Dr. Patrick Jones

Research Interests

Originally from the North West of England, I hold degrees from the Universities of Leeds and Geneva, where I obtained my PhD in Modern English Literature in 2023. In 2019, I was the recipient of a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship which enabled me to conduct archival research at Harvard University’s Houghton Library and to take up visiting scholar positions at Boston College’s English Department (Spring semester) and Yale University’s Department of Comparative Literature (Autumn semester).

My research primarily explores the relationship between modern literature and continental philosophy, with a particular focus on modernist fiction and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of life (e.g. those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Wilhelm Dilthey). Other areas of interest include the history of close reading, object-relations psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy.

My forthcoming monograph, Henry James and the Question of Living (Bloomsbury, 2026), argues that Henry James’s fiction is exemplary of what Robert B. Pippin calls ‘philosophy by other means’. I suggest that James’s late style – and particularly his use of free indirect discourse – models a way of thinking about the activity of leading a life that is remarkable in its phenomenological subtlety and sophistication. I claim that paying close attention to James’s innovative techniques for representing lived experience allows us to place him in a mutually-enriching conversation with philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Georges Canguilhem and Stanley Cavell.

Provisionally entitled Literary Criticism and Life, my current book project examines how modernist literary critics like Henry James, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster exploited the semantic elasticity of the word ‘life’ in order to indicate regions of aesthetic experience which cannot be described or accounted for in propositional terms. I argue that the significance, complexity and rich history of this rhetorical gesture has been overlooked in existing studies of the development of twentieth-century Anglophone literary criticism. To remedy this state of affairs, I draw on the insights of recent philosophical scholarship and suggest that the modernist appeal to ‘life’ can be profitably contextualised in relation to a long-standing intellectual tradition of rational or critical vitalism. I ultimately claim that a carefully theorized return to critical vitalism offers potential solutions to the methodological impasses that are afflicting contemporary literary study.

In addition to being on the scientific committee for the CUSO Doctoral Programme in English Language and Literature, I am co-organiser of the CUSO-funded Modern and Contemporary Doctoral Workshop at the University of Geneva. The workshop meets fortnightly during term time to share work in progress, to discuss important theoretical texts, to develop key professional skills (e.g. writing grant applications) and to hear talks by invited speakers. Recent invited speakers include Robert B. Pippin (University of Chicago), Ananya Kabir (Kings College London), Howard Caygill (Kingston University) and Mina Gorji (University of Cambridge).

With Simon Swift, Hye-Joon Yoon and Ji Hyea Hwang, I am a member of a collaborative, intercontinental research initiative which explores the subject of ‘Poetry, Creativity and Close Reading in the Transnational Digital Age’. As part of this project, which is financed by the UNIGE-Yonsei Joint Seed Funding scheme, I gave a talk in May 2025 at Yonsei University, Seoul, entitled ‘Teaching Close Reading in the Age of Generative AI’. In that talk, which I intend to develop into a short pamphlet for teachers and students, I made two arguments: (1) that AI-generated close readings of literary texts tend to be superficial, formulaic and insufficiently attuned to the strangeness and complexity of literary language; (2) that the severe limitations of AI-generated close readings provide an occasion for teachers and students to observe the ways in which received ideas play a determining role in directing – and more often than not distorting – our responses to literary texts.

I am passionate about teaching and have designed and led more than fifteen seminars on a wide range of topics, authors and genres since arriving in Geneva in 2016. See here for a full list of these seminars along with detailed course descriptions. In the 2025-2026 academic year I will be giving seminars on Austen and Woolf’s use of free indirect style (advanced undergraduate); Roland Barthes’s late writings on the neutral (graduate); and psychoanalytic approaches to literature (advanced undergraduate). I will also teach a practical workshop for first-year students on textual analysis as part of the team-taught ‘Introduction to the Study of Literature’ module.