Nicholas Griffin

School of English

PhD Research Student

npgriffin1@sheffield.ac.uk
Profile

Thesis Title:

Reflecting on Drugs: Writing and Sobriety in Thomas De Quincey, William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker

Thesis Abstract:

My thesis crosses the disciplines of Medical Humanities, Critical Theory, and Anglo-American Literature with the purpose of formulating a theory of drugged writing. The specific focus is the textual unconscious which, via a methodology of close reading, aims to disclose what Avital Ronell has characterised as ‘tropium’, a textual reciprocity in which ‘texts are on each other’. In so doing, it will argue for a drugged experience latent within written language. This is predicated on the slippage of authorial and readerly intention, with new meanings and textual readings becoming apparent in the entry of writing into new cultural, political and historical contexts. As such, the emphasis is on the agency of the text itself, which attains an intoxicating influence and circulation. 

I examine the convergence of writing and drugged experience through consideration of three writers – Thomas De Quincey, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker – who each offer distinct inflections on a shared concern regarding the limits of authorial agency. My argument, concerned with the role of the written subject and its claims to sobriety and intoxication, brings together psychoanalytic and poststructuralist thinkers – Ronell, Derrida, Freud – who themselves interrogate notions of normative consciousness and experience. I argue that my three selected writers are in intertextual dialogue with each other, indicating a literature that is never truly clean, that must always, stated or not, surrender to some degree its self- sufficiency, ingest and be sustained by an exterior (become interior) text. 

More broadly, my research interests compromise 20th century literature, intoxicants, countercultural and continental theory of the 1950s/60s/70s, and the interface of literature with psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Qualifications
  • MA English Literature & Culture, University of Birmingham, 2019
  • BA English Language & Creative Writing, University of Gloucestershire, 2017
Research group

Supervisors:

  • Sue Vice
  • Adam Piette
Teaching activities
  • EGH113 Contemporary Literature
  • EGH329 Hitchcock's Films
Professional activities and memberships
  • Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA)

Conferences

  • ‘Addicted to the Real: Transcendence and the Material in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821),’ Transcendence and the Sacred, University of Sheffield PGR Colloquium, May 2024 - speaker
  • ‘Everybody splice himself in with everybody else’: Towards a Carnival of Cut-Up,’ Cut-Ups@60, European Beat Studies Network, University of Chicago Centre, Paris, September 2023 - speaker
  • Sheffield Language and Literacy Conference: Forging Hopeful Literacies, University of Sheffield, June 2023 – co-organiser
  • Transforming and Activating Places Knowledge Exchange Symposium, University of Sheffield, September 2022 – co-organiser and panel chair
  • ‘William Burroughs and Posthuman Addiction,’ InMind Support Addictions in Psychology, Culture and Art, Gdansk University, June 2022 – speaker
  • Who Am I? Constructing Identity from Culture and Belief, University of Sheffield, May 2022 – co-organiser and panel chair
  • ‘Burroughs and Addiction through Bakhtin,’ Medical (Post) Humanities: Reassessing and Reimagining the Human, University of Sheffield, April 2022 - speaker
  • ‘Drug Addiction as Eating Disorder in Go Ask Alice (1971),’ British Society of Literature &Science, University of Manchester, April 2022 - speaker
  • ‘Cain’s Book (1960) and the Post-Chatterley Suppression of Literature,’ University of Birmingham Graduate MA Symposium, May 2019 - speaker

Publications:

  • Smith, A; Griffin, NP.; Buadze, A; Liebrenz, M, The aesthetics of Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930): An early progenitor of Art Brut – Psychiatry in Art, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2025 https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2024.222
  • Griffin, NP.; Smith, A; Liebrenz, M, The Velvet Underground's performance for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry in 1966 – Psychiatry in music, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2024 https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2024.96
  • Smith, A; Griffin, NP.; Buadze, A; Zullino, D; Liebrenz, M, From Chocolate to Cannabis: Exploring the Evolving Sociocultural Frameworks of Substance Use, Swiss Archives of Neurology, Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 2024 https://doi.org/10.4414/
  • Griffin, NP., Cannibalism, Capitalism and Grotesque Consumption in Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, WRoCAH Journal Issue 6, 2022

Book Reviews:

  • ‘Narcolepsy in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation,’ Moveable Type, 2022 https://doi.org/10.14324/111.1755-4527.136