Literature and Utopia
John Farrell grew up in Cranston, R.I., and attended Brown University and Harvard, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the early novels of the American author Thomas Pynchon. He is a specialist in literary theory and the author of three books on the subject, “Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion” (1996), “Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau” (2006), and, most recently, “The Varieties of Authorial Intention: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy” (2017). As the titles of these books suggest, Farrell is a critic of the dominant theoretical trends in literary study in the American academy since the 1970s; much of his work has been devoted to uncovering the historical origins of these trends as well as explaining their weakness and drawbacks.
Farrell has been teaching in the department of Literature at CMC since 1990, where he offers such courses as Literary Theory from Plato to the Present, Love Poetry of the English Renaissance, European Modernist Fiction, The Novel Since World War Two, News from the Delphic Oracle: Introduction to Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, and Utopia/Dystopia. He is currently chairing the CMC Committee on Writing as it directs the new Summer Book Program for First Year Students.
Professor Farrell's Athenaeum presentation celebrates his installation ceremony as the Waldo W. Neikirk Professor of Literature at CMC.