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Professor John Schad

Professor of Modern Literature

Degree: BA (York), PGCE (Bristol), PhD (Wales)

Current Teaching

At undergraduate level, I give lectures on English 100, Victorian Literature, Modernism, and Literary Theory. I also offerthird-year options called 'Other Victorians' and'Between the Acts, 1919-1938.' At MA level, I offer two courses, one called 'Victorian Extremes: The Coming of Modernity' and one called 'Fusions' which explores various twenteith-century texts that fuse literary genres or traditions - in particular, the critical and the creative.

Research Interests

Professor John Schad studied for his BA at the University of York and his PhD at the University of Wales. Before moving to Lancaster in 2006 he taught at Loughborough University.

Professor Schad's main areas of research are: critical-creative writing; modernism; Victorian writing; literary theory; and the relationship between religion and literature. These interests are reflected in his major publications - his five authored books: namely, Someone Called Derrida: An Oxford Mystery (Sussex), Arthur Hugh Clough (Northcote House), Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Joyce (Sussex), Victorians in Theory (Manchester UP*), and The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors (Macmillan); and his four edited books: namely, Dickens Refigured (Manchester UP); Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (Penguin); Writing the Bodies of Christ (Ashgate); and life.after.theory (Continuum). This last book includes new interviews with Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi, and Christopher Norris.

Professor Schad's most recent book, Someone Called Derrida, is a novelistic attempt to combine traditional archival scholarship with memoir, investigative history, detective fiction, and Oxford; it is, in a sense, a book that explores the space between critical and creative writing. The opening chapter will be dramatised and performed on BBC Radio 3's The Verb in October 2009. In this connection, it is worth noting that Professor Schad is General Editor for a new series of experimental monographs called critical inventions (http://www.sussex-academic.co.uk/sa/titles/SS_Critical/_critical.htm). The series includes titles by Thomas Docherty, Roger Ebbatson, J.Hillis Miller, Kevin Mills, David Punter, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Michael Wood.

Professor Schad is currently working on a novel called I Am Not Walter Benjamin. It concerns a man on a post-war council estate near Watford who thinks or says he is the late Walter Benjamin; this peculiar figure only ever uses the words of Benjamin. Drawing as it does on the political history of the estate I Am Not Walter Benjamin is, if you will, a work of social sur-realism. The opening scenes were read and discussed on BBC Radio 3's The Verb in January 2009, and the first chapter will appear in Mark Knight (ed.), Religion, Literature and Imagination (London: Continuum, 2009).

In June 2009 Professor Schad is running a conference called 'The Critic as Artist / The Artist as Critic' with Valentine Cunningham (Oxford) and Paul Farley (Lancaster) as plenary speakers. Papers and/or readings are invited that explore or enact what it might now mean to fuse literary criticism and creative writing - or, if you will, the work of the critic and that of the artist. All papers/presentations will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume of writings to be published as part of the critical inventions series.

Professor Schad has been invited to lecture at a number of universities, both here and in the USA, has served as external examiner at PhD level on several occasions, has been an external for MAs at the University of Southampton and Royal Holloway (University of London), and for several years served as a member of Editorial Board of the Tennyson Research Bulletin. In June 2003 he was invited to the USA to participate in the Erasmus Institute's Summer Faculty Seminar, 'Religious Hermeneutics and Secular Interpretation,' led by Geoffrey Hartman. He is currently an external examiner for the BA English programme at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Having supervised several PhD students to successful completion, Professor Schad welcomes research proposals in any of his areas of interest.

REVIEWS/RESPONSES

Nowhere Near London. Or, I Am Not Walter Benjamin

-'Set partly in Watford and partly in the haunted wing of the English language' (Ian Macmillan, on BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb')

critical inventions (the series)

-'a creative intellectual enterprise as rare as it is necessary' (Jonathan Dollimore, web-site endorsement)

-'an astounding series which really does offer new ways of thinking and reading' (Ian Macmillan, on BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb')

Someone Called Derrida

-adopted as a primary text on an undergraduate course at Roehampton University (ENG020N232S Reading Literary Theory).

-'caught my imagination straight away' (Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury)

-'an extraordinary performance' (Sir Frank Kermode, web-site endorsement)

-'an amazing book' (J. Hillis Miller, web-site endorsement)

-'a remarkable novel ...both challenging and ultimately rewarding' (Ian Macmillan, on BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb')

-'intriguing, emotionally powerful and disturbingly entertaining...an intellectual thriller' (The Daily Star, Lewisburg, USA)

-'dense and dizzying' (Church Times)

-'a perfect illustration of how scholarship and storytelling can dovetail beautifully' (Willy Maley, The Glass).

Arthur Hugh Clough

-'Schad …pushes out the…boundaries of Victorian studies' (Journal of Victorian Culture)

Queer Fish

-'the modern theoretical re-evaluation of literature has given way to a renewed interest in religious questions. The religiously inflected critical inquiry of writers such as Geoffrey Hartman, Luce Irigaray, J. Hillis Miller, Terry Eagleton, and John Schad has developed this tradition.' (The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature).

-'Rarely is a book …so much a day at the beach: bright, splashy, full of laughter, leaving you happy, if exhausted, at the end….its overall point is not to be missed' (Victorian Studies)

-'John Schad's account of Christian unason makes both belief and unbelief more relevant for us today. His is a critical yet always empathetic rereading of some of the major thinkers who have influenced who we now are. Schad is a critic who inspires respect and trust.' (Jonathan Dollimore, jacket-cover endorsement)

-'this book is both quirky and highly informative, theoretically sophisticated and written in a unique voice… essential reading for anyone wanting to make sense of the traces of Christianity in our supposedly secular age' (Bryan Cheyette, jacket-cover endorsement)

-'if I had to select the book published this year that has affected me most it would be … Schad's wonderful mind-bending book' (The Daily Star, Lewisburg, USA)

-'one of the most exciting and imaginative contributions to the field of literature and religion for some time' (Christianity and Literature)

-'a single page can move the reader from laugh-out-loud jokes to stunned disbelief' (The Glass)

-'its scholarship is exceptional and its contribution to multiple disciplines…is fresh and unique' (Religion and Theology)

-'Schad takes his readers on a deep-sea expedition of Victorian waters' (Literature and Theology)

-'…many moments of real insight' (The Tennyson Research Bulletin).

-'…much more on the significance of fish in Christianity and philosophy can be gleaned from Queer Fish by John Schad, also sometimes known as 'John Shad,' a scholar who - despite appearing as a character in Nabakov's Pale Fire under the name 'John Shade' - is real, and not made up by me at all. In the slightest. Really.' (A.R.R.R. Roberts, The Va Dinci Cod (Gollancz, 2005))

life.after.theory

-'rich in ideas' (Terry Eagleton - letter, Jan 2004)

-'interesting things' (The Guardian)

-'a useful contribution to poststructuralism and a critique of what remains of it' (TLS)

-'bracing and encouraging stuff' (The Spectator)

-'fresh, unprogrammatic and lively; a reminder of thinking at its best' (The Philosophers' Magazine)

Writing the Bodies of Christ

'an exciting collection of essays …quirky, stimulating and enjoyable' (Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory)

-'Schad asks "Have those of us who belong to the discipline [of English Literature] ever left the church?" I cite this inquiry…as a call to action for further scholarship intersecting ...religious studies and current theory' (Victorian Literature and Culture)

-'the wonderfully allusive qualities of Schad's own essay…provide a microcosm of the commendable attempt that the volume makes to renew our thinking about the church' (Review of English Studies)

Victorians in Theory

-'...an extraordinary text' (Jacques Derrida - letter, May 1999)

-'Schad's provocative and zestful study cross-hatches nineteenth-century English literature and recent French history, and makes them mutually illuminating' (Malcolm Bowie, All Souls College, Oxford - jacket cover)

-'John Schad is emerging as one of the most exciting readers of Victorian literature….the intertextual dialogue he sets up produces brilliant and, at times, breathtaking results' (Tennyson Research Bulletin).

-'audacieuse et originale…exécutée par un virtuose' (Etudes Anglaises)

-'at the threshold of literary experimentation and informed analysis, looking both backward and forward as it does, simultaneously mindful of both the periods it embraces' (Textual Practice)

-'a highly inventive interrogation, almost a meditation…fertile with suggestions and excitedly speculative in its heady way with ideas' (JVC)

-'a series of intellectual riffs…impressive and convincing' (19th-C Contexts)

-'by turns whimsical and insightful, challenging and rewarding' (Lit and Theology)

-'one cannot help but admire his eager intelligence and compendious grasp of the field' (Comparative Literature)

-'the …reference to the French original citations…makes this…study' (French Review)

Dickens Refigured

-'Schad's essay ...illuminates religion and architecture and many other aspects of Dickens, and sets up a discursive linking of these themes that others in the volume...echo with profit' (Journal of Victorian Culture)

-'Schad's collection attempts something striking and heartening: innovative, sinewy critical work...tough, philosophical, and historical assaults on areas of resistance ... and ... an editorial direction that has given space to ...much energy' (MLR)

-'challenging and engaging…sophisticated and original insights'(Dickens Quarterly)

The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors

-'This is a "big" book...' (Studies in English Literature)

-'This book is deeply-knowledgeable, abundant in insight, elegantly-argued and, in its dare-devil exorbitance, faithfully, quirkily imitates its subject' (Steven Connor).

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Victorian literature; Modernism; life-writing; place-writing; literary theory; critical-creative writing; religion and literature; experimental criticism.

ePrints Publications Repository

John Schad has 4 publication records in the Lancaster University ePrints repository. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title.

Associated Keyword: English

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