等待Bookforum的发布.
Heise’s latest book centers on the story of the city crime novelists tell when the older narrative of the city as a place of decay and violence has been replaced by a new, 城市复兴和文艺复兴的助推器叙事, 一个由大企业和政客们讲述的故事.
“The premise of the book — and my work more generally — is that we cannot understand literature without understanding the material conditions that provide the context for its production. 在这种情况下, those conditions are the unprecedented drop in crime in New York beginning in the 1990s and the subsequent development boom. 因为犯罪小说是我们所拥有的最无情的都市类型, 我想调查一下犯罪小说家是如何看待这些变化的,他说.
“Gentrification is an expression of the abstract and diffuse economic processes of neoliberalism. 然而, we can see those processes up close in the changes to a neighborhood’s demography and in the changes to a neighborhood’s built environment. 考虑到这个事实, I organized each chapter of "中产阶级化情节" around a specific neighborhood — the Lower East Side, 曼哈顿的唐人街, 红钩, 哈莱姆区, and Bedford-Stuyvesant — and investigated the story crime novelists were telling of its transformation,海斯继续说道.
These neighborhoods have been of historical importance to America’s immigrant, 非裔美国人, 少数民族, 工人阶级群体, 每个人都有自己的故事. 在《易胜博》中," Heise analyzes literary texts as well as policing theory and urban planning documents to get a fuller understanding of the new narratives of the city that have emerged since the 1990s.
托马斯Heise's new book was was published as part of the Columbia University Press Literature Now series, 当代文学研究的顶级印记之一.
Heise started writing about contemporary crime fiction in 2014 but didn’t conceive of "中产阶级化情节" as a book project until a few years later. He traces the roots of this book to his childhood love of hardboiled detective stories.
“I was drawn to how the best books — such as those by Hammett and Chandler — in the genre could combine the intellectual pleasure of unraveling a puzzle while at the same time providing the visceral thrill of reading about the city as a site of danger, 浪漫, 和阴谋,他说.
Another source of inspiration was his experience living in New York in the early 2000s.
“I watched one neighborhood after another gentrify as it reinvented itself, 但并不总是以最好的方式. 在《易胜博》中,' I wanted to find a way to take my personal experience of witnessing this change and channel it into my reading of literature,他说.
《易胜博》建立在之前的专著之上, "Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture."
“作为一名文学学者，我的工作以城市为中心，跨学科. My research seeks to bring to American literary studies an understanding of the spatiality of human life, 如文学和文化材料所表现的, as deeply enmeshed in ‘real’ human geographies that are undergoing constant transformation,他说.
“无论是在《易胜博》(中产阶级化情节)还是《易胜博娱乐》(Urban Underworlds)中,' I am pursuing questions of how the built environment is structured by flows of capital and labor; how racial, 少数民族, 性别, 性, and class subjectivities are spatially constructed and contested; and how personal and public places preserve traces of histories, 记忆, 影响, 和意识形态,海斯继续说道.
Heise’s next project is a novel about a psychiatrist who runs a sleep disorders clinic for insomnia and nightmare sufferers in New York. He had set it aside while he was taking a deep dive into the research and writing of "中产阶级化情节."
"中产阶级化情节" is critical to Heise’s work as an assistant professor of American literature at 阿宾顿 and as a writer.
“我教过城市文学和犯罪小说课程, 没有我的研究，这两件事都不可能实现. Also, I believe very strongly that academic writing should be readable, even pleasurable. 在我的创意写作课上, 我总是教我的学生关于叙事的说服力, 关于如何创造生动的场景, 关于如何安排故事的节奏, and about how to zero in on a single luminous detail that captures a sense of the whole. 对我来说, these formal concerns are as true of academic writing as they are of creative writing,他说.
关于宾大阿宾顿
易胜博娱乐分校提供了一个负担得起的, accessible and high-impact education resulting in the success of a diverse student body. It is committed to student success through innovative approaches to 21st-century public higher education within a world-class research university. 大约3个,700名学生, 宾州州立大学阿宾顿分校 is a residential campus that offers baccalaureate degrees in 23 majors, 本科研究, 施赖尔荣誉项目, NCAA三级田径和更多.
