English Department

Geoffrey Baker
Literature
Phone: 898-5455
Office: Siskiyou 133
gabaker@csuchico.edu

Prior to joining the English Department at Chico in 2006, Geoff Baker studied at Brigham Young University, the Freie Universität in Berlin, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. His scholarly and teaching interests include the novel, literary realism, theories of imperialism, and the relationship between politics and literature.

Geoff’s forthcoming book, Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Ohio State UP), investigates the challenge posed to realist narrative by the cultural effects of late imperialism and the beginnings of globalization in the nineteenth century: the eased communication between distant regions, immigration to Europe from the colonies, etc. Realists often tried to ground their writing in empiricism and science, but they simultaneously worried at the effects that advances in technology, communication, and mobility would have on the imagination. This book focuses in particular on Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane, but it situates them within the larger context of European realism in the nineteenth century. Alongside this book, Geoff is currently co-editing a collection of essays called Realism’s Others with Eva Aldea (Royal Holloway, University of London).

Two other book-length projects related to realism are also in the works. The first, Nietzsche, Naturalism, and the Possibility of Political Aesthetics, traces twentieth-century debates about political art, beginning with the tension between the anti-realist Nietzsche and the ultra-realist Naturalists in the 1870s. The other, called The Critique of Judgment: Problems with Evidence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, shows how detective plots or scenes scripted as legal proceedings demean empirical evidence as a means of truthful explanation.

Geoff teaches comparative courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and world literature, and courses on later British literature.

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