In his recent work, Michael Lucey has developed a methodology combining insights from a Bourdieu-inspired sociology of culture and from the field of linguistic anthropology with the aim of studying a variety of ways in which works of literature function socially, and also studying ways in which certain works of literature can be understood to serve in their own right as analytical instruments for different aspects of the social world. His current work is focused mostly on novels.
A nearly-completed book on “Thinking About Sexuality with Novels,” like his previous books Someone and Never Say I, takes sexuality—same-sex sexuality mostly—as a set of cultural forms, concepts, and categories with which literary texts engage in complex ways; this engagement offers a paradigmatic case for thinking about literature interactively, for thinking about how novels, coupled with readers, do cultural work. At the heart of his approach is the idea that sexuality often exists in language indexically rather than on the level of denotation, and the idea that certain novels are particularly devoted to an investigation of this semiotic predicament or else caught up in it. Several of his recent articles are drawn from this project, including “Translation and Polylanguaging: Sexuality and Novels from James Baldwin to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr” and “Some Novelistic Versions of Sexuality Happening in Language.”
Another project, “Towards a Science of Novels in Use,” explores several kinds of “real-time” interactive moments in the history of a text such as a novel that readers might find ways of being attuned to. To understand a book as a social object involves, at least in part, attempting to reconstruct the habitus of the reader(s) to whom it might have been (or might still be or might end up being) addressed. It can also involve attempting to reconstruct how, in different times and places, different readerly habitus (including our own) have responded to and appropriated the book in different ways. Readers from different times and places will have, somehow, to account for their own set of readerly and social dispositions, abstracting themselves from them, in order to attempt to understand how a habitus contemporary with the work’s production might have reacted to it (or to account for how a text calls for a habitus it might not be expecting to find in its immediate moment).A number of his recent articles are drawn from this project, including “Conceptualizing Trajectories of Readability” and “How You Read Madame Bovary.”
His newest project is called “Ear Training: Novels as Musical Sound Archives, from Baldwin to Diderot via Proust.” In his book, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, he developed an interest in novelists who studied cultural interactions, like talk, where much of the work is done not explicitly but rather through what linguistic anthropologists refer to as social indexicality. In this new project he explores how Proust and Baldwin listened to their worlds with richly attentive ears. They heard social projects within people’s voices or their music. They were also fascinated by different ways people had of listening. Their novels are intrigued by what differential forms of listening (to music in particular) can reveal about the worlds in which that listening happens. This is one of the aspects of Proust and Baldwin that Ear Training investigates. It deploys terms such as social indexicality, differential listening, qualia, and aspect as well as relational modes of thinking in order to demonstrate the kinds of attention to musical listening found in Baldwin, Proust, and several other novelists stretching back to Diderot. All together they contribute to a novelistic project of critical social analysis of musical sound. A recent article on “Understanding ‘Understanding Music’ in Proust” is drawn from this project.
See his c.v. for details on his translation work and early books and articles.
Office Hours
Fall 2026: Mondays 3-4 in 4210 Dwinelle; Thursdays 11-noon on Zoom. Sign up at: https://calendly.com/mlucey-mpy/officehours
Selected Publications
What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
“Silverstein and Bourdieu: A Science of Literary Works in Use.” In Luke Fleming, Nicholas H. Harkness, and Constantine V. Nakassis, eds., The Total Linguistic Fact. University of Toronto Press. Forthcoming.
Introduction to Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by Helen Constantine, Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press, 2026.
“Sexuality, Indexicality, and Music in Baldwin’s Just Above My Head,” Representations 174 (Spring 2026): 53-82.
“Some Novelistic Versions of Sexuality Happening in Language.” In “How to See What Has Been Done with Words,” eds. Nan Da and Matt Hunter. A special issue of Textual Practice 40, no. 3 (2026): 334-56.
“Understanding ‘Understanding Music’ in Proust.” In “Fugitive Proust,” eds. Hannah Freed-Thall and Zakir Paul. A special issue of Textual Practice 38, no. 11 (2024): 1746-58.
“From Phonemes and Sonemes to Qualia, Aspects, and Collateral Observation.” American Book Review 45, no. 3 (2024): 61-65
“Translation and Polylanguaging: Sexuality and Novels from James Baldwin to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.” Comparative Literature 76, no. 4 (2024): 406-28.
“Conceptualizing Trajectories of Readability.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 52, nos. 1-2 (2023-2024): 1-35.
“Sociological.” In “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani,” eds. Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco. A special issue of differences. Volume 34, no. 1 (2023): 244-51.
“Speech.” In Anna Elsner and Tom Stern, eds., The Proustian Mind. Pp. 191-208. New York: Routledge, 2023.
“Introduction: Proust’s Modernist Sociology.” In “Approaching Proust in 2022.” A special issue of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 45, no. 1 (2022): 1-21.
“How You Read Madame Bovary.” Representations 156 (Fall 2021): 27-54.
“Real-Time Literary Texts.” College English 82, no. 1 (2019): 41-54.
Comparative Literature; Modern French Literature and Culture; Modern English and American Literature and Culture; Studies of the Novel; Literary and Cultural Criticism and Theory; Social Theory; Linguistic Anthropology; Sexuality Studies; Cultural Studies of Music; Sound Studies.
