Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Culture, Gender studies, Language and Literature (French), Language and Literature (German), Literatures in a modern language

Regions:

Europe

Summary of research interests and expertise:

My research interests are in comparative literature, culture and theory, with a particular interest in psychoanalysis, the body, the senses, gender and sexuality. My current and most recent books are on replacement. A full CV can be supplied on request.

Under Publications in this profile I have listed my books (6 monographs, with a further one in preparation, 1 translation, 11 co/edited collections with two more in preparation ); in addition I have published 97 shorter pieces (journal articles, chapters & pamphlets). The most recent of these are:

1. ‘Puppets and people, from Kleist to Stelarc’, to be published in Replacement and Replaceability: theoretical traditions and contemporary practices, edited by Sara Magno, Jad Khairallah & Ilios Willemars, in 2023

2. ‘Touching and not touching: the indirections of desire’, in eds. Caterina Nirta, Danilo Mandic, Andrea Pavoni & Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, TOUCH (London: University of Westminster Press, 2020), pp. 29–87

3. 'Gide se remémore: "Mettons que c'est par pénitence que je l'écris"' in a special issue of Psychiatrie française, vol XXXXVIII, 4/17 (décembre 2018) ed. by Yoann Loisel, pp. 51-62

4. ‘“A petty form of suffering”: a brief cultural study of itching’, in a special issue of Body and Society: Skin Matters: Thinking through the body’s surfaces, edited by Marc Lafrance, June 2018, vol 24: 1-2, pp. 88–102

5. ‘The principles, pleasures and realities of translating psychoanalysis’, in The Problems of Literary Genres/ Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, vol 6, issue 2 (122) (2017), pp. 9–23

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
24-Jul-2024	Dwelling: cultural representations of inhabited spaces Edited Book Coedited with Orsolya Petocz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), ISBN 978-3-031-56839-8.
24-Jul-2024	The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces: Pockets, Pouches & Secret Drawers Edited Book The cultural construction of hidden spaces: Essays on pockets, pouches and secret drawers, coedited with James Brown and Anna Jamieson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2024), ISBN 978-90-04-52288-6 / 978-90-04-51974-9
06-Oct-2018	On Replacement Edited Book Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan. Coedited book based on preceding conference in 2016; my own contributions are the introduction & two other chapters. This book is an interdisciplinary study of the human drama of replacement. Is one’s irreplaceability dependent on surrounding oneself by a replication of others? Is love intrinsically repetitious or, on the contrary, built on a fantasy of uniqueness? The sense that a person’s value is blotted out if someone else is now in the place where they once were can be found in the serial monogamy of our age or in the lives of replacement children in the recent past. Versions of replacement include AI and doubling, incest and bedtricks, imposters and revenants, human rights and ‘surrogacy’, intertextuality and adaptation; and follow the emotions of betrayal, jealousy and desire both within and across generations. These 24 essays are divided into seven sections – What is replacement?, Law & society, Wayward women, Lost children, Replacement films, The Holocaust and Psychoanalysis – and will appeal to anyone engaged in reading cultural and social representations.
02-Mar-2018	Between motion and emotion: cultural literacy on the move Edited Book Publisher: De Gruyter. Coedited collection, special issue of Open Cultural Studies, based on the CLE Conference on (E)Motion held at Warsaw in 2017. Coedited with Maciej Maryl.
02-Feb-2016	The Skin-ego Monographs Publisher: Karnac. Translation of Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau (Paris: Dunod 1995).
15-May-2015	Opera, Exoticism and Visual Culture Edited Book Publisher: Peter Lang. Coedited collection of articles based on IGRS conference of 2008.
06-Oct-2014	From Literature to Cultural Literacy Edited Book Publisher: Palgrave. Coedited collection of essays introducing the conecpts of Cultural Litercy (see www.cle.world).
06-Oct-2013	Vicissitudes: Histories and destinies of psychoanalysis Edited Book Publisher: igrs books. Coedited collection of essays based on an IGRS Core Programme on Psychoanalysis 2006-08.
06-Oct-2011	‘When familiar meanings dissolve...’: Essays in French studies in memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007) Edited Book Publisher: Peter Lang. Coedited book in memory of IRS founder Malcolm Bowie, based on IGRS conference of 2008.
06-Oct-2009	Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch Publisher: Rodopi. This monograph is a wide-ranging comparative study of cultural figures, texts and objects including André Gide’s skin, Princess Diana’s radiance, poetry on touching sculpture, Kafka and starvation, Rilke and dolls, and such films as Gattaca, The Talented Mr Ripley, Being John Malkovich, The Piano and The Truman Show. It also examines gender, desire and the caress, phantom limbs, replacement children and the experience of love and loss. Connecting all these is the skin, the sense of touch and the work of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu (1923-99).
2009	Witnessing through the skin: the hysteric's body Journal of Romance Studies: ‘The Witness and the Text’, vol 9, no 3, pp 73-85
20-Mar-2003	Indeterminate Bodies Edited Book Publisher: Palgrave. Coedited book based on the MA on The Body & Representation, which I created & ran at Reading University 1995-2004.
14-Jul-2001	Le Désir à l’œuvre : André Gide à Cambridge 1918, 1998 Publisher: Rodopi. Edited book (in French) based on conference on Gide held at St John's College Cambridge in 1998.
22-Nov-1998	André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy Publisher: Oxford University Press. This monograph is a close study of André Gide (1869-1951). In his apologia for pederasty, whether directly polemical or as a covert motive of the fiction, he is arguing for an exclusively self-referring form of the masculine; yet in a number of ways, his argument relies on the feminine, whether in women or in men, as the negative from which this value proceeds, and it leads most often towards failure or retreat – undesire.The theoretical basis of the book’s analysis develops a critical use of the hydraulic theory of desire as a system of interconvertible body fluids within and between bodies. In the introductory chapter, I apply this to theories of pedagogy and pederasty from the ancient world to the present. The next, biographical chapter explores Gide’s life through his own and others’ representations of his body. The subsequent five chapters build up a comparative examination of Gide’s writings through a set of thematic issues: the woman’s voice, the chain-formation of male structures, the fascination of ‘the dangerous individual’, the desire of uncles and aunts, and the pedagogic-pederastic motive of Gide’s educational experimentation with animals and children. The final chapter returns to theories of desire, the failure of the hydraulic metaphor, and explores some common elements between Gide, Carroll and Barrie.
28-May-1998	Coming Out of Feminism? Edited Book Publisher: Blackwell. Coedited collection of essays on the relations of feminism & gay/queer studies.
16-Jun-1997	Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s Articles Publisher: Macmillan. Coedited book based on conference at the IRS in 1993.
05-Jul-1992	The Adulteress’s Child: authorship and desire in the nineteenth-century novel Monographs Publisher: Polity Press. A study of the relations of authorship and desire in 19c novels of adultery from France, Germany, Russia and America. The book examines seven novels by Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Hawthorne and Fontane, seeking in key scenes and structures the politics of the implied author’s paternal relation to male and female characters and to the implied reader.
06-Oct-1988	Narcissus and Echo: women in the French récit Monographs Publisher: Manchester University Press. This monograph compares short fictions by Prévost, Chateaubriand, Constant, Gautier, Mérimée, Musset, Nerval, Fromentin and Gide examined in these two books are confessional texts, tales told by a young man to an older man in which a woman is misloved and dies.
19-Aug-1988	Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and its Vicissitudes Edited Book Publisher: Yale University Press.Coedited colection on Freud, based on conference coorganised in 1986.
28-Feb-1986	The Unintended Reader: feminism and Manon Lescaut Monographs Publisher: Cambridge University Press.This monograph is a close study of male-female relations in Prévost's Manon Lescaut.It was reissued in 2010.
21-Jun-1981	The Banal Object: theme and thematics in Proust, Rilke, Hofmannsthal and Sartre Monographs This book was published by the IGS Bithell series of monographs; it is based on my PhD thesis, awarded in 1978 at the University of London.

Research Projects & Supervisions

Research projects:

Details
Cultural Literacy Everywhere (formerly Cultural Literacy in Europe) Founded in 2007 under the aegis of the Standing Committee of the Humanities of the European Science Foundation (on which I represented the UK 2005-2011), this organisation runs annual events - Conferences or Symposia, since 2015 - and a set of Special Interest Groups & has published several books. For all info see www.cle.world.

Past PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 2007 Until: 2012	The Myrrha complex: daughter-father incest in literature and life-writings Supervision of Jean Owen, Birkbeck College.
From: 2005 Until: 2007	The metamorphosis of philosophy: Kafka’s literary transformation of contemporary philosophical themes’ Ruth Martin, Birkbeck College
From: 2002 Until: 2008	Marguerite Yourcenar: in search of the mother Catherine Guy-Murrell, Reading University
From: 2001 Until: 2005	André Gide and curiosity Victoria Reid, Reading University
From: 2001 Until: 2009	The borders of the body Lori Parks, Reading University
From: 2000 Until: 2005	Pierre Loti and the Theatricality of Desire Peter Turberfield, Reading University

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

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