Dr Sarah Bernstein

Publications

Study for Obedience

Bernstein Sarah

(2023)

Or maybe she's a daytime sleeper

Bernstein Sarah, White Hilary

On Insomnia An Anthology (2023) (2023)

A dying tongue

Bernstein Sarah

(2023)

Gestures of Refusal : Podcast - Episode 8

Bernstein Sarah, Er Yanbing, Emejulu Akwugo, Yao Xine, Robles Francisco

(2022)

Gestures of refusal

Bernstein Sarah, Er Yanbing

Post45: Contemporaries (2022)

The social-scientific imagination : Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye

Bernstein Sarah

MFS Modern Fiction Studies Vol 68, pp. 298-319 (2022)

https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0013

More publications

Teaching

I teach literature and creative writing at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

Research Interests

My critical research focuses on the politics of experiment and the politics of care in twentieth-century literature. My current book project, Difficult Women and the Common Good: Towards a Literature in Commons explores the relationship between affective and aesthetic difficulty in the work of Scottish writers such as Muriel Spark and Helen Adam and American writers like Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding. I look at how the operations of these ‘difficult women’ can, counterintuitively, offer new ways of conceiving forms of social cooperation.

My first monograph, The Social-Scientific Imagination: Mid-Century Women's Writing and the Welfare State (in development) concentrates on postwar women writers' indirect and mediated representations of the welfare state in the form of a 'social-scientific imagination', manifested in both subject matter and literary form. An article on Muriel Spark and the post-war worker, which arose from this project, is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies, and a version of the chapter on Angela Carter and post-war economic planning was published in Contemporary Women's Writing. Elsewhere, I've written on topics like austerity, housing and the commons in the fiction of Doris Lessing; Agatha Christie and the modern girl; and, most recently, with Patricia Malone, on academic precarity and literary experiment in the zine Academics Against Networking. 

My creative writing practice also focuses on an investigation into aesthetic and affective difficulty. My first novel, The Coming Bad Days, was published by Daunt Books in 2021 and is interested in ideas of distance, detachment and attention. My second novel, Study for Obedient, borrows from the painter Paula Rego's idea that women can be 'obedient and murderous at the same time'. It was recently excerpted in Granta. A collection of prose poetry, Now Comes the Lightning, was published by Pedlar Press in 2015 and shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing.