R. M. Berry is the author of the novels Frank (2006), "an unwriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," and Leonardo's Horse, a New York Times "notable book" of 1998. His first collection of short fictions, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, was chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize, and his second, Dictionary of Modern Anguish (2000), was described by the Buffalo News as "a collection of widely disparate narratives inspired...by the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein." Berry's essays on philosophy and experimental fiction have appeared in Symploke, Soundings, Narrative, Philosophy and Literature, and Contex, and in such books as Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein (2003) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited by Richard Eldridge. With Jeffrey Di Leo he has edited the essay collection Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (SUNY Press: 2007), and he has also edited Forms at War: FC2 1999-2009 (University of Alabama Press: 2009), an anthology of experimental fiction published by FC2.
     Berry is a native of Atlanta, GA. He attended Young Harris College, Furman University, and Wesley Theological Seminary at American University and received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Since 1985 he has been on the faculty of the English Department at Florida State University, where he specializes in 20th Century Literature and Critical Theory. In 2006 he became Chair of the Department. From 1999 through 2007 he served as publisher of Fiction Collective Two (FC2).


Dictionary of Modern Anguish

"In his new book of stories, R. M. Berry again shows himself to be a writer's writer." --- The New York Times Book Review

“The stories of Dictionary are so thoughtfully counterpointed that the term collection is too weak to describe the book. Each expands its antecedent....Measuring Dictionary’s philosophical grammars against the conventional realism of most story collections, I can say that Berry’s work represents the next term, an exemplar of its final fiction, ‘The Function of Art at the Present Time.’” --- The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart

"...impressive...dizzying...an imaginative integration of the aesthetic possibilities of mathematics and science with those of literature and philosophy." --- Los Angeles Times

Leonardo's Horse

"Berry's prose is as active as Leonardo's imagination, piling clause upon clause and multiplying details as he tracks Leonardo's memories . . . . I can't begin to explain how Berry manages to pull this off, but it's an indication of the lengths to which he is willing to go to reclaim Leonardo from television commercials, advertising agencies, and overly reverential art monographs . . . . Berry's ambitious goal is 'plotting a failure, the despair of art, civilization at cross-purposes,’ by which he means the last decade of the 15th century as well as the last decade of the 20th century, and in doing so he makes Leonardo's story our own." --- Washington Post Book World

Frank

"[T]he novel Frank is an 'unwritten' classic cast into racial, class, imperial, and gendered terms... and recalls events not available to Mary Shelley but always there in potential, at the edges of an already post-Romantic, proto-feminist, multiracial awareness....Unwriting, like retrofitting a brownstone for electricity, DSL, and single-family living, requires demolition as much as reconstruction. And Frank is certainly a destroyer." --- Joseph Tabbi in American Book Review

BOOKS

Forms at War: FC2 1999-2009
Forms at War
FC2 1999-2009		 Dictionary of Modern Anguish
Dictionary of
Modern Anguish		 Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart
Plane Geometry		 Leonardo's Horse
Leonardo's Horse		 Frank
         Frank		 Fiction's Present
Fiction's Present

RECENT CRITICAL WRITING

  • Experimental Writing,” Oxford Companion to Philosophy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge (forthcoming, April 2009), 35 pp
  • “War and the Form of Writing,” American Book Review (Vol. 28, 6: Sept./Oct 2007), 4.
  • Fiction's Present: Situating Narrative Innovation, ed. R. M. Berry and Jeffrey Di Leo (SUNY Press: 2007).
  • "R. M. Berry Answers Joseph Tabbi," American Book Review (Vol. 27, 5: July/August 2006), 37-38.
  • "Did the Novel Die? (And Would We Know?), Rain Taxi (Vol. 11, 1: Spring 2006), 24.
  • "The Present Instance: Publishers R. M. Berry and John O'Brien on Conceptual Writing," Review (Vol. 7, no. 4: March, 2005), 36.
  • "Wittgenstein Writing," Journal of Modern Literature (forthcoming, 2006).
  • "Language," A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin Dettmar (Blackwell: 2006), 113-22.
  • "The Avant Garde and the Question of Literature" Soundings: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Study (Vol 88, nos. 1-2: Spring-Summer, 2005), 105-27.
  • "Sukenick's Dying Words," Golden Handcuffs Review (Vol. I, no.4: Spring, 2005), 151-153.
  • "Ego and the Sublime: Rereading Sukenick," American Book Review, (Vol. 26, no.1: Nov/Dec 2004), pp. 1,8.
  • "Is There a Language Problem?" Electronic Book Review (2004), 10 pp.
  • "12 Theses on Fiction's Present," (with Jeffrey Di Leo) Symploke (Vol. 12, 1-2: 2004), 7-15.
  • "In Which Henry James Strikes Bedrock," Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein, ed. Walter Jost and Kenneth M. Dauber (Northwestern UP: 2003), 245-258.
  • "Cavell's Meaning 1968," Symploke (Vol. 11, no. 1-2: 2003), 237-241.
  • "On Becoming Unaffiliated" in Affiliations ed. Jeffrey Di Leo (U of Nebraska P: 2003), 144-155.
  • "What Is a Book?" in Without Covers:Writers and the Web ed. Lesha Hurliman (Purdue UP: 2002).
  • "FC2 and the Present of Fiction," (introduction to special FC2 feature) AltX.com (March 2001).
  • "Wittgenstein and Modern Writing," American Book Review, January/February, 2001), pp. 3,6.

RECENT FICTION

  • “from Untitled,” Theory @ Buffalo (2008), 23 pp.
  • "from Untitled," The Golden Handcuffs Review (Vol. 1, no. 7: Summer-Fall, 2006), 218-230.
  • "Never Write about Writing," Rules of Thumb:73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations, ed. Michael Martone, (Writers Digest Books: 2005), 3pp.
  • "from Frank," The Brooklyn Rail (December, 2005).
  • "from Untitled" The New Review of Literature vol. 2, no. 2 (April, 2005), pp. 4-8.
  • "from Untitled," Notre Dame Review (19: 2005), pp. 109-14.
  • "from Untitled," The Brooklyn Rail (September, 2004).
  • "from Frank," Fiction International (36: 2003), 22 pp.
  • "Uxoria Oculitis" in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, ed. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts (Chimeric Press [UK] / Night Shade Books [US]: 2003), 176-8.
  • "from Frank (The Lawton Letters) " Fiction International (35: 2002), pp. 106-123.
  • "from Frank," Iowa Review, vol. 32, no. 1 (Spring, 2002), 12 pp. MS.
  • "Abandoned Writing Projects," AltX.com (March 2001), 16 pp.
  • "Mimesis," Five Points (Winter, 2000), pp. 89-106.

LINKS

HONORS AND AWARDS

  • AHPEG Grant (FSU Literature and Film Conference): 2003-4
  • Florida Cultural Support Grant (FC2): 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000
  • NEA Grant in Literary Publishing (FC2): 2005, 2003, 2001
  • Tallahassee Cultural Resources Council Grant (FC2): 2004, 2003, 2002
  • COFRS Summer Award, 2001
  • Pushcart Prize nominee, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1991, 1990
  • New York Times "Notable Book" for Leonardo's Horse, 1998
  • Florida Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, 1995-96, 1988-89
  • Teaching Incentive Program Award, 1995-6
  • Pushcart Prize honorable mention, 1991-92
  • Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award, 1991
  • Fulbright Junior Lecturer in American Literature in France, 1985-1986
  • Fiction Collective Award: Plane Geometry, 1984

Faculty Page at FSU Department of English

Author Page at FC2

FSU, Department of English
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580
rberry@english.fsu.edu
850 644-5158