Hilary White

    English

    Postdoctoral Researcher

    Biography

    I completed my PhD, 'Models of Indiscipline: Visuality in the 1960s-70s novels of Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin and Brigid Brophy', at the University of Manchester in 2021. I am currently an Irish Research Council, Government of Ireland 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, working on a project called Forms of Sleep: Literary Experiments in Somnolence. This project focuses on sleep-centric literature, drawing lineages between modernist and contemporary formal experimentation, and exploring historic entanglements of experimental writing and sleep science. It contends that writing which occurs in and around states of sleepiness—hypnagogia, dozing, dreaming, fatigue, falling asleep and waking up—can help to challenge embedded attitudes surrounding productivity and its associated hierarchies in a world which devalues sleeping, dreaming and other non-productive states. 

    Research Projects

    Title Role Description Start date End date Amount
    Forms of Sleep: Literary Experiments in Somnolence, 1920-present Postdoctoral Research Fellow As psychologist Rubin Naiman states, we live in a 'wake-centric' world. My project centres sleep in its reading and thinking, learning from writers who learn from sleep, on different ways of approaching knowing and knowledge, as well as sleep itself. Departing from prior literary work on sleep through my focus on formal experimentation, I formulate experimental literature as an observational and introspective medium, capable of helping us understand certain subjective aspects of sleep which technology cannot capture. Here, ‘experimental’ literature is that employing idiosyncratic, non-verbal and non-linear elements to communicate meaning on multiple levels, useful for depicting experience which is difficult to put into words—like that of sleep disorders and states surrounding the unconsciousness of sleep. My method is close textual analysis, beginning with 1920s modernist novels, as this is when the electroencephalograph (EEG) is first developed for studying human subjects. I argue that the ability to ‘see’ the brain activity of sleeping human subjects (first accomplished in the 1930s) changes how writers depict sleep, whether writers were directly aware of these developments or not. 1930s novels like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake show a concurrent interest in narrating sleep—a state previously inaccessible—beyond the experience of dream. These early twentieth-century experiments provide important background for my primary focus, which is sleep experiments in contemporary experimental poetry and prose (1990-the present): from Wanda Coleman’s waking-dreamscape in African Sleeping Sickness (1990), to Bernadette Mayer’s hypnagogic writing experiments in Ethics of Sleep (2011), to Shola von Reinhold’s hypersomniac narrative in Lote (2021), I show how sleep becomes the ‘stuff’ of writing even more directly than it was for modernist precursors, and moreover, a generative state in its own right. While culturally-embedded hostilities towards over-sleeping (and under-productivity) remain high, my project presents literary sleep 'disorder' as a powerful challenge to such notions of normal sleep. 01/09/2023 31/08/2025