Andrew Epstein

Chair, Caldwell Professor of English
Andrew Epstein
WMS 405G
aepstein@fsu.edu
20th- and 21st-century U.S. literature and culture, modern and postmodern poetry and poetics, 19th century American literature

ANDREW EPSTEIN, Department Chair, Caldwell Professor of English, Ph.D. Columbia University (2000), B.A. Haverford College, Pennsylvania (1992). Dr. Epstein specializes in post-1900 American literature, with particular emphasis on poetry and American literature and culture since 1945. His research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary poetry and poetics; issues in modernism and postmodernism; theories and practice of the avant-garde; literature and culture of the Cold War and the 1960s; theories and debates about everyday life and twentieth-century writing; and experimental fiction. He is also interested in the inter-relationship between literature and other art forms, especially the visual arts and music, and in the afterlife of nineteenth-century American writing (especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatist philosophy) in post-1900 literature and culture.

He is the author of three books -- The Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023; Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016); and Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006). Epstein is currently editing Frank O’Hara In Context (Cambridge University Press), which will consist of about 40 essays by leading scholars of O’Hara and American poetry

His work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the New York Times Book Review, the TLS, Contemporary Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, Jacket2, and Raritan, and in various essay collections, including The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature, The Cambridge Companion to American Poets, The New Wallace Stevens Studies, Elizabeth Bishop in Context, Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry, and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Since 2013, he has been blogging about the New York School of poets at Locus Solus.

Books

Edited Journal Issues

  • Co-Editor, with Abram Foley, “Remembering Stanley Cavell," a cluster of tributes to philosopher Stanley Cavell. ASAP/J (2018).
  • Special Issue Co-Editor, with Jonathan P. Eburne, "Poetry Games." Comparative Literature Studies 51:1 (2014).

Essays

Selected Book Reviews and Other Publications

  • Review of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson by James Marcus. Times Literary Supplement (TLS) (June 7, 2024).
  • “Old Possum.” Review of Eliot After “The Waste Land,” by Robert Crawford. New York Times Book Review (October 2, 2022).
  • Review of Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Post-War America by Calista McRae. American Literary History 34.3 (2022)
  • Review of The Selected Letters of John Berryman. On the Seawall (2021)
  • Review of Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the Social in U.S. Fiction by Matthew Mullins and Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel by Katie Owens-Murphy. American Literature (2020).
  • Review of Since When: A Memoir in Pieces by Bill Berkson. On the Seawall (2019).
  • “Funks of Ambivalence: On Flarf.” Review of Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf. Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2018).
  • “His True Vocation.” Review of The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life, by Karin Roffman. New York Times Book Review (August 6, 2017).
  • "The Disruptive Power of Ordinary Things." Review of Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism, by Maurizia Boscagli. Journal of Modern Literature (2016).
  • Review of Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After, by Peter Middleton. American Literary History: ALH Online Review (2016).
  • Review of Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, by Srikanth Reddy. The Wallace Stevens Journal 39.1 (2015): 121-123.
  • "'Here is Freshness and the Shore's Timeless Teeth': The Plays of Kenneth Koch." Review of The Banquet : The Complete Plays, Films, and Librettos, by Kenneth Koch (Coffee House Press, 2012). Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2013.
  • Review of Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, eds. Stephen Burt and Nick Halpern (University of Virginia Press). Modern Philology 110.3 (2013).
  • On John Ashbery's "Street Musicians." Excerpt from Beautiful Enemies on Modern American Poetry Site.
  • Review of A Natural History of Pragmatism, by Joan Richardson (Cambridge University Press). Henry James Review 30.1 (Winter 2009): 87-90.
  • "Critiquing 'La Vie Quotidienne': Contemporary Approaches to the Everyday." Review of Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, by Michael Sheringham (Oxford University Press). Contemporary Literature 49.3 (Fall 2008): 476-487.
  • "'The Academy of the Future is Opening Its Doors': Women Poets and the New York School." Review of Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions, by Maggie Nelson (University of Iowa Press) Jacket 35 (2008).
  • Review of Ashbery's Forms of Attention, by Andrew DuBois (U of Alabama Press). South Atlantic Review 72.4 (Fall 2007): 147-151.
  • "'History Took Hold of My Throat.'" Review of The Afflicted Girls, by Nicole Cooley. Common-Place (July 2004).
  • "Precision Poetry." Review of The Poems of Marianne Moore, in Newsday (Nov. 2, 2003).
  • "'Antimodern' in a Time of Upheaval: Rereading African-American Culture in the Sixties." Review of Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties, by James C. Hall, in Contemporary Literature (Fall 2003): 548-558.
  • Review of The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson, in Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 205-7.
  • "John Ashbery." Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, ed. Eric Haralson. (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001): 479-481.
  • "Marianne Moore's 'Marriage.'" Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century: 24-26.

SELECTED SHORT ESSAYS, ONLINE PUBLICATIONS, AND INTERVIEWS

AWARDS

  • Choice Outstanding Academic Title for Attention Equals Life, 2017.
  • Shortlisted for 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for Attention Equals Life.
  • University Undergraduate Teaching Award, Florida State University, 2014.
  • University Graduate Teaching Award, 2008.
  • Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, 1999-2000.
External links
andrewepstein.net
Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets
Publications By This Author
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