
Jonathan Farina, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English
(973) 761-9388
Email
Fahy Hall
Room 365
Jonathan Farina, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English
Jonathan Farina serves as Chair of the Faculty Senate and as President of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA). He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, and critical theory, as well as the Honors Colloquium on the Early-Modern World, and researches the history of fiction as a form of knowledge.
Jonathan's first book, Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press 2017), earned Honorable Mention for the Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies. It describes the grammar of everyday language that underwrote what counted as knowledge for Victorian writers, including many novelists and scientists such as Lyell, Darwin, and Tyndall. "Characterization," it shows, was a historically specific mode of description that represented things other than fictional people and that aimed not to reproduce facts but to deviate from them—and yet still tell the truth.
Jonathan is working on a second book, Aformalism: Undisciplined Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain, which recasts Victorian literary criticism as a repository of alternative, never-institutionalized forms of knowledge production rather than a mere genealogy of new criticism and other contemporary modes of interpretation. To this end, he is finishing an article on "awkwardness" as the constitutive affect of literary criticism and another on the problem of translating "obviousness" into respectable knowledge.
Jonathan has delivered invited talks at Columbia, the Grad Center at CUNY, Princeton, Rutgers, Toronto, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere, and dozens of conference papers.
Education
- Ph.D., New York University
- M.A., New York University
- B.S., Boston College
Scholarship
Books
- Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Reviewed by:
- Daniel Tyler in Victorian Studies
- Matthew Sussman in Modern Philology
- Barbara Black in Review-19
- Camilla Cassidy in TLS
- Anna E. Clark, Tara K. Menon, and Daniel Wright in V21 Collations
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
- “Stock Exchanges. On Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray,” in My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice, ed. Annette R. Federico (University of Missouri Press 2020), 155-74.
- "Character," Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 609-12
- "As a Matter of Course': Trollope's Ordinary Realism" in The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, eds. Margaret Markwick, Deborah Morse, and Mark Turner. New York: Routledge, 2016. 142-53
- "On the Genealogy of 'Deportment': Being 'Present' in Bleak House," Special Issue on the V21 Symposium. boundary 2 online, October 4, 2016.
- "Literary Histories of Natural Historical Books," Victorian Literature and Culture 44.2 (June 2016): 411-21
- "Allusive Tactics: R. H. Horne, Induction, and 'Desultory Criticism," Nineteenth-Century Prose 43.1-2 (Spring 2016): 115-34
- "Mad Libs and Stupid Critics." Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, 46 (1), 325-338, August 2015.
- "Whoever Explains a "But": Tact and Friction in Trollope's Reparative Fiction." Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, no. 128, 139-61, September 2015.
- "Literary Criticism." Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, eds. Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes. Wiley-Blackwell, July 2015.
- "The Excursion and the Surfaces of Things." The Wordsworth Circle 45.2, Special Issue on the Bicentennial of The Excursion guest-edited by Tom Duggett and Jacob Risinger, 99-105, April 2014.
- "David Masson's British Novelists and their Styles (1859) and the Establishment of Novels as an Object of Academic Study." BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, June 2012.
- "Dickens's 'As If': Analogy and Victorian Virtual Reality." Victorian Studies 53.3, 427-36, February 2011.
- "'A Certain Shadow': Personified Abstractions and the Form of Household Words." Victorian Periodicals Review, 42(4), 392- 415, December 2010.
- "Flash Reading: Tom and Jerry and the Last Subordinations of Plot to Character." The Wordsworth Circle, 41(2), May 2010.
- "The New Science of Literary Mensuration: Accounting for Readers, Then and Now." Victorians Institute Journal Digital Annex 38, n.p., January 2010.
- "Middlemarch and 'That Sort of Thing.'" RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 53, February 2009.
Reviews
- Scholarly reviews and review essays of dozens of books published and forthcoming in European Romantic Review, Journal of British Studies, Modern Philology, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Notes & Queries, Review-19 (NBOL), Victorian Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Studies, and The Wordsworth Circle.
Accomplishments
Fellowships
- Associate Fellow, 2010-11, Seminar "The Ordinary and the Everyday," Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University
Elected Positions and Appointments
- President, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA), 2018-
- Delegate Assembly, Modern Language Association (LLC Victorian and Early 20th-Century English), 2018-
- Trustee, The Dickens Society, 2018-
Awards
- Honorable Mention, Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book in Victorian Studies (2017)