Déborah Blocker
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Faculty Advisor

Déborah Blocker specializes in the social and political history of literary practices in early modern France, with a particular interest in theater. Her first book, to be published by Champion in June 2009, has led her to develop a larger curiosity for the social and political constitution of discourses on poetry and the arts (poetics, aesthetics) in early modern Europe. She is currently interested in better understanding the social and political circumstances in which modern conceptions of “art” emerged.

Publications include:
Instituer un “art”: politiques du théâtre dans la France du premier XVIIe siecle to be published by Honoré Champion in Paris in May 2009.

“Elucider et équivoquer: Francesco Robortello (ré)invente la catharsis”, in J-P Cavaillé, ed., Stratégies de l’équivoque” Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques, 33 (2004), see also http://ccrh.revues.org/index250.html

“The Hermeneutics of Transmission: Deciphering Discourses on Poetry and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)”, Intermédialités, 5 (2005).

“Costumi, virtù et onestà: la question des ‘mœurs’ dans le Pastor fido et sa querelle”, in B. Méniel, éd., Ethiques et formes littéraires à la Renaissance, (Honoré Champion, 2006).

“Territoires de savoirs et espaces de temporalités : le sublime de Boileau aux prises avec quelques ‘modernités’”, in Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 29, 2007.

A discussion of François Hartog’s book Régimes d’historicité : présentisme et expériences du temps, (Paris, Le Seuil, 2003), entitled “Le présent comme inquiétude: temporalités, écritures du temps et actions historiographiques”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 53, 3, September 2006 (with Elie Haddad).

With Elie Haddad, “Protections et statut d’auteur à l’époque moderne : formes et enjeux des pratiques de patronage dans la querelle du Cid (1637)”, French Historical Studies, 31, 3, 2008, p. 381-416.

“Corneille et l’art poétique: appropriations, déplacements, reconfigurations”, proceedings to be published in Pratiques de Corneille: actes du colloque de Rouen (6-9 juin 2006), at the Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre by the end of 2009.

“Une ‘muse de province’ négocie sa centralité : Corneille et ses lieux“, in Les Dossiers du Grihl, 2008-1, Localités : localisation des écrits et production locale d’actions, July 2008, http://dossiersgrihl.revues.org/document2133.html.

Co-authored a section entitled « Patronages, actions, écriture dans le parcours de Jean Mairet », with Laurence Giavarini et Elie Haddad. This set of articles was published in Littératures classiques, 65, 2008, p. 35-63.

“Publier les ‘arts’ à Florence sous Cosme I de Médicis : une Poétique d’Aristote au service du Prince”, published in the Brazilian internet journal AISTHE ( http://www.ifcs.ufrj.br/~aisthe/vol%20II/2008Blocker.pdf), which also comes out in print).

Karl Britto
Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Professor Britto’s teaching and research interests include Francophone colonial and postcolonial literatures of Vietnam, Africa and the Caribbean.

Publications include:

“L’ésprit de corps: French Civilization and the Death of the Colonized Soldier," in Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds, ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (Lexington Books, 2009)

Disorientation: France, Vietnam, and the Ambivalence of Interculturality (Hong Kong University Press, 2004)

“Tahar Ben Jelloun,” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (Columbia University Press, 2006)

“‘You don’t know this but I keep telling you’: Memory and Disavowal in Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s ‘Kelly’,” in Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue, eds. Jane Winston and Leakthina Ollier (Palgrave Global Publishing at St. Martin’s Press, 2001)

“History, Memory, and Narrative Nostalgia: Pham Duy Khiem’s Nam et Sylvie,” Yale French Studies 98 (2000)

Suzanne Guerlac
Professor

Prof. Guerlac’s principal areas of research include 19th and 20th century literature and thought. Her interests include the examination of cultural ideologies and articulations between literature and philosophy, and literature and the visual arts. Her current project, Visual Dust: Proust and Photography, examines time, vision and the production of experience in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Publications include:
Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Cornell University Press, 2006)


Literary Polemics, Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton. (Stanford University Press, 1997, reprinted in paper, 1999)
Co-winner, Scaglione Prize, 1998

The Impersonal Sublime - Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont and the Esthetics of the Sublime (Stanford University Press, 1990)

Derrida and the Time of the Political, co-edited with Pheng Cheah (Duke University Press, 2009)

Recent articles include:
“The Fragility of the Pardon (Derrida and Ricoeur)”, forthcoming in Derrida and the Time of the Political

“Valéry - Modernist Myths and (Anti) Modernist States of Mind” (forthcoming in The Romanic Review)

“The Useless Image – Bataille, Magritte, Bergson,” Representations 97, winter 2007, pp. 28-56

“Sartre, - ‘au bord de l’image’ in Situating/Situations de Sartre 2005, (New York University, 2007)

“Madame de Staël et le discours (féminin) de la ‘civilisation universelle’, Cahiers Staêliens, # 57, 2006

“Le Passé au Lavis, Choses Vues et Apparences Informes dans Le Rhin” in Hugo et l’Histoire, edited by Léon-François Hoffman and Suzanne Nash,(Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2005)

Timothy Hampton
Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Professor Hampton’s principal research interests revolve around the relationship between literature and politics, historiography, questions of cultural transmission and cross-cultural encounters. He is currently at work on a project analyzing the relationship between literature and diplomacy in Renaissance Europe, from Machiavelli to Leibniz.

Publications include:
Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2009).

“The Diplomatic Moment: Representating Negotiation in Early Modern Europe” Modern Language Quarterly (2006)

“Monstrous Signs: Monstrosity and the Rhetoric of Description in Rabelais and Montaigne” in Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities (Cornell University Press, 2004)

Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Cornell University Press, 2000; winner of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for the best book in French and Francophone Studies)

Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Cornell University Press, 1990)

David Hult
Professor

Medieval French literature; Chrétien de Troyes, Jean de Meun; allegory; literary theory and hermeneutics; text editing and related disciplines.

Publications include:
“Alain Chartier in Manuscript: Authorial or Scribal Culture?” Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83 (2005)

“Words and Deeds: Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose and the Hermeneutics of Censorship,” New Literary History (Spring 1997)

Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain) (ed. and trans. Paris, 1994)

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Romance of the Rose (Cambridge University Press, 1986)

Richard Kern
Associate Professor and Director of the Berkeley Language Center

Professor Kern teaches courses in French linguistics, applied linguistics and foreign language pedagogy. His research interests include second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, reading, writing, and technology. He has served as Associate Editor of the journal Language Learning & Technology since 2001. He is currently writing a book on relationships among language, technology, and literacy.

Publications include:
"Literacy and Technology in French Language Teaching: Issues and Prospects," in D. Ayoun (Ed.) Studies in French Applied Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008, pp. 255-294.

“Making connections through texts in language teaching,” Language Teaching, 41, 3, 2008, pp. 367-387.

“De l’apprenant au locuteur/acteur,” with Anthony Liddicoat, in G. Zarate, D. Lévy, C. Kramsch (Eds.) Précis du plurilinguisme et du pluriculturalisme. Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 2008, pp. 27-33.

“La communication médiatisée par ordinateur en langues: recherches et applications récentes aux USA,” Le français dans le monde: recherches et applications, No. 40, 2006, pp. 17-29.

“Perspectives on Technology in Learning and Teaching Languages,” TESOL Quarterly 40, 1, 2006, pp. 183-210.

“Beyond orality: Investigating literacy and the literary in second and foreign language instruction,” with Jean Marie Schultz, Modern Language Journal, 89, 3, 2005, pp. 381-392.

Literacy and Language Teaching, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Michael Lucey
Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Chair of French

Professor Lucey specializes in French literature and culture of the 19th- and 20th-centuries. He also teaches about social, literary, and critical theory, sexuality studies, 19th- and 20th-century British literature and culture, and 20th-century American literature and culture.

Publications include:
Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Duke University Press, 2006). This book traces the development of a variety of complicated strategies for saying ‘I’ within literary texts dealing with same-sex sexualities.

The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2003), discusses the complex place sexuality holds in the social world of the Balzacian novel, its relation to history, economics, law, and the family.


Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, and Writing (Oxford University Press, 1995)


Translator of Didier Eribon’s Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (Duke University Press, 2004)

He is currently working on a sequel to Never Say I.

Professor Lucey was also the founding director of Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, which sponsors lectures, conferences, fellowships and workshops. (website: http://cssc.berkeley.edu)

Susan Maslan
Associate Professor

Professor Maslan works on early modern French literary and political history. She is currently at work on a book-length project called “The Literary Invention of Human Rights in France, 1640-1795”

Publications include:

"'Gotta Serve Somebody': Service, Autonomy, Society," in eds. Sophia A. McClennen and Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights and Literary Forms, spec issue Comparative Literature Studies, v.46, no 1 (2009): 45-75.

“The Dream of the Feeling Citizen: Law and Emotion in Corneille and Montesquieu,” SubStance 109 (2006).

Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

“The Antihuman: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” (SAQ:South Atlantic Quarterly)(2004).

“Susannah at her Bath: Surveillance and Revolutionary Drama” Eighteenth-Century Studies (2001).

“La fémininité juive et le problème de la représentation dramatique” Papers on 17th Century French Literature (1999).

“Resisting Representation: Theater and Democracy in Revolutionary France” Representations (1995).

Mairi McLaughlin
Assistant Professor

Prof. McLaughlin’s research interests include history of the French language; Variation and change in contemporary French; History of the Italian language; Comparative Romance linguistics; Language contact; Translation studies.

Publications include:
“(In)visibility: Dislocation in French and the Voice of the Translator”, French Studies 62, January 2008, pp.53-64.

Nicholas Paige
Associate Professor

Professor Paige teaches courses ranging from Classical comedy and early modern conceptions of selfhood to detective fiction and films of the New Wave. He is currently completing Before Fiction, a study of the strategies used by early French novelists to think through the fluid relation between books and the world; Lafayette, Crébillon, Rousseau, and Balzac are among the authors analyzed.

Publications include:

“Permanent Re-Enchantments: On Some Literary Uses of the Supernatural from Early Empiricism to Modern Aesthetics” (in The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford 2009);

“Proto-Aesthetics and the Theatrical Image” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 69 (2008);

“Rousseau’s Readers Revisited: The Aesthetics of La Nouvelle Héloise” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.1 (2008);

“Relearning to Read: Truth and Reference in Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie” (in The Art of Instruction: Essays on Pedagogy and Literature in Seventeenth-Century France, Rodopi, 2008);

Lafayette’s Zayde: A Spanish Romance (trans., University of Chicago Press, 2006);

“The Storyteller and the Book: Scenes of Narrative Production in the Early French Novel” MLQ 67:2, 2006;

“Bardot and Godard in 1963 (Historicizing the Postmodern Image)” Representations 88, 2004;

Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)

Debarati Sanyal
Associate Professor

19th and 20th-century literature and culture, including questions of trauma, testimony, and commitment; Holocaust studies; Baudelaire studies; theories of modernism and modernity; postwar French intellectual culture; memories of the Occupation and the Algerian war.

Publications include:
The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)

“A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism,” Representations 79 (2002)

“The Tie That Binds: Violent Commerce in Baudelaire’s ‘La Corde’,” Yale French Studies 101 (2002)

“Broken Engagements: Sartre, Camus and the Question of Commitment,” Yale French Studies 98 (2000)

“The Object of Poetry: Commodity and Critique in Baudelaire,” Confrontations: Politics and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century France (2001)

Ann Smock
Professor and Head Graduate Advisor

Professor Smock’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th-century fiction and poetry, literary criticism and theory, France during World War II, the Algerian War; Blanchot, Beckett, Jacques Roubaud, Jacques Jouet, J.-Ph. Toussaint. Her current projects bear on Walter Benjamin, as well as on Roubaud and Jouet.

Publications include:
“Distant Language” Parallax #39, 2006

“Cloudy Roubaud,” Representations, spring 2004

What Is There to Say? (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), is on Blanchot, Melville, des Forêts and Beckett

Soraya Tlatli
Associcate Professor

Professor Tlatli’s research interests are in francophone literature --particularly from North Africa—as well as colonial and postcolonial historiography. She has also written and researched on 20th century French psychoanalysis, philosophy and intellectual history.

Publications include:
“Les ruines de l’Algérie chez Kateb Yacine” in Hommage à Kateb Yacine ed. Nabil Boudraa (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006)

La Folie Lyrique: essai sur le surréalisme et la psychiatrie (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2004)

Le Psychiatre et ses Poètes: essai sur le jeune Lacan (TCHOU, Paris, 2000)


She is currently writing a book on the relationship between history and memory in Algerian literary depictions of the nation.