My name is Dr. Matthew Paproth.  I received my PhD from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in May 2006.  My major area is contemporary British fiction, and my dissertation,"Modernist Authors, Postmodernist Writers: Joyce, Beckett, Rushdie", discusses modernist and postmodernist elements of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Salman Rushdie.  Recently, I have published essays on Zadie Smith and Samuel Beckett; these can be found in Zadie Smith: Critical Essays and Drama and the Postmodern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre, respectively.

Currently I am a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  It is my third year at Georgia Tech, and I have already expanded my research interests and teaching range to include a wide variety of new texts.  My Writing Rock n Roll class, which I taught in Spring 2007 and Fall 2008, was wildly successful and enjoyable; a group of students in my Spring 2007 iteration won the award for Best Student Multimodal Project.  Click here for a list of still-functioning websites created in those courses.

More recently, I have taught courses called Reading Ulysses at Georgia Tech and Postmodernism and Adaptation.  The Ulysses class was a special section of 1102 aimed at Civil Engineering majors, and it asked freshmen to read Joyce's novel in the context of Georgia Tech.  Joyce provides a panoramic vision of 1904 Dublin, famously claiming that if Dublin were destroyed, Ulysses could be used to recreate it, down to the smallest detail; using the latest technology, this class puts that claim to the test.  It also asks us what new avenues current technology opens up for exploration within and surrounding the book.  Ultimately, the class sought to determine what a reading, in this context and by these students, can show us about Joyce, his novel, his characters, and his city. Click here to link to some of these projects.

My course on postmodernism asked students to create their own postmodern revisions of these texts, which were themselves about revision. Alan Moore's Watchmen revised the typical superhero mythos; Ian McEwan's Atonement deals with a writer attempting to revise her life; and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is about a possibly crazy scholar trying to annotate himself into the work of a poet he admires. A list of projects from this course will hopefully appear here soon!

In Spring 2009, I will offer an "encore" of my Writing Rock n'Roll course.