Brian G. McHale is a US academic and literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly relating to postmodernism and narrative theory. He is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pub ...
. His area of expertise is Twentieth-Century British and American Literature.
Education
McHale was born in 1952 and raised in
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...
,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
. He received his B.A. from
Brown University in 1974 and his D.Phil. from
Merton College,
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
in 1979. He is a
Rhodes Scholar.
Career
Brian G. McHale is the editor of the journal ''
Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication''. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). McHale was an honorary professor, from 2009 to 2011, at
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU; ) is a Public university, public research university in Shanghai, Shanghai, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Ministry of Education of China ...
, China. He was previously the associate editor and co-editor (until 2004) and is since 2015 the current editor of the journal ''
Poetics Today
''Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of poetics. The editors-in-chief
An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chi ...
''. He is co-founder, with
James Phelan and David Herman, o
Project Narrative an initiative based at Ohio State University. He is the past President (2011) o
The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and President o
The International Society for the Study of Narrative(ISSN).
He is the author of ''Postmodernist Fiction'' (1987), ''Constructing Postmodernism'' (1992), and ''The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole'' (2004), and ''Introduction to Postmodernism'' (2015) from Cambridge Press. He is co-editor with Randall Stevenson of ''The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English'' (2006), and co-edited ''The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature'' with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons (2012) and ''The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon'' with Inger H. Dalsgaard and Luc Herman (2012).
He has writte
"What Was Postmodernism?" He has also written about the cultural resonance of ''
Alice in Wonderland'', which he regards as a symbol of postmodernism.
See also
*
Descriptive poetics
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:McHale, Brian
Living people
Alumni of Merton College, Oxford
American literary theorists
Brown University alumni
Ohio State University faculty
Writers from Pittsburgh
Academic journal editors
Year of birth missing (living people)