About

Aaron Santesso is a Professor of Literature at Georgia Tech and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. He has previously taught at Wesleyan University and the University of Nevada. His scholarly work explores the intersections of literature, surveillance, privacy, and liberalism. Santesso is the author of The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood, which argues that changes in observation strategies since the Renaissance have driven innovations in literature and that literature provides a forum for understanding surveillance and privacy. His first book, A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia, examines the legacy of eighteenth-century nostalgia poetry. He has also co-edited collections on Swift and satire and has published articles on topics including privacy law, surveillance theory, early modern education, literary tourism, and science fiction in various academic journals and law reviews. His current research focuses on the connections between literature and liberalism.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Literature
• History
• Epistemology
• Visual arts
• Media studies
• Philosophy
• Art history
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Banning the Enlightenment

  2025-12-16

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Liberal Theory and Eighteenth-Century Criticism

  Studies in eighteenth century culture/Studies in eighteenth-century culture · 2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Political Science

  In recent years the academic study of literature has been riven by debates over the merits of “critique” (and near synonyms like “strong theory” and “hermeneutics”). In most of these debates, the only imaginable alternatives to the ostensibly destructive and “suspicious” practices of critique have been various forms of “weak” (i.e., descriptive, contextualizing, or affective) theory. In this essay we argue that: a) the dichotomy presented by advocates of “critique” and “postcritique” is a false one, and b) there is an ambitious and complex species of theory native to the eighteenth century that stands outside this dichotomy altogether. We trace the origins of this “native” theory in the work of a series of authors from Locke, to Dryden and Behn, to Addison, Fielding, and Johnson, to (ultimately) Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth. We argue that this native theory is an outgrowth of period thinking about contracts and (especially) liberalism. Although this theoretical tradition was extinguished, primarily by the “hermeneutic turn” of the early nineteenth century, before it could be fully articulated, we argue that it points to an ethical mode of reading that may be vital to the survival of the discipline today.

  PublisherDOI

• The Narrative Garden

  Eighteenth-Century Life · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Political Science

  Critics have long pointed to the connections between eighteenth-century landscape gardens and poetry. This essay examines the influence of prose narrative on garden design, arguing that gardens increasingly reflect narrative techniques as the eighteenth century progresses. The essay also considers the relevance of narratology to nonliterary fields and subjects.

  PublisherDOI

• Privacy, Literature, and Public Discourse

  American Literary History · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract In the last few decades, something has changed about how Americans conceive of privacy, which has had consequences for how writers address their publics: how writers write. This essay argues that rapidly evolving and expanding surveillance regimes have profoundly affected our sense of where the private life begins and ends and what can or cannot be concealed from others. Discourses characterized by fragmentation, opacity, and indirection have become both a means by which we communicate information about ourselves to the larger world and a mimetic representation of how that surveillance-mediated world often appears to us. Literature has played a crucial role in these transformations and has served as a laboratory for many of these emerging discourses. This essay focuses on two recent and contrasting cohorts of American writers: a slightly older group of authors who saw the sacrifice of individual privacy as having catastrophic implications for liberal democracy, and a younger group whose views of privacy and communication were, on the whole, less panicked and more tactical. The essay concludes by considering what happens when rhetorical modes meant primarily to preserve the private self reenter the public sphere and assert themselves within a civil-minded conversation.

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• The Satiric Contract

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-02-12

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  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Fascisme et science-fiction

  ReS Futurae · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  De nombreuses critiques récentes ont montré que la SF était « naturellement » libérale et progressiste. Cet article soutiendra que de telles affirmations sous-estiment la diversité du genre, négligeant la manière dont certains tropes fondateurs et certaines structures narratives (ce qui apparaît le plus clairement dans la SF pulp) convoquent des intrigues et des figures plus proches du fascisme que de la pensée progressiste. Pour certains critiques, la politique anti-progressiste de nombreuses œuvres de l’époque des pulps est une fâcheuse bizarrerie historique, transcendée et oubliée depuis longtemps. Cet article soutient, d’autre part, qu’une sorte de fascisme latent de l’ère des pulps subsiste même dans les formes contemporaines ostensiblement progressistes. Retracer la vie après la mort des tropes et des thèmes fascistes complexifie de nombreuses affirmations critiques sur les tendances idéologiques du genre.

  PublisherDOI

• Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter

  The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats · 2018-01-01

  review1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter Aaron Santesso Joel Schechter. Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole. Exeter: Exeter, 2015. Pp. xii + 276. $95. Lloyd Evans concluded a recent review of a revival of The Threepenny Opera with the assertion that “this is the last century in which [Brecht’s] work will be performed” (The Spectator, June 11, 2016). For Evans, Brecht is chained to a particularly preachy version of Marxism, and his work feels ever more “puerile and dated.” Joel Schechter could not disagree more. For him, Brecht has never been more relevant. I suspect Mr. Schechter is closer to the truth than Evans: one need not be a doctrinaire Marxist to appreciate anew Brecht’s critiques of a world run by corrupt plutocrats. But while Mr. Schechter may have started out with a promising subject, the finished product is frustrating. The basic claim is that the writers attempting to criticize Walpole under the restrictions of the Licensing Act were “early Brechtians.” This argument is interesting enough—if somewhat vague, since “Brechtian” is used very liberally—and even plausible at points. But the desperate attempt to show the “relevance” of both eighteenth-century satiric drama and Brecht pretty quickly leads Mr. Schechter into some very odd places. Every academic wants his or her work to be “relevant,” but Mr. Schechter’s approach is scattergun and far from subtle. Occupy Wall Street is named several times. Chelsea Manning shows up randomly. Fictional interstitial chapters (“lost Messingkauf [End Page 79] Dialogues,” etc.) set up imaginary situations in which Georgian dramatists or Brecht himself are brought back to life to comment on modern-day events. These digressions range from odd to cringeworthy: particularly painful is a first-person essay from Macheath explaining why he has decided to become a Wall Street banker rather than a highwayman (Bernie Sanders and Goldman Sachs make awkward appearances). Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is recognizably one of those books that, while presenting a relatively conventional argument, sets itself up as iconoclastic and radical, something that will scandalize if not terrify all those dusty academics out there. Peter Thomson introduces the book as “a bid to jolt the Anglophone theatre out of its political doziness,” as if the real world were not doing enough in that regard. At its heart this is a kind of influence study, fleshed out with much interesting and possibly useful historical anecdote and contextualization. But Mr. Schechter claims his book is actually an attempt to “reduc[e] the authority of chronology,” so that Brecht turns out to have influenced John Gay rather than the other way around. Other critics (Claude Rawson, most notably) have played with this conceit, though as far as I know none has strung it out to book length. What we end up with are passages of straightforward theater history presented as Brecht avant la lettre, interspersed with various asides in which eighteenth-century authors complain about the fate of their works (so that Swift, for example, appears in order to complain about Max Fleischer’s 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels—this is much less fun than it sounds). There is no real evidence presented, just the author’s general sense that this or that author is a member of the Brechtian club. And just in case we are tempted to take the conceit seriously, Mr. Schechter takes the time to clarify things for us: “It almost goes without saying that Gay and Farquhar did not set out to write Brechtian . . . plays.” Yes, almost. Meanwhile, the actual links to Brecht are often either nebulous or unconvincing (Theophilus Cibber is “an eighteenth-century Brechtian” because “his concerns anticipate a call to join with the discontented”). Several times Mr. Schechter seems to imply that any author writing satire is “Brechtian.” Why several of the works discussed resemble Brecht rather than, say, Karel Čapek, is unclear. Various other lines of influence are proposed, somewhat randomly, occasionally as a kind of flight-of-fancy: “Perhaps Henry Fielding would have cited a continuity between his work and Gay’s, too, if his adaptation of John Gay’s Polly had been...

  PublisherDOI

• School Surveillance and Privacy

  2018-01-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Next Door to Nirvana: Neighboring States and the Utopian Border Paradox

  Utopian Studies · 2018-12-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The presence of neighboring nations has always posed a problem for utopian states. Wouldn't those nations naturally fear or envy their utopian neighbors? If they do not, why not? Should non-utopian neighbors be ignored, tolerated, or assimilated? This article looks at the various paradoxes associated with utopian borders and neighbors and compares the solutions proposed by utopian theorists and authors of utopian fiction with the work being done in the field of “border theory,” which seeks to redefine the relationship between states with asymmetrical power relationships.

  PublisherDOI

• Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole

  The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats · 2018-01-01

  review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Rosen

  14 shared

• David W. Rosen

  Agency for Science, Technology and Research

  4 shared

• David Rosen

  Fairleigh Dickinson University

  2 shared

• Jane Detweiler

  University of Nevada, Reno

  1 shared

• Kate Hendricks Thomas

  University of Nevada, Reno

  1 shared

• Neil Sacca- Mano

  University of Nevada, Reno

  1 shared

• Bob Mead

  University of Nevada, Reno

  1 shared

• Lamar Herrin

  University of Nevada, Reno

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Associatio…