Derek Attridge

Last updated March 27, 2024

Derek Attridge FBA (born 6 May 1945) is a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, having retired from the university in 2016, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Attridge undertakes research in South African literature, James Joyce,^[1] modern fiction, deconstruction and literary theory and the history and performance of poetry. He is the author or editor of thirty books, and has published eighty articles in essay collections and a similar number in journals. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship, and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and All Souls and St. Catherine's Colleges, Oxford. Among the visiting positions he has held have been professorships at the American University of Cairo, the University of Sassari, the University of Cape Town, Northwestern University, Wellesley College, and the University of Queensland.

Education

Attridge attended Scottsville Government School and Maritzburg College in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa, and received his Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Natal University in South Africa before moving to the UK in 1966 to complete his Master of Arts (MA) and PhD at Clare College, Cambridge. He held a Research Lectureship at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1971 to 1973, and then a Lectureship and Senior Lectureship at the University of Southampton. In 1984 he was appointed Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and in 1988 moved to the USA, where he joined the English Department at Rutgers University. In 1998 he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Professorship, which he took up at the University of York, U.K., where he became Professor in 2003.

List of works

Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres Cambridge University Press, 1974
The Rhythms of English Poetry Longman, 1982
Post-structuralist Joyce (co-edited with Daniel Ferrer) Cambridge University Press, 1984
The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature (co-edited with Nigel Fabb, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe) Manchester University Press and Routledge, 1987
Post-structuralism and the Question of History (co-edited with Geoff Bennington and Robert Young) Cambridge University Press, 1987
Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Cornell University Press and Methuen, 1988; reissued, Routledge, 2004
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (edited) Cambridge University Press 1990; second, revised edition, 2004
Acts of Literature, by Jacques Derrida (edited) Routledge, 1992
Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction Cambridge University Press, 1995
Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970–1995 (co-edited with Rosemary Jolly). Cambridge University Press, 1998
Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History Cambridge University Press, 2000
Semicolonial Joyce (co-edited with Marjorie Howes) Cambridge University Press, 2000
Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (with Thomas Carper) Routledge, 2003
J. M.Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event University of Chicago Press and KwaZulu-Natal University Press, 2004
The Singularity of Literature Routledge, 2004
Ulysses: A Casebook (edited) Oxford University Press, 2004
How to Read Joyce Granta Books, 2007
Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces Edinburgh University Press, 2010
Theory after 'Theory' (co-edited with Jane Elliott) Routledge, 2011
The Cambridge History of South African Literature (co-edited with David Attwell) Cambridge University Press, 2012
Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry Oxford University Press, 2013
Derek Attridge in Conversation (with David Jonathan Bayot and Francisco Roman Guevara) Sussex Academic Press and De La Salle University Press, 2015
The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation (with Henry Staten) Routledge, 2015
The Work of Literature Oxford University Press, 2015
Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal: Writing Scotland and South Africa (co-edited with Kai Easton) Routledge, 2017
The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers Oxford University Press, 2019
The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21^st Century (co-edited with Anirudh Sridhar and Mir Ali Husseini) Palgrave, 2021
Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations (co-edited with Mantra Mukim), Routledge, 2021
In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa by Graham Pechey (co-edited with Laura Pechey), Liverpool University Press, 2022
Forms of Modernist Fiction: Reading the Novel from James Joyce to Tom McCarthy Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023

Previous appointments

Research Lecturer – Christ Church, Oxford (1971–1973)
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer – University of Southampton (1973–1984)
Professor – University of Strathclyde (1984–1988)
Professor – Rutgers University (1988–1998)
Leverhulme Research Professor – University of York (1998–2003)
Professor – University of York (1998–2016)
Emeritus Professor – University of York (2016 – )

Honours and awards

Guggenheim Fellowship (1993–4)
Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Prize (1999)
ESSE Book Award (2006)
Fellow – British Academy (2007)

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References

↑ Hanrahan, Heidi. "Attridge, Derek, Ed. James Joyce's 'Ulysses': A Casebook." English Literature In Transition 1880–1920 3 (2004): 366. Literature Resource Center. Web. 31 Aug. 2014.

External links

University of York profile
Audio of Derek Attridge's lecture "Reading and Responsibility." at Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities on 16 October 2007.

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[1] Hanrahan, Heidi. "Attridge, Derek, Ed. James Joyce's 'Ulysses': A Casebook." English Literature In Transition 1880–1920 3 (2004): 366. Literature Resource Center. Web. 31 Aug. 2014.

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