Rivky Mondal is a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago with appointments in the English Department and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Her major areas of research and teaching are the 19th to 21st-century novel, minoritarian aesthetics, gender studies, and social theory. A praxis in archival and sociological research informs her teaching in tandem with her scholarship.

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Rivky’s working on two books with a shared agenda: to trace forms of underhanded behavior and explain their surprising pro-social function. How can manipulation, slow texting, tact, and flat affect be understood as strategies for manifesting and managing unequal power relations?

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Subtle Distinctions: Microsocial Encounters in the Modern Novel is a study of subtlety’s functions and ramifications in the novel from Henry James to the present. The project analyzes a penchant for narrative indirection in a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels that render difficult-to-articulate feelings, situations, and consequences of gender, race, and class. Readings examine this through the “microsocial,” a small scale of encounter comprised of affects, speech, and norms that lay outside the field of common vision. Each chapter identifies an imperceptible sub-style appearing in encounters that require subterfuge and maneuvering: from affective management in Henry James, tact in Nella Larsen, and opacity in William Faulkner, to symbol in Toni Morrison, flat style in Sally Rooney, and qualifications in Raven Leilani.

 

Rivky’s second project, A Modern History of Introversion: 20th- and 21st-Century Aesthetics of Social Attrition examines the unexpected popularity of the introvert today as a social type and habitus countenanced by corporate culture and the self-care industry. The project returns to the transgressive root of the introvert: that is, their ability to shine an unflinching light on American individualism and its unsettled relationship with loneliness despite neoliberalism’s obsession with making the social more seamless. Introverts serve as a fount of socially insightful negativity in Western fiction (Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, and Kazuo Ishiguro), psychology (Carl Jung), queer studies (Audre Lorde and José Esteban Muñoz), and other realms of social deprogramming in the long-twentieth century.

 

Writing related to this research has appeared or is forthcoming in Textual Practice, Camera Obscura, The Henry James Review, and Post45 Contemporaries.​​​​​