Director, Centre for French and Francophone Research. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/centre-french-and-francophone-research My research and teaching interests span a variety of topics in modern French literature and theory – especially space, first-person narrative, the concept of the event, and the relationship between text and image. I have published articles and presented conference papers on a variety of authors and thinkers such as Rancière, Deleuze, Virilio, Derrida, Cixous, Houellebecq, Proust, Nerval, Sand, and others.
This essay looks at Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale as a “literary-historical event,”... more This essay looks at Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale as a “literary-historical event,” that is, an event that becomes legible only by a literary text. Flaubert’s novel attempted to turn the ambiguous political events of 1848 and the coup d’état of Napoleon III into a literary manifesto and a history of his generation. One of the novel’s early titles was “Dried Fruits,” which conveys a sense of preserved youth or even lost potential that can be exploited later. Flaubert’s novel explores what changes over time and what inevitably repeats in apparently singular historical events. Similarly, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte famously uses literary and theatrical tropes to explain the same events as Flaubert as they unfolded. Both Flaubert and Marx show us that literary form (irony, farce, attention to linguistic repetition) participates in the politicization of, and the resistance to, historical events.
The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière has become over the past two decades one of ... more The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière has become over the past two decades one of the most influential voices in literary, art historical, and film criticism. His work reexamines the divisions that have defined our understanding of modernity, such as those between art and politics, representation and abstraction, and literature and philosophy. Working across these divisions, he engages the historical roots of modernism at the end of the eighteenth century , uncovering forgotten texts in the archive that trouble our notions of intellectual history. Rancière's story is that of a generation that Hélène Cixous called " les incor-ruptibles " (after the revolutionary leader Robespierre), placing him in dialogue with and as a successor to Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others. 1 As a young student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Rancière contributed, along with Étienne Balibar, to Louis Althusser's Reading Capital in 1965. The outsized aspirations and deceptions of May 1968 led Rancière and many others to question the paradoxical elitism of academic Marxism, and in 1974 he published a repudiation of Althusser, Althusser's Lesson. Rancière's simple yet formidable revelation was that Marxist theorists, indeed nearly all philosophers, claim to speak for the people as their natural representatives, but in so doing they deny the very equality they supposedly espouse. Like Michel Foucault before him, Rancière returned to the archives to find the traces of popular philosophy and literature, silenced by their benevolent spokesmen. What he discovered were workers who aspired to be poets and philosophers, seeking emancipation through writing. In a series of groundbreaking works in the 1980s that would constitute the foundation of his thought, Rancière told the history of early-nineteenth-century workers'
Gustave Flaubert famously referred to himself as a ‘casseur de cailloux’ [common stonebreaker], i... more Gustave Flaubert famously referred to himself as a ‘casseur de cailloux’ [common stonebreaker], intriguing future literary critics, who tend to think of him as the hardest-working chiseller of sentences. This contrast between mental labour and physical labour belies other connections that help us understand how Flaubert’s text relates to corporeality, labour, politics, and aesthetics. Flaubert’s ‘cailloux’, or stones, especially in Bouvard et Pecuchet, mediate between the materiality of ink on the page and the abstract meaning of words, resulting in a text that is both ‘pulverized’ and transcendent.
“Conceptualizing the Novel Map: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Cartography.” Literature and C... more “Conceptualizing the Novel Map: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Cartography.” Literature and Cartography, edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2017).
... 18. Katalin Orb?n argues that the materiality of Spiegelman's book and his relative avoi... more ... 18. Katalin Orb?n argues that the materiality of Spiegelman's book and his relative avoidance of sequential images (the trademark of the comic form) amounts to an "anti narrative impulse" (29) that freezes time at the moment of the 9/11 attacks: "[In the ...
One of the enduring clichés about Proust and his narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu is the... more One of the enduring clichés about Proust and his narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu is the image of an effete snob who wastes half his life in high society and spends the other half writing a self-indulgent autobiography. In popular culture, those who read Proust are thought to waste an almost inconceivable amount of time on a frivolous object of elitist culture, all the more so since only the rich can afford the leisure time to read 3500 pages of dense prose. Yet…
HONORÉ DE BALZAC’S 1831 NOVEL La peau de chagrin presents the reader with a baffling array of the... more HONORÉ DE BALZAC’S 1831 NOVEL La peau de chagrin presents the reader with a baffling array of theories on subjects ranging from willpower and mechanics to politics and medicine. The ‘theoreticians’ competing for narrative legitimacy are nearly as diverse as the theories they expound: the narrator, Raphaël de Valentin, Eugène de Rastignac, an ancient antiques dealer, as well as scientists, journalists, courtesans, and a host of other characters. Lost, perhaps, in all of these theories in the novel is a comprehensive theory of the novel, of literary thought, which is to say how this or any novel constructs and represents meaning for the reader. I argue that Balzac’s novel, which opens his Études philosophiques, inscribes within its pages a theory of its own writing that problematizes the role of fiction, desire, and the visual in theory itself. As the above quote from Marcel Proust’s last and most theoretical volume of À la recherche du temps perdu suggests, a novel that displays its own literary theories shows as much bad taste as leaving a price tag on an object. Presumably, only a writer unsure of the value of a work would need to provide the reader with a theory of literature or a measure of literary quality. In so doing, if we follow Proust, the literary “work” becomes an “object,” one that loses its status as artistic creation when it enters into a monetary exchange. When a theory of the novel is crassly written into the narrative, its self-defined worth is visible and readable (like a price that is decipherable on a visible tag), and the novel enters into something akin to a marketplace, it commodifies itself by some mysterious alchemy. Polite literary society thus demands that theory be invisible, that literature’s value be undeclared yet self-evident, limited perhaps to those “happy few” who know its price and can afford it. La peau de chagrin, although disregarding literary good taste in innumerable ways, obeys Proust’s injunction and displaces and diffuses its theory of the novel across all the other theories represented in the work. When a theory becomes a fictional representation, its claim to truth (where the inscribed concept matches its external referent) becomes secondary to the theory’s role in establishing the novel’s aesthetic truth (a structural harmony that may or may not exist outside of the text). Narrative logic takes the place of scientific
This article examines the destruction of the bohemian neighborhood known as Le Doyenné found with... more This article examines the destruction of the bohemian neighborhood known as Le Doyenné found within the wings of the Louvre during Napoleon III’s remodeling of national politics and Parisian space. The razing of this quartier by Second Empire authorities simultaneously effaced from view artists and the poor. Gérard de Nerval’s two nostalgic works about the time he lived in the Doyenné neighborhood, La Bohême galante and Petits châteaux de Bohême: Prose et poésie along with Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose form the aesthetic response to this political, spatial, and semiotic crisis through their writing of poetry into prose.
This essay looks at Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale as a “literary-historical event,”... more This essay looks at Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale as a “literary-historical event,” that is, an event that becomes legible only by a literary text. Flaubert’s novel attempted to turn the ambiguous political events of 1848 and the coup d’état of Napoleon III into a literary manifesto and a history of his generation. One of the novel’s early titles was “Dried Fruits,” which conveys a sense of preserved youth or even lost potential that can be exploited later. Flaubert’s novel explores what changes over time and what inevitably repeats in apparently singular historical events. Similarly, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte famously uses literary and theatrical tropes to explain the same events as Flaubert as they unfolded. Both Flaubert and Marx show us that literary form (irony, farce, attention to linguistic repetition) participates in the politicization of, and the resistance to, historical events.
The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière has become over the past two decades one of ... more The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière has become over the past two decades one of the most influential voices in literary, art historical, and film criticism. His work reexamines the divisions that have defined our understanding of modernity, such as those between art and politics, representation and abstraction, and literature and philosophy. Working across these divisions, he engages the historical roots of modernism at the end of the eighteenth century , uncovering forgotten texts in the archive that trouble our notions of intellectual history. Rancière's story is that of a generation that Hélène Cixous called " les incor-ruptibles " (after the revolutionary leader Robespierre), placing him in dialogue with and as a successor to Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others. 1 As a young student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Rancière contributed, along with Étienne Balibar, to Louis Althusser's Reading Capital in 1965. The outsized aspirations and deceptions of May 1968 led Rancière and many others to question the paradoxical elitism of academic Marxism, and in 1974 he published a repudiation of Althusser, Althusser's Lesson. Rancière's simple yet formidable revelation was that Marxist theorists, indeed nearly all philosophers, claim to speak for the people as their natural representatives, but in so doing they deny the very equality they supposedly espouse. Like Michel Foucault before him, Rancière returned to the archives to find the traces of popular philosophy and literature, silenced by their benevolent spokesmen. What he discovered were workers who aspired to be poets and philosophers, seeking emancipation through writing. In a series of groundbreaking works in the 1980s that would constitute the foundation of his thought, Rancière told the history of early-nineteenth-century workers'
Gustave Flaubert famously referred to himself as a ‘casseur de cailloux’ [common stonebreaker], i... more Gustave Flaubert famously referred to himself as a ‘casseur de cailloux’ [common stonebreaker], intriguing future literary critics, who tend to think of him as the hardest-working chiseller of sentences. This contrast between mental labour and physical labour belies other connections that help us understand how Flaubert’s text relates to corporeality, labour, politics, and aesthetics. Flaubert’s ‘cailloux’, or stones, especially in Bouvard et Pecuchet, mediate between the materiality of ink on the page and the abstract meaning of words, resulting in a text that is both ‘pulverized’ and transcendent.
“Conceptualizing the Novel Map: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Cartography.” Literature and C... more “Conceptualizing the Novel Map: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Cartography.” Literature and Cartography, edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2017).
... 18. Katalin Orb?n argues that the materiality of Spiegelman's book and his relative avoi... more ... 18. Katalin Orb?n argues that the materiality of Spiegelman's book and his relative avoidance of sequential images (the trademark of the comic form) amounts to an "anti narrative impulse" (29) that freezes time at the moment of the 9/11 attacks: "[In the ...
One of the enduring clichés about Proust and his narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu is the... more One of the enduring clichés about Proust and his narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu is the image of an effete snob who wastes half his life in high society and spends the other half writing a self-indulgent autobiography. In popular culture, those who read Proust are thought to waste an almost inconceivable amount of time on a frivolous object of elitist culture, all the more so since only the rich can afford the leisure time to read 3500 pages of dense prose. Yet…
HONORÉ DE BALZAC’S 1831 NOVEL La peau de chagrin presents the reader with a baffling array of the... more HONORÉ DE BALZAC’S 1831 NOVEL La peau de chagrin presents the reader with a baffling array of theories on subjects ranging from willpower and mechanics to politics and medicine. The ‘theoreticians’ competing for narrative legitimacy are nearly as diverse as the theories they expound: the narrator, Raphaël de Valentin, Eugène de Rastignac, an ancient antiques dealer, as well as scientists, journalists, courtesans, and a host of other characters. Lost, perhaps, in all of these theories in the novel is a comprehensive theory of the novel, of literary thought, which is to say how this or any novel constructs and represents meaning for the reader. I argue that Balzac’s novel, which opens his Études philosophiques, inscribes within its pages a theory of its own writing that problematizes the role of fiction, desire, and the visual in theory itself. As the above quote from Marcel Proust’s last and most theoretical volume of À la recherche du temps perdu suggests, a novel that displays its own literary theories shows as much bad taste as leaving a price tag on an object. Presumably, only a writer unsure of the value of a work would need to provide the reader with a theory of literature or a measure of literary quality. In so doing, if we follow Proust, the literary “work” becomes an “object,” one that loses its status as artistic creation when it enters into a monetary exchange. When a theory of the novel is crassly written into the narrative, its self-defined worth is visible and readable (like a price that is decipherable on a visible tag), and the novel enters into something akin to a marketplace, it commodifies itself by some mysterious alchemy. Polite literary society thus demands that theory be invisible, that literature’s value be undeclared yet self-evident, limited perhaps to those “happy few” who know its price and can afford it. La peau de chagrin, although disregarding literary good taste in innumerable ways, obeys Proust’s injunction and displaces and diffuses its theory of the novel across all the other theories represented in the work. When a theory becomes a fictional representation, its claim to truth (where the inscribed concept matches its external referent) becomes secondary to the theory’s role in establishing the novel’s aesthetic truth (a structural harmony that may or may not exist outside of the text). Narrative logic takes the place of scientific
This article examines the destruction of the bohemian neighborhood known as Le Doyenné found with... more This article examines the destruction of the bohemian neighborhood known as Le Doyenné found within the wings of the Louvre during Napoleon III’s remodeling of national politics and Parisian space. The razing of this quartier by Second Empire authorities simultaneously effaced from view artists and the poor. Gérard de Nerval’s two nostalgic works about the time he lived in the Doyenné neighborhood, La Bohême galante and Petits châteaux de Bohême: Prose et poésie along with Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose form the aesthetic response to this political, spatial, and semiotic crisis through their writing of poetry into prose.
Ce livre analyse de manière suivie et lyrique ce qui se répète chez Proust. Il s'agit pour nous d... more Ce livre analyse de manière suivie et lyrique ce qui se répète chez Proust. Il s'agit pour nous d'un geste de retour vers Proust, non seulement en tant que spécialiste ou chercheur universitaire, mais par des détours nombreux dans le champ de la création-la philosophie (Deleuze), l'image (Chris Marker), la sémiologie (Barthes), la poésie (Nerval)... S'immerger dans l'événement littéraire qu'est À la Recherche du temps perdu nous protège de la dilution du moment actuel en « événements » médiatisés et médiatiques, déterminés à l'avance et figés ; en lisant Proust, nous affirmons notre liberté, nos marges de manoeuvre pour retrouver les intermittences du temps. Des entre-temps ou entre-images à travers quelques chapitres courts où les thématiques se suivent et se répètent de façon parfois inattendue.
The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière has become over the past two decades one of ... more The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière has become over the past two decades one of the most influential voices in literary, art historical, and film criticism. His work reexamines the divisions that have defined our understanding of modernity, such as those between art and politics, representation and abstraction, and literature and philosophy. Working across these divisions, he engages the historical roots of modernism at the end of the eighteenth century , uncovering forgotten texts in the archive that trouble our notions of intellectual history. Rancière's story is that of a generation that Hélène Cixous called " les incor-ruptibles " (after the revolutionary leader Robespierre), placing him in dialogue with and as a successor to Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others. 1 As a young student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Rancière contributed, along with Étienne Balibar, to Louis Althusser's Reading Capital in 1965. The outsized aspirations and deceptions of May 1968 led Rancière and many others to question the paradoxical elitism of academic Marxism, and in 1974 he published a repudiation of Althusser, Althusser's Lesson. Rancière's simple yet formidable revelation was that Marxist theorists, indeed nearly all philosophers, claim to speak for the people as their natural representatives, but in so doing they deny the very equality they supposedly espouse. Like Michel Foucault before him, Rancière returned to the archives to find the traces of popular philosophy and literature, silenced by their benevolent spokesmen. What he discovered were workers who aspired to be poets and philosophers, seeking emancipation through writing. In a series of groundbreaking works in the 1980s that would constitute the foundation of his thought, Rancière told the history of early-nineteenth-century workers'
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