Dr. Thomas Laughlin
Position: Assistant Professor
Education: B.A. Honours (Trent), MA (Carleton), PhD (Toronto)
Office: BAC 418
Research Interests
Nineteenth-Century Literature; the Novel; Realism; Political Economy; Aesthetics; Literary and Critical Theory
My scholarly work combines a wide-ranging interest in the literature of the long nineteenth century with a specializing focus on the interpenetrating histories of the emotions, the environment, and the economy.
Selected Publications
Articles and Book Chapters
“Structures of Feeling: Raymond Williams’s Progressive Problemshift.” Raymond Williams at 100. Ed. Paul Stasi. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. 61-88.
“Fog, Coal, Capitalism: Dickens’s Energy Atmospherics and the Anthropocene.” Climate Realism. Eds. Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinic, and Jeff Diamanti. Special issue of Resilience: A Journal for the Environmental Humanities, no. 7, vol. 2-3, 2020. 132-56.
“George Eliot’s Epic Syntax: History and Totality in Middlemarch.” Realism Revalued. Ed. Davis Smith-Brecheisen. Special Issue of Mediations, no. 33, vol. 1-2, 2020. 1-30.
Review Essays
“Figural Reading, or, a ‘Weak Messianic’ Undercurrent in Literary Criticism: Carolyn Lesjak’s The Afterlife of Enclosure.” Mediations, no. 34, vol. 2, 2021. 83-88.
“Crisis and Clarity: Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism, Affect, and the Problem of Representing Totality Today.” Mediations, no. 32, vol. 2, 2019. 176-186.
“Anthropocene Marxism: John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett’s Marx and the Earth.” Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Eds. Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti. Special issue of Mediations, no. 31, vol. 2, 2018. 149-156.
Teaching
I teach texts as lived responses to concrete historical situations. The point is not to bog students down with biographical details, but to impress upon them the active role that the literary imagination plays in helping authors and audiences make sense of historical conjunctures and experiences. Here, I am influenced by Fredric Jameson’s notion that literature can provide “cognitive maps” that help us understand and navigate complex geopolitical terrains. The figure of the “map,” however, is perhaps too cold to be thoroughly convincing. For literature, I observe in my classes, appeals not just to our understanding (i.e., to our cognition), but also to our emotions, blending the two into what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling,” offering us ways of understanding experiences that are, as he says, still on “the edge of semantic availability.” It is not that literature is superior or inferior to the sciences, but that it expresses and articulates different kinds of knowledge—knowledge which is intuitive, encoded in metaphor rather than formula. The practice of literary criticism teaches us how to decode and evaluate this worldly knowledge to which the literary form gives both shape and expression.
Courses Recently Taught
ENGL 1423 Writing and Reading Critically
ENGL 2783 Nineteenth-Century Fiction