Robert Chodat

Professor Chodat’s research focuses on post-WWII American fiction, the relation between literature and philosophy, and the intersection of these two areas. His published work includes Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (Cornell University Press, 2008), as well as articles on Richard Powers, Lorrie Moore, Philip Roth, and others. In recent years he has published articles considering the status of literature and practical action in the writings of Stanley Cavell, Walker Percy, American pragmatism, and evolutionary and cognitive theory.

Before coming to BU, he was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003-4). Professor Chodat has also been Humboldt Research Fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin (2006-7), and in 2009-10, he had a Junior Fellowship from the BU Center for the Humanities. His teaching covers a wide range of twentieth-century literature, theory, and intellectual history, and includes “Philosophical Fictions,” “Irony and Postwar Literature,” “The Sixties in Fiction and Theory,” “The Mind in Literature and Theory,” and “Ordinary Language Philosophy and Contemporary Literature.” He has also taught surveys of post-WWII American fiction and the history of criticism from Plato to Nietzsche.