about

My scholarship revolves around different applications of systems thinking and phenomenology to 20th century literature, primarily post-45 American novels but extending to global literature, both Anglophone and in translation. Whether examining the nature of novelistic progression and the establishment of “voice”, or the way contemporary novels understand the globe, or how characters develop patterns of bodily self-relation, I like to use feedback loops and self-regulation as concepts that inform all dimensions of literature. I have recently begun a position as Assistant Professor of English at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, where I’ll get to pursue my next book project on global encyclopedic novels written by women and minorities who take up the encyclopedic tradition, exploring how they develop literary form to conceptualize global systematicity in different ways, and how the rhetoric and ethics of closure works uniquely in this genre of novel.

My specialty is in 20th century fiction, and theory of all kinds (e.g. narrative, poetic, critical), and my research interests include narrative theory, poetics, stylistics, systems theory, and environmental literature, as well as 20C philosophy and phenomenology, especially as they pertain to the experience of reading. As a synthesis of those fields, I am working on theorizing rhythm and on the idea of fictional rhetoric as an ecology (on rhythm: I also like to play the drums in my free time). I obtained my doctorate in 2019 from The Ohio State University with the project The Voices of David Foster Wallace: Comic, Encyclopedic, and Sincere. There, I track the variation in narrative voice through three periods of Wallace's career, revising theoretical models of narrative voice while identifying Wallace's changing purposes, values, and influences, placing him in a matrix of 20th century literature and culture.

More generally, I like to think at the intersection of phenomenology, systems, rhetoric, reading, and literary form; I'm also very interested in composition, manuscript genetics, and stylometry. I've written mostly about Wallace's work, but I've also worked on projects involving Philip K. Dick, Lyn Hejinian, Walter Benjamin, James Joyce, and John Updike. Besides my reading, writing, and teaching, I have worked as the Administrative Assistant to the International James Joyce Foundation and to Project Narrative, with which I am still affiliated, and I recently taught as Postdoctoral Teaching Faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

You can reach me at yonina.a.hoffman@gmail.com, and I’m on Twitter at @yonina and Instagram at @Yonina9, where I often post pictures of doors.