Professor of French Literature, and the College
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.