Brian McHale
Humanities Distinguished Professor of English
562 Denney Hall
164 West Annie & John Glenn Avenue
Columbus, OH
43210
Areas of Expertise
- Twentieth-Century British and American Literature
Education
- AB, 1974, Brown University
- DPhil, 1979, Oxford University
Video: OSU Distinguished Professor Brian McHale Talks Postmodern Narrative & Narrative Theory
Podcast: Project Narrative Podcast Episode 2: Brian McHale & Jim Phelan – Stories with Holes
McHale is a Rhodes Scholar (Rhode Island 1972), D Phil from Merton College, Oxford, and BA from Brown University. He has taught at Tel Aviv University, West Virginia University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, among other institutions. He was for many year associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. He is co-founder of Project Narrative at Ohio State, and co-founder and past president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.). He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Constructing Postmodernism (1992), and The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (2004), as well as articles on free indirect discourse, mise en abyme, narrativity, modernist and postmodernist poetics, and science fiction. He co-edited, with Randall Stevenson, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006); with David Herman and James Phelan, Teaching Narrative Theory (2010); with Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012); and with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbon, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012).