The Paul Auster Research Library Visiting Fellow 2026: Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein is a poet and Emeritus Professor of English, Xavier University, Cincinnati. Widely published in the fields of modern poetry and Jewish American literature, he is the author of seven books of criticism and thirteen books of poetry. He was also one of the first critics to write about Auster’s work in the early 1990s.
He will be in residence 11th September to 11th October, room 24.4.41.
His project is entitled Paul Auster, Writer of the Uncanny. Here he will examine the operations of the uncanny in a number of Auster’s texts, extending from early on (The Book of Memory, The New York Trilogy, and possibly his poems), to mid-career (The Book of Illusions) to the very end (Baumgartner). His hypothesis is that the uncanny dimension of Auster’s writing becomes somewhat less overt over time, but that ghosts, doubles, coincidences, and above all, the recovery of lost memories from earlier stages in psychic development (this is Auster’s main concern in his own brief discussion of The Uncanny) remain near the heart of his thematics.
As the narrator of The Locked Room says of Fanshawe’s notebook at the end of the novel, “Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. It is odd, then, that the feeling that survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity.” The “odd”—the uncanny—is always to be found in the spaces between the sentences and paragraphs of Auster’s books.
More information about The Paul Auster Research Library.
Norman will give a paper for The Dark Arts Research Group.
- Norman Finkelstein, "My rhymes more than their rhyming tell'*: Toward an Esoteric Poetic"
- Monday 21st September at 3.00 – 5.00 p.m.
- South Campus, room 24.4.11
He will also interview Siri Hustvedt in connection with the opening of The Auster Collection, 5th October, in the arrangement entitled ”Paul Auster’s Haunted Books: Siri Hustvedt in Conversation with Norman Finkelstein”.
Staff and students are most welcome to attend.
For further information please contact Inge Birgitte Siegumfeldt mailto:siegum@hum.ku.dk