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Papers by Yonina Hoffman
Modern philology, Feb 28, 2024
De Gruyter eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Fictions, 2022
This article offers a scalar model for rhythm in narrative texts, arguing that rhythm must be ana... more This article offers a scalar model for rhythm in narrative texts, arguing that rhythm must be analysed with a specific attention to the scale of the base unit which produces the rhythmic pattern. The article therefore first elaborates a phenomenological account of rhythm based on Husserl's concepts of protention, retention, and the horizon, before elaborating the different base units (and corresponding scales of rhythmic patterning) that can be used to produce the reader's experience of rhythm. Reviewing the wide variety of existing rhythm analysis, the article argues that rhythm production occurs on multiple scales of a narrative text, and that rhythmic choices on one scale can impact rhythms on others, creating a complex interaction that produces the overall rhythmic effects. Turning to the work of David Foster Wallace in The Pale King, the article examines a particularly difficult scale, that of the paragraph, using Benjamin Harshav's (2007) concept of « frame of reference » to analyse some of the rhythmic effects that Wallace produces. Wallace's writing both produces rhythm and considers rhythm as a topic ; the article ends by considering his ideas about the inherent meaning and function of rhythm, suggesting that it carries immense potential for creating cohesion and synchrony in texts.
Post-45, 2022
This paper examines a collection of contemporary novels of work, focusing on the boredom of infor... more This paper examines a collection of contemporary novels of work, focusing on the boredom of information workers in a postindustrial economy, with attention to theories of boredom and trauma, as well as to alienation, globalization, sexuality, drugs, time, and narrative. Whereas modernist theories of boredom (e.g. Benjamin, Krakauer) often point to its liberatory potential, these novels--Hilary Leichter's Temporary (2020), Halle Butler's The New Me (2019), Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Stuart Bateman's Grind (2014), David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011), Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End (2007), Michael Bracewell's Perfect Tense (2001), and Michel Houllebecq's Whatever (1994)--find that the partial attention required of information and culture work prevents these laborers from reaching the existential awakening of radical boredom. Instead, these workers are further inhibited from self-development by their jobs, illuminating Scarfone's recent model of trauma. The novels exhibit the variety of contemporary transformations in the novel of boring work, from gender dynamics and historical outlook to narrative structure.
The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020, Mar 25, 2022
![Research paper thumbnail of The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, and Sincere [Dissertation Abstract]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/59884414/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](The power and intimacy of Wallace's voices allow him to affect his readers powerfully on multiple... more The power and intimacy of Wallace's voices allow him to affect his readers powerfully on multiple levels: cognitively, linguistically, and affectively. But how? The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, and Sincere offers a systematic analysis of Wallace's poetics of voice. I focus on Wallace's three novels, identifying a dominant voice for each, pinpointing its techniques and intertextual origins, and casting it in a career arc of Wallace's evolving novelistic purposes.
Evidence of teaching effectiveness, including teaching statement, diversity statement, student ev... more Evidence of teaching effectiveness, including teaching statement, diversity statement, student evaluations, sample syllabi, and sample assignments.
Book Reviews by Yonina Hoffman
Modern Philology, 2024
Brian Gingrich, with immense critical erudition, has begun to address the topic of place, an omni... more Brian Gingrich, with immense critical erudition, has begun to address the topic of place, an omnipresent but somehow underexamined phenomenon of narrative, with The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. A formal history of pace in the novel, as well as a history of critical discourses on pace, The Pace of Fiction is densely packed: it introduces and historicizes the concept of pace, examines the structural techniques of scene and summary by which pace has been managed in fiction, and considers how those structural techniques have evolved over the history of the novel. After his short but substantial theoretical introduction, Gingrich focuses on a specific structuring element of pacing-the division between scene and summary-explicating novel history as an unfolding of the tension and interplay between them.
American Book Review, 2021
Siegel himself wrote to say how glad he felt that I understood him. The highest honor!
Modern philology, Feb 28, 2024
De Gruyter eBooks, Jul 10, 2023
Fictions, 2022
This article offers a scalar model for rhythm in narrative texts, arguing that rhythm must be ana... more This article offers a scalar model for rhythm in narrative texts, arguing that rhythm must be analysed with a specific attention to the scale of the base unit which produces the rhythmic pattern. The article therefore first elaborates a phenomenological account of rhythm based on Husserl's concepts of protention, retention, and the horizon, before elaborating the different base units (and corresponding scales of rhythmic patterning) that can be used to produce the reader's experience of rhythm. Reviewing the wide variety of existing rhythm analysis, the article argues that rhythm production occurs on multiple scales of a narrative text, and that rhythmic choices on one scale can impact rhythms on others, creating a complex interaction that produces the overall rhythmic effects. Turning to the work of David Foster Wallace in The Pale King, the article examines a particularly difficult scale, that of the paragraph, using Benjamin Harshav's (2007) concept of « frame of reference » to analyse some of the rhythmic effects that Wallace produces. Wallace's writing both produces rhythm and considers rhythm as a topic ; the article ends by considering his ideas about the inherent meaning and function of rhythm, suggesting that it carries immense potential for creating cohesion and synchrony in texts.
Post-45, 2022
This paper examines a collection of contemporary novels of work, focusing on the boredom of infor... more This paper examines a collection of contemporary novels of work, focusing on the boredom of information workers in a postindustrial economy, with attention to theories of boredom and trauma, as well as to alienation, globalization, sexuality, drugs, time, and narrative. Whereas modernist theories of boredom (e.g. Benjamin, Krakauer) often point to its liberatory potential, these novels--Hilary Leichter's Temporary (2020), Halle Butler's The New Me (2019), Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Stuart Bateman's Grind (2014), David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011), Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End (2007), Michael Bracewell's Perfect Tense (2001), and Michel Houllebecq's Whatever (1994)--find that the partial attention required of information and culture work prevents these laborers from reaching the existential awakening of radical boredom. Instead, these workers are further inhibited from self-development by their jobs, illuminating Scarfone's recent model of trauma. The novels exhibit the variety of contemporary transformations in the novel of boring work, from gender dynamics and historical outlook to narrative structure.
The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020, Mar 25, 2022
The power and intimacy of Wallace's voices allow him to affect his readers powerfully on multiple... more The power and intimacy of Wallace's voices allow him to affect his readers powerfully on multiple levels: cognitively, linguistically, and affectively. But how? The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, and Sincere offers a systematic analysis of Wallace's poetics of voice. I focus on Wallace's three novels, identifying a dominant voice for each, pinpointing its techniques and intertextual origins, and casting it in a career arc of Wallace's evolving novelistic purposes.
Evidence of teaching effectiveness, including teaching statement, diversity statement, student ev... more Evidence of teaching effectiveness, including teaching statement, diversity statement, student evaluations, sample syllabi, and sample assignments.
Modern Philology, 2024
Brian Gingrich, with immense critical erudition, has begun to address the topic of place, an omni... more Brian Gingrich, with immense critical erudition, has begun to address the topic of place, an omnipresent but somehow underexamined phenomenon of narrative, with The Pace of Fiction: Narrative Movement and the Novel. A formal history of pace in the novel, as well as a history of critical discourses on pace, The Pace of Fiction is densely packed: it introduces and historicizes the concept of pace, examines the structural techniques of scene and summary by which pace has been managed in fiction, and considers how those structural techniques have evolved over the history of the novel. After his short but substantial theoretical introduction, Gingrich focuses on a specific structuring element of pacing-the division between scene and summary-explicating novel history as an unfolding of the tension and interplay between them.
American Book Review, 2021
Siegel himself wrote to say how glad he felt that I understood him. The highest honor!