I work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, with a particular focus on post-World-War-II experimental writing, representations of everyday life, chance/contingency in literature, and nonfiction narrative. What unites these interests is my enduring concern with literature’s varied modes of engagement with reality, and a fascination with the social and collective meanings of literary forms.
My first book, Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern University Press, 2009) studies one the major figures of postwar French literature. I argue that Perec uses formal and semantic constraints both as a spur to literary inspiration and as a means of exploring the tension between chance and determinism, fate and freedom, historical forces and human agency. My most recent book, The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) traces the emergence, in the wake of naturalism, of a documentary impulse that shapes literature’s relationship to visual representation, testimonial discourses, and autobiographical narrative. I show that the realist emphasis on authentic details becomes in the twentieth century a fascination with facts, which anticipates an explicit turn away from fictional invention in contemporary literature. My future research will turn to the other side of the coin, exploring the shifting conceptions of fiction and uses of fictionality that have shaped literary production in the last three decades.
My teaching has an important interdisciplinary component, often relating literature to the visual arts and/or cinema (“Littérature et photographie”; “L’écriture du quotidien au XXe siècle”). In addition to introductory courses on modern and contemporary French prose and poetry, I have also taught undergraduate and graduate seminars on history in the novel, the literary avant-garde, realism in the twentieth century, and autobiography.
Books, Edited Volumes, Journal Issues
- Co-editor (with Olivier Dubouclez): “Valère Novarina: une poétique théologique?” Special issue of Littérature, no. 176 (2014).
- Co-editor (with Christophe Reig): Frontières de la non-fiction: littérature, cinéma, arts. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013.
- Editor: “Forms of Formalism,” special issue of L’Esprit créateur 48.2 (Summer 2008).
- Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009.
- The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Selected Articles
- “ ‘Ismaïl, lui aussi.’ Le romanesque du témoin dans La Disparition.” Cahiers Georges Perec, no. 13 (2019): 113–26.
- “Re-reading Emmanuel Bove.” Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, no. 18 (2019): 246–53.
- “Dans la caverne de Platon ou de la fiction comme ‘réalité augmentée.’” In Régis Jauffret: éclats de la fiction, ed. Christophe Reig. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2017. 101–118.
- “Interlingual Oulipo.” Modern Language Notes 131.4 (September 2016): 864-876.
- “History-Forms: Jacques Jouet’s Documentary Poems.” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: Sites 20.3 (2016): 444–452.
- “La Force des faits dans l’écriture du présent.” In Pour un récit transnational: la fiction au défi de l’histoire immédiate, ed. Yolaine Parisot and Charline Pluvinet. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015. 311–323.
- “Thinking the Everyday: Genre, Form, Fiction.” L’Esprit créateur 54.3 (Fall 2014): 78–91.
- “Poem-Walking: The Survival of Paris in Jacques Roubaud’s La Forme d’une ville.”Modern Philology 111.1 (August 2013): 107–131.
Recent Courses in RLL
- FREN 21740 Introduction à la poésie française du XXe siècle (Winter 2017)
- FREN 22203/32203 The Literary Avant-Garde (Autumn 2017)
- FREN 23444 Voyages littéraires, XXe-XXIe siècles (Spring 2020)
- FREN 23711/33711 Littérature et photographie (Autumn 2016)
- FREN 23810 Memory and Identity in French Literature: Proust to the Present (Spring 2019)
- FREN 24111/34111 L'écriture du quotidien au XXe siècle (Winter 2019)
- FREN 27777/37777 Existentialism and Its Literary Legacies (Spring 2020)
- FREN 38510 Margins of Fiction in Contemporary France (Spring 2019)
- RLLT 37000 Revising Prose (Autumn 2019)
Publications
