Recent Publications

 

Books

 

· Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer.  New York: Continuum, 2009.

· Edgar Allan Poe.  Bloom’s Classic Critical Views.  Vol. ed. Robert T. Tally Jr.  New York: Chelsea House, 2008.

 

Essays

 

· “Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos, or, Starting Over.”  New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut.  Ed. David Simmons.  New York: Palgrave, 2009.  113-131.

· “Radical Alternatives: The Persistence of Utopia in the Postmodern.”  New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.  Ed. Alfred Drake.  Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.  109-121.

· “Whale as a Dish: Culinary Rhetoric and the Discourse of Power in Moby-Dick.”  Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.  Eds. Marie Drews and Monika Elbert.  New York: Palgrave, 2009.

· “Reading the Original: Alienation, Writing, and Labor in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’.”  Bloom’s Literary Themes: Alienation.  Eds. Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby.  New York: Chelsea House, 2009.  1-10.

· “‘We are what we pretend to be’: Existential Angst in Vonnegut’s Mother Night.”  Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice.  2.2 (Spring 2009): 94-115.

· “The Whale in the World.”  Academic Exchange Quarterly.  12.1 (Spring 2008): 174-177.

· “Reason and Revolution Redux: Antonio Negri’s Political Descartes.”  Theory & Event.  11.2 (2008).

· “A Postmodern Iconography: Vonnegut and the American Novel.”  Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel.  Eds.  Elizabeth Boyle and Anne-Marie Evans.  Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008.  163-179.

· “‘Spaces that before were blank’: Truth and Narrative Form in Melville’s South Seas Cartography.”  Pacific Coast Philology.  Special issue: Transoceanic Dialogues.  42.2 (Fall 2007).  181-198.

· “The Agony of the Political.”  Postmodern Culture. 17.2 (2007).

· “‘Literature Proper’: Genre Problems in an Early American Literature Survey.”  Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice. 1.2 (2007): 123-141.

· “Anti-Ishmael: Novel Beginnings in Moby-Dick.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. 18.1 (Spring 2007): 1-19.

· “The Poetics of Descent: Irreversible Narrative in Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’.”  Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts.  Ed. Benjamin Schreier.  Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.  83-98.

· “‘Believing in America’: The Politics of American Studies in a Postnational Era.”  The Americanist: The Warsaw Journal for the Study of the United States. XXIII (2006): 69-81.

 

Education

J.D., Duke University School of Law, 2001

Ph.D., Literature, University of Pittsburgh, 1999

M.A., Literature, University of Pittsburgh, 1993

A.B., Philosophy, Duke University, 1990

Recent Courses

Eng 5332: Studies in American Literature

Eng 5301: Literary Scholarship

Eng 4334: American Romanticism

Eng 3343: Edgar Allan Poe

Eng 3341: Studies in World Literature

Eng 3338: The American Novel

Eng 3333: Early American Literature

Eng 3304: Professional Writing

Eng 3301: Critical Theory & Practice

Eng 2359: American Literature before 1865

Eng 2340: World Literature after 1600

Eng 2330: World Literature before 1600

 

 

Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr.

 

 

 

Dr. Tally is the vice-president of the Kurt Vonnegut Society.  For more information about the Society, see the website: www.vonnegutsociety.net. 

 

Prior to coming to Texas State, Dr. Tally has taught courses at High Point University, Chatham College, and the University of Pittsburgh.  He has also worked for the U.S. House of Representatives,  a New York law firm, a Chapel Hill educational publishing company, and a newspaper.  In college, he drove a bus for Duke University Transit.

Home Page

Department of English

Texas State University

San Marcos, TX 78666

Phone: 512-245-3016

Fax: 512-245-8546

Email: robert.tally@txstate.edu

“In Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer, Robert Tally, unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, refuses the temptation to domesticate Herman Melville’s polyvalent literary excesses. Instead he goes all out to think them positively. The result is a major contribution to the New Americanist effort to reconstellate Melville’s work out of the American nationalist context where it has been mired into the global context where it has always belonged.”

— Distinguished Professor William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, New York, USA