Mona Rahimpour
PhD
English and Theatre Studies
Mona is a Graduate Research Teaching Fellow in English and Theatre Studies and has taught "Literature, environment and Crisis" and "Popular Fiction". Before moving to Australia, she was an Erasmus Mundus fellow at the "Crossways in Cultural Narratives" scheme in France and Germany and tutored at the University of Tübingen.
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Thesis
Doom Lit: Affect and Aesthetics at the End of Times
Mona is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. She is currently in the third year of her PhD researching the dynamics of feeling and form in a species of contemporary novel she identifies under the conceptual category of Doom Lit. Focusing on works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Ahmed Saadawi, and Behrouz Bouchani (among others), she argues that doom-both as a steady thematic concern and an affective formation- is refracted in these fictions and traces the tension between the formal properties of the novel and their affective entailments.
She employs doom as a category of ""thinking feeling"" to talk about the contemporary preoccupation with 'the end' and its aesthetic and affective implications. This preoccupation, she argues, is marked by a pervasive ordinariness of extreme precarity, an ever-present dread of catastrophe permeating the realm of the quotidian to the extent that its exceptional character is no longer felt.
Research interests
- Contemporary Novel
- Affect Theory
- Form& Feeling
- Intertextuality
- Fictionality