My work in Comparative Literature can be seen as moving in dimensions which can be described as horizontal and vertical and which foreground respectively space and time. The spatial dimension involves comparative study of literature and the contexts for literature in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the interaction of colonies and empires, and on the impact of decolonization. The dissertation focuses on poetry in the five areas – Ireland, India, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean -- in relation to the politics of their respective countries and the relationship to the colonizing literatures of Europe and the U.S. I would like to carry out further study at the foundations devoted to the life and work of Tagore in Calcutta, of Senghor in Dakar, of Neruda in Santiago de Chile, and of St.John-Perse and the French Overseas Empire (A.O.F.) in Aix-en-Provence as I revise the dissertation and prepare it for publication.

In addition, Irish literature has been an ongoing area of research and writing, and a book on Yeats's Echoes: Poetry, Nation, and the Irish Traditio is a second possible outcome of the dissertation. For my undergraduate thesis under the direction of Professors Paul de Man and R.W.B. Lewis at Yale, I wrote two chapters (80 pages) about the use of symbol in the poetry of Yeats and Baudelaire. For my dissertation under the direction of Professor Edward Said at Columbia, I wrote an extended chapter (180 pages) about the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Eavan Boland that sets Yeats in the context of other poets of decolonization--Tagore in India, Senghor in West Africa, Césaire in Martinique, and both Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral in Chile. The dissertation traces the influence of European modernism on the poetry of decolonization throughout the world, and demonstrates the place of each of these seminal poets in an evolving national tradition within their own countries. In the case of Yeats, I would extend my work to include the mid-century years in which Yeats's influence was difficult to overcome, the resurgence of poetry in Gaelic and by other women poets such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and the emergence of an outstanding generation of younger poets whose birth coincided with Yeats's death, one of the foremost poets among them being Seamus Heaney (b. 1939).

My next writing project has grown out of my teaching at Barnard in the Literature of the Americas. As a historical comparatist, I have structured the course around a series of correlations between North and South American literature beginning in the pre-Columbian period and proceeding through the literatures of discovery and conquest to the dominant influences of Catholicism and Puritanism, respectively, in South and North America, the rise of minority voices in the literatures of the Americas from the eighteenth century forward, and the rhetoric of revolution and independence in both North and South America. A central preoccupation is to trace the development of form in South and North American poetry (beginning in the seventeenth century) and in fiction (beginning at the end of the eighteenth century). In the period before 1900, the development of American literatures cannot be understood in isolation from what is happening in Europe and in European literature; as a result, I work on issues of decolonization not purely from an American but from a comparative and trans-Atlantic perspective.

The fourth dimension of my writing is concerned with time and literature from Dante and the early modern period to the present. This work is grounded in the writing I did at Yale under Paul de Man and R.W.B. Lewis, in which I looked at symbolism as a comparative system that reflected a shift in representation across the Europan continent. I am writing about other systems, from the renaissance, baroque, enlightenment, and romantic, to the modern and poet-modern, with explicit reference to the relation of word and object in the poetry of the period, and to the belief systems which structure the relationship of meaning to form in a particular period. The parents of this work are Auerbach’s Mimesis and, more recently, Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses. This research would result in a manuscript focussing on “Literature and Belief Systems” or “System, Symbol, Sign: Meaning and Reference in Poetry.”