Associate Professor Geoffrey Baker earned Bachelors degrees in English Literature and French Studies from Brigham Young University before going on to study at the Freie Universität in Berlin and Rutgers University, where he received his PhD in Comparative Literature in 2006.

Broadly, I work on modern western European literature, particularly in France, Germany, and Britain. More specifically, my research has most often engaged problems of literary realism, in a variety of ways.

My first book, Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2009), looks at how realist novels set in major European cities exploit colonial figures in order to generate their fictions, and then explores some of the consequences of this move for the novel’s sense of space and its mode of realistic representation. The chapters focus on Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane, but broaden from this as well to look at more general tendencies within European realism, by its major authors, and the legacies of these tendencies in fiction after 1900.

Similarly concerned with problems of representation, my second book (The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion: Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists, Palgrave, 2017) traces a tension between clear, realistic literature and challenging, avant-garde literature that arises in the 1860s and 1870s and then seems to structure much of the ensuing debate about how literature can be politically engaged. I read Émile Zola and Friedrich Nietzsche as emblems of this core division, and mobilisers of its key terms of clarity and confusion. The later chapters cover debates over the role of intellectuals (Julien Benda, Thomas Mann, Matthew Arnold, Bruce Robbins, Judith Butler, and Martha Nussbaum), and then dive deeper into the literary activism of Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Peter Handke, Toni Morrison, and J M Coetzee.

My third and most recent book, Belief in Evidence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press as part of their Law and Literature series. It argues that the first decades of the 1800s must be seen as an “age of evidence,” a period in which British evidence law became increasingly permeated by terms for forming judgments based on evidence popularised by the philosophy of John Locke; these terms, and “evidence-thinking” generally, then permeated the culture more broadly. Using a specific anecdote from Locke’s foundational Essay concerning Human Understanding, a story of a conversation between a Dutch ambassador and the King of Siam that was repeated with astonishing frequency in later treatises on evidence law, Belief in Evidence examines how Locke’s list of the factors moderating our judgment—age, experience, the number of people testifying to a fact, and their character—inform key novels of the century and our ideas of realistic representation. The chapters cover the history and purpose of the evidence treatise in the British Isles and related evidence-thinking in works by Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Wilkie Collins.

In addition to these larger projects, my restlessness and curiosity as a student and teacher of literature has led me to a number of shorter projects outside of my primary field. This work has dealt with the problem of sympathy in J M Coetzee’s novels, the political potential of various kinds of rap music (with a final focus on French hip-hop artist MC Solaar), social mobility in Reagan-era teen films, the role of textual violence in Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour, the problematic politics of Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer, the function of Berlin as a space within the field of German literary production, and the ethical economy of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

• Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (especially British, French, German)
• Realism and Naturalism
• Political Aesthetics
• Fiction and the Supernatural
• Imperialism in Literature
• Literature and the Law (Evidence, Empiricism)
• The Bildungsroman
• The History and Theory of the Novel

Books

Belief in Evidence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (forthcoming, Law and Literature series, Oxford University Press)

The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion: Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. (paperback edition, 2018)

Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2009. (paperback edition, 2020) [Reviewed in: Comparative Literature 64.2; German Quarterly 84.1; Nineteenth-Century French Studies 39.3/4; Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50.1; Victorian Studies 53.1; Choice Feb. 2010 :: Chapter 6, on Anthony Trollope, “Global London and The Way We Live Now,” reprinted in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 274. Gale, 2013. 329-41.]

Realism’s Others, ed., with Eva Aldea (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010)

Articles and Book Chapters

“Contact Nodes: Ports, Connection, and the World in Trollope’s Later Fiction,” in Pacific Gateways, ed. Laurence Williams and Tomoe Kumojima (forthcoming, Asia-Pacific and Literature in English series, Palgrave)

“Evidence,” in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, ed. Simon Stern and Robert Spoo, forthcoming

“Spaces that Matter: Reflections on Berlin in the Field of German Literary Production,” in Die große Mischkalkulation: Institutions, Social Import, and Market Forces in the German Literary Field, ed. William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2021, pp. 17-32.

“The Use and Abuse of Romance: Realist Revisions of Walter Scott in England, France, and Germany,” in Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature), ed. Shun-liang Chao and John Corrigan, Routledge, 2019, pp. 50-66.

“Empiricism, Evidence Law, and Emma.” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 38.3 (2018).

“Legal Others: The Knowledge of National Community in Nineteenth-Century British Legal Theory and Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40.3 (May 2018): 239-54.

“‘I know the man’: Evidence, Belief, and Character in Victorian Fiction.” Genre 50.1 (April 2017): 39-57.

“Preachers, Gangsters, Pranksters: MC Solaar and Hip-Hop as Overt and Covert Revolt.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 233-255.

“Making a Spectacle of Ourselves: The Unpolitical Ending of Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 45.4 (2009): 353-68. [Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, vol. 172. Gale, 2013. 244-253.]

“The Limits of Sympathy: J.M. Coetzee’s Evolving Ethics of Engagement.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 36.1-2 (2005): 27-49.

“Empiricism and Empire: Orientalist Antiquing in Balzac’s Peau de chagrin.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 51 (2003-04): 167-74.

“Pressing Engagement: Sartre’s Littérature, Beauvoir’s Literature, and the Lingering Uncertainty of Literary Activism.” Dalhousie French Studies 63 (2003): 70-85.

“Nietzsche, Artaud, and Tragic Politics.” Comparative Literature 55.1 (2003): 1-23. [Reprinted in Nietzsche and the Rebirth of the Tragic. Ed. Mary Ann Frese Witt. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007. 159-85.]

“Other Capital: Investment, Return, Alterity and The Merchant of Venice.” The Upstart Crow 22 (2002): 21-37. [Revision and reprint in Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus.” Ed. Moshe Gold and Sandor Goodhart. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2018. 123-45.]

“The Predication of Violence, the Violence of Predication: Reconstructing Hiroshima with Duras and Resnais.” Dialectical Anthropology 24:3/4 (1999): 387-406.

Incidental and Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications:

“Social Mobility in Reagan-era Teen Films: From Inaugural Optimism to the Invention of Generation X.” Magazine Americana online (September 2006).

• Literature and Humanities I & II
• Novel Evidence: 19th-Century British Fiction and the Law
• Literary Activism: Texts, Aesthetics, Politics;Fiction and the Supernatural
• Realism and Naturalism
• Fiction and the Supernatural
• The Self and Society: The Novel of Development
• Proseminar in Literary Studies
• Capstone Seminar (Literature)