Altieri specializes in 20th century
American and
British Literature and teaches graduate courses on Nineteenth Century Thought, Victorian Literature, Modern and Contemporary English and
American Poetry, Modern and Classical Literary Theory, Literature and the
Visual Arts, and seminars on specific poets, theoretical problems, and interdisciplinary period studies. In his book on the reading of
Wallace Stevens as a poet of what Altieri calls 'philosophical poetry', Altieri discusses his own reading of the relevance of such philosophers as Hegel and Wittgenstein while presenting a speculative interpretation of Stevens under this interpretative approach.[2]
Awards
Summer Fellowship, New York State, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1975.
Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Paperback: Penn State Press, 1994.
Canons and Consequences. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990.
Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and its Social Implications. Oxford: Blackwells, 1994.
Postmodernism Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998.
The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
The Art of Modern American Poetry. Oxford. Blackwells, 2005.
Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013