William M. Burton

In the broadest sense, my research concerns the history of ideas, tropes, and argumentative schemas as they circulate among the discourses of literature, philosophy, politics, and the sciences in the French-speaking world, principally in the 18th and 20th centuries. I trace the ways that these sectors and their subdivisions make and defend claims of autonomy, supremacy, expertise, and so on vis-à-vis one another.

The End of Sex: Science and the Social Contract from Monique Wittig to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2027) tells the surprising story of the antifeminist 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influence on the 20th-century lesbian writer, activist and theorist Monique Wittig. In debate with social scientists and natural historians (respectively), Wittig and Rousseau developed social contract theories that radically denaturalized the categories of sex and envisioned what a world without them would look like.

My next project, provisionally titled Theorist-Novelists: Literature between Science and Politics, focuses on the period running roughly from 1945 to 1990. The book will examine a range of literary writers who authored both formally inventive narrative works of fiction and sophisticated essays about the nature and theory of the novel. I argue that this development arose in response to the steady institutionalization of the social and human sciences and increasing politicization of the literary field. Among the authors it will consider are Hubert Aquin, Roland Barthes, the Nouveaux Romanciers, Yambo Ouologuem.

In the past, I have also worked on Quebec studies, queer theory, and translation.

Affiliations

I am affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, and the Canadian studies program.