Today, I am a PhD candidate in English Literature at University of Nevada, Reno. Through historical materialist-inflected readings of global anglophone contemporary literature, I think of new concepts for old problems. My readings consider formal and affective infrastructures of late capitalist literary production, structured by fourfold frameworks, from tropes–metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony–to exegesis–literal, allegorical, archetypal and anagogic horizons–of Commonwealth twentieth and twenty-first century texts.
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.
My work treats literature as a site for thinking about form, temporality, and interpretation. I develop transferable reading practices—often drawing on continental philosophy and critical theory—to show how novels generate meaning through resonance, scale, and self-awareness. Modernism’s afterlives, in narrative structures, formal experimentation, and ethical perception, tend to mediate historical time and utopian possibilities in literature today. Stylistically, I favor essayistic rigor over archival exhaustiveness, and treat literary texts as laboratories for thinking and meaning rather than objects to be mastered or dissected.
While I work, I like to listen to house music, ambient, IDM, jazz, or classical. In my free time, I paint and draw, practice kundalini yoga, enjoy West Coast IPAs, and bike to the Truckee to sit on my favorite cottonwood tree.
I hope you can enjoy some of my work on this site. To learn more or ask me anything, email DanielRyanAdler@gmail.com.
Daniel the Writer 