Academic Writing
Sharon Kunde’s academic writing encompasses late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American nature writing and literary criticism, examining the ways in which racialized assumptions about the parameters of supposedly-nonhuman nature underpin equally exclusive ideas about what constitutes American literature and the reading methods appropriate to it. She works to imagine more capacious and inclusive reading practices.
If “nature” has been at the heart of American notions of literary value, then Douglass and Thoreau help us see that tackling the racial dimensions of literary nature is a way to undo and desediment disciplinary protocols about literature’s value and the purposes of reading. Practicing denaturalizing reading, we might disassemble and coopt bits of the institutional machinery always on the verge of enclosing and consuming us.
Links
Article: “‘This Bitter Earth is a Song’: The Necrogeorgics of Lucille Clifton and Terrance Hayes”
Academic article exploring the necrogeorgic poetics in Clifton’s “mulberry fields” and Hayes’ “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.”
Book Project: “Natural Reading”
“Natural Reading: Race, Place, and Literary Practice in the United States from Thoreau to Ransom” in Twentieth-Century Literature, Fall 2021 (67:3).
OpEd: “Food Waste is Destroying the Planet”
Opinion column in the Los Angeles Times.
Post: “Pandemic Reflections: On the Class of 2024”
Guest post in K-12 Talk.
Review: “Falter” by Bill McKibben
Review of “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?” in International Studies in Literature and the Environment.
Review: “We're Doomed. Now What?” by Roy Scranton
Review of “We’re Doomed. Now What?” in Los Angeles Review of Books.