Research Areas

Professor Smock's teaching and research interests focus on twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture; contemporary fiction and poetry; literary criticism and theory; France during World War II, the Algerian War, May 1968; Blanchot, des Forêts, Beckett; Roubaud, Hocquard, Jouet, Collobert, Portugal.

Selected Publications

The Play of Light. Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard and Friends  (SUNY Press, 2021).

A Semite, a translation, with William Smock, of Un Sémite, by Denis Guénoun(Columbia University Press, 2014).

Give the Word: Responses to Werner Hamacher's 95 These on Philology, an edited volume with Gerhard Richter (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

"Einmal ist keinmal," in Give the Word (83-93), 2019.

"'No music!'," in Modern Language Notes. Special issue, Poetics and Politics: with Lacoue-Labarthe, Vol. 132, no. 5 (December 2018) 1151-1169.

"Improvisational Mallarmé," in Hyperion, part 2 of a double issue on Mallarmé, 2017.

"Poorly Defined Goals," in The Made and the Found. Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michael Sheringham, P. Mcguinness and E. Mclaughlin eds. (Legenda, 2017), 52-62.

"Geranium Logic:  Intensity and Indifference in Emmanuel Hocquard," in Qui Parle, vol 21, no. 2, 2013.

"Accents," "Estampe," Theater Without Theater," "This Concept Destroys Its Name," all in Reading Derrida's Of Grammatology, edited by Sean Gaston and Ian Maclachlan (Continuum Books, 2011).

"Les Trois Parques" (a tribute to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, translated from the English by Will Bishop), in Retour d'y voir, nos. 3 et 4( 2010).

"Jacques Roubaud's Sonnetomanie," in Literary Imagination, a special issue, Sonnets Then and Now:  Fields of Play, edited by Susan Wolfson and David Miciks, vol. 12, no. 3 (2010).

"Everyday" (on Jacques Jouet), in l'esprit créateur, vol. 49, no. 2, summer 2009.

"Instamatic" (on J.-Ph. Toussaint), in Phantom Sentences. Essays in Linguistics and Literature presented to Ann Banfield, Robert Kawashima et al. ed. (Peter Lang, 2008).

"Distant  Language" (on Blanchot), in Parallax, 2006.

"Cloudy Roubaud," in Representations, no. 86, 2004.

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

Forthcoming:

“’Nel mezzo del cammin…’:  Queneau’s Enfants du Limon ,” in Modern Languge Notes, special issue in honor of Rochelle Tobias, 2021.

“Listening for Blanchot,” in SubStance, special issue on Blanchot, 2021.