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David Simpson

David Simpson teaches English at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern will come out from Cambridge next year.

From the London Review dated 20 May 2004

The Mourning Paper

“Back in November 2003, Sergeant Georg Andreas Pogorny faced the possibility of being court-martialled for cowardice after he’d panicked at the sight of an Iraqi cut in half by machine-gun fire. Pogorny was overcome with what he described as ‘an overwhelming sense of my own mortality’. The most troubling implication of this story is that it appears to be untypical. Few of us in the homeland are given any materials for imagining ourselves in the place and body of the other, a place where in so many ways we already are: this is the real symmetry between 9/11 then and Iraq today.” [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (2006)
  • Situatedness; Or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (2002)
  • The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (1995)
  • Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (1993)
  • Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination (1987)
  • The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (1986)
  • Fetishism and Imagination: Melville, Dickens, Conrad (1983)
  • Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (1982)
  • Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979)

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