Steve Tomasula
Steve Tomasula is an American novelist, critic, short story, and essay author known for cross-genre narratives that explore conceptions of the self, especially as shaped by language and technology.
Biography
Steve Tomasula grew up along the industrial border between East Chicago and the South Side of Chicago, the locale used as the setting in his novel IN&OZ. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. While working on his first novel, he taught in the Middle East. After his return, he joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame, where he is currently a professor of English. Tomasula lives with his wife, the artist Maria Tomasula, in South Bend, Indiana, and Chicago.Works
Tomasula is the author of five novels, a collection of short fiction, and numerous essays and short stories. His fiction is a hybrid of multiple genres and is noted for its use of visual elements and nonfiction narratives. His writing can be characterized as postmodern and has been called a "reinvention of the novel" for its formal inventiveness, play with language, and incorporation of visual imagery. Though he is mostly known for his novels, his short fiction and essays also take up similar themes, especially the depiction of the self as a construction of society.His first novel, VAS: An Opera in Flatland is an adaptation of Edwin Abbott's 1884 novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. It uses Abbott's characters Square and Circle and the flat, two-dimensional world in which they live to critique contemporary society during the rise of genetic engineering and other body manipulations. His second novel, The Book of Portraiture is a prequel to VAS. It tells the story of "portraiture" in chapters that move across several centuries, for example: a desert nomad inventing an alphabet to depict himself in words; a Renaissance painter depicting nobility; and a 20th-century security expert using surveillance cameras and data-mining techniques to compose portraits of employees. TOC: A New-Media Novel is a multimedia novel published on DVD then as an iPad app with a third edition as a web novel. A collage of text, animation, music, and other art forms, TOC explores competing conceptions of time that shape human lives: historical time, cosmic time, geological time, personal and biological time. IN&OZ is an allegory of four artists and an auto mechanic. It has been compared to George Orwell's Animal Farm for its class-consciousness as it follows the story of people trying to find a way to live authentically in a world where individuality is squeezed out by mass-market thought. Ascension: A Novel takes up the theme of how humans continually remake the conception of nature, and how these new conceptions shape what it means to be human.
Tomasula's short fiction and essays have been included in many literary magazines, including McSweeney's, Bomb, and The Iowa Review. A collection of his short fiction, Once Human: Stories, gathers a number of stories that are thematically linked by conceptions of the self as it is shaped by science, technology, and cultural change.
His essays on innovative and conceptual literature, body art and genetic art have appeared in journals such as The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The New Art Examiner and Leonardo. Critical volumes in which his essays have been published include The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature ; Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, and Musing the Mosaic.
He has given key-note addresses or invited readings from his fiction at numerous universities and institutions, including the Library of Congress in the U.S., and, in Europe, Université Paris 8, Plymouth University, Paris Sorbonne University, and the University of Constantine the Philosopher.