Du paletot idéal de «Ma Bohème » à la robe de laine des anges de Mystique, les tissus se dématérialisent dans la poésie de Rimbaud. La portée du champ sémantique des étoffes et des vêtements dans l’œuvre du poète de Charleville structure, avec d’autres thèmes, l’esthétique de la Voyance. Le monde s’habille, en effet, d’âme, tandis que l’âme…[Read more]

If synesthesia is rare in “Le Spleen de Paris”, it is also differently constructed and shaped than in the Fleurs du Mal. This article aims to demonstrate that this evolution points out a shift in Baudelaire’s esthetics, that from Unity of Univers seems to move towards fragmentation of reality: actually, from Baudelaire to Proust.
Abstract in…[Read more]

This is a longer version of my conference paper, in which I provide some ideas on how to merge scholarship on 18th-c France, especially the revolutionary period, with the kinds of advocacy promoted by the MLA. I foreground exciting new work done by colleagues in the US, UK, and Italy, and provide a “sneak peek” at materials to be included in the…[Read more]

This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Jean-Luc Godard’s video short Puissance de la parole (1988). It engages with key historical figures in film, visual art and music, positioning Godard’s video mashup as a violent intermedial space where past and future meet. Exploring techniques of fragmentation, decontextualization and rec…[Read more]

Online course

The course Au coeur de Paris, Baudelaire et Paris is a Massive Open Open Course, and focuses on the relation between Baudelaire’s poetry and the city of Paris, within an interdisciplinary approach that includes literary, geographic and artistic features.

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie’s great paper, “Printers of the Mind.”

Kafka’s Romanticism/Platonism is hidden underneath the covers. In this article I show how better translations can help the reader take the covers off the bed. Whether it be K.’s meeting with Buergel in the Castle or with the Josef K.’s meeting with the Priest in The Trial,
essentially the message resonates. A preview of ESSENTIAL KAFKA.

Like other forms of treachery, translation can be either concealed or exposed. Though most literary translators work in the dark and some embrace invisibility as an ideal, all translations can be situated along the continuum of illusionist-anti-illusionist or domesticating-foreignizing. A variety of paratexts lay bare the devices of translation.…[Read more]

The main topic of this article is the history of a rare and precious French magazine of the late Nineteenth century, in which a vivid and crucial discussion about arts and their inter-relation grew the more and more intense in the short space of four years (1892-1896). The “Livre d’Art” was first conceived as a simple booklet to be distr…[Read more]

With the discovery of the earliest known manuscript version of Et les chiens se taisaient, we learn that Césaire had started thinking about the theater earlier than had been assumed, and most important, that he had originally envisioned this work as a historical drama based on the Haitian Revolution. “Migrant Textuality” explores the several vers…[Read more]