Dr Peter Marks

Combined BA Honours First Class NSW, PhD Edin.
Senior Lecturer

+61 2 9351 6862

I am particularly interested in literature as social critique; in relationships between literature and cinema as well as between literature and politics; in periodical culture, and in utopias (broadly conceived). One line of current research investigates surveillance as it has been predicted, depicted and assessed in literary and cinematic utopias, employing recent surveillance theory to investigate utopias, and utopias to analyse surveillance theory. I have published several articles on this topic (see, for example, ‘Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies’). Three chapters on politics and its influence on British and American literary periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s appear in the first two volumes of the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. As a result of this research I am starting a new project, ‘The Transatlantic Thirties’, a comparative study of British and American Literature in the 1930s. Research for the first part of that project will be undertaken at Cambridge University, where I will be a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall in the second half of 2009. I have published articles on the films Adaptation and Code 46, on how periodicals such as Blast and transition helped literary Modernism come into being, as well as on George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Socialist realism, D. H. Lawrence and on theories of the essay. My critical study of the satirical fantasist director Terry Gilliam for Manchester University Press’s British Filmmakers series has just been published.

As part of my interest in tertiary level teaching I have a Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) from the University of Sydney (2005). I was awarded a Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008.

Selected publications

Books

• Terry Gilliam (Manchester University Press), 2009
• Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, edited with Roger Luckhurst (Longmans), 1999

Book chapters

• ‘The Left in the Twenties’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds) Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 2 North America, 1880–1960 (Oxford University Press), forthcoming in 2010
• ‘The Left in the Thirties’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds) Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 2 North America, 1880–1960 (Oxford University Press), forthcoming in 2010
• ‘Art and Politics in the 1930s: The European Quarterly, Left Review and Poetry and the People’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds) Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 2 North America, 1880–1960 (Oxford University Press), forthcoming in 2010
• ‘Illusion and Reality: The Spectre of Socialist Realism in Thirties British Literature’, in Keith Williams and Steve Matthews (eds) Re-Writing the Thirties, 1997

Articles

• ‘Surveillance Screens and Screening in Code 46’, Scan, 2008
• ‘Adaptation from Charles Darwin to Charlie Kaufman’, Sydney Studies in English, 2008
• ‘“And God Saw Everything”: Paradise, Utopia and Surveillance’, Script and Print, 2006
• ‘Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies’, Surveillance and Society, Winter 2005
• ‘Making the New: Literary Periodicals and Constructions of Modernism’, Precursors and Aftermaths, 2004
• ‘Incomplete Thoughts on the Essay’, Sydney Studies in English, 2001
• ‘The Odyssey of D.H. Lawrence: Modernism, Europe and the New World’, Miscellanea 20, 1999
• ‘Reputations: George Orwell’, The Political Quarterly 70/1, January–March 1999
• ‘No Heat – No Light: Arguments for The Literary Periodical’, Heat 12, 1999
• ‘Partial Transactions: Dialogues with History in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Sydney Studies in English 24, 1988–9
• ‘Where He Wrote: Periodicals and the Essays of George Orwell’, Twentieth Century Literature 41/4, Winter 1995

Areas of teaching

• Contemporary British literature
• Twentieth-century literature
• Literature and cinema
• Literature and politics
• Utopias and dystopias