Born in Brooklyn, New York, I lived in Bay Ridge until I was eight. My family moved to Westchester County for a few years before we crossed the country to Portland, Oregon, where I went to middle school and high school. I returned east for college, and graduated with a BA magna cum laude in English literature and a philosophy minor from NYU.
I moved to Bushwick in 2010 and worked in marketing and real estate, and traveled with what I earned (given the chance, I’ll always go back to Italy). The entire time I was writing. I eventually returned to academia by matriculating into the Creative Writing MSc at Edinburgh University. I went on to do an MFA in Fiction at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Today, I am a PhD candidate in English Literature at University of Nevada, Reno. Through historical materialist-inflected readings of modernist and contemporary global anglophone literature, I derive new concepts for old problems. My readings consider formal logics structured by fourfold frameworks, from tropes–metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony–to exegesis–literal, allegorical, archetypal and anagogic horizons.
My work treats literature as a site for thinking about form, temporality, and interpretation. I draw on continental philosophy and critical theory to show how novels generate meaning through resonance, scale, and self-awareness. I theorize how modernism’s afterlives in narrative structures, formal experimentation, and ethical perception, mediate historical time and utopian possibilities in literature today.
While I work, I like to listen to deep house, ambient, IDM, jazz, or classical music. In my free time, I paint and draw, practice yoga, enjoy West Coast IPAs, and bike along the Truckee River.
I hope you can enjoy some of my work on this site. To learn more or ask me anything, email DanielRyanAdler@gmail.com.
