Bruno Chaouat

chaou001@umn.edu

612/626-0537

French & Italian 304D FolH 9 Pleasant St SE

Department Affiliations

Narrative

I work on 19th-21st-century French literature and thought, drawing on my interest in contemporary literary debates to explore the relationship between language, experience, and memory. My work has addressed the writer’s dispossession in the face of death and articulated theoretically the questions of testimony and experience with those of language and writing. More recently, I have reflected on French debates concerning Jews in France, the memory and the representation of the Holocaust, and the impact of the Middle-East conflict in literature and theory. I am currently finishing a book of intellectual, literary and cultural history entitled Morose Thought. This work engages with the traumatic memory of WWII and Collaboration in French thought, and ends on an analysis of the different literary and philosophical responses to what I perceive as a malaise in liberal democracy.

Specialties

Holocaust studies
Ethics and literature
20th century novel
Literary theory
Intellectual and cultural history (20th-21st century France)

Publications

Books:
“¢ Je meurs par morceaux. Chateaubriand (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, coll. “Objet,“ 1999).
Edited volumes:

“¢ “Chateaubriand inconnu,“Revue des Sciences Humaines 247 (1997)
“¢ “Writing One’s Death: Between Fiction and Testimony,“ L’Esprit Créateur XL:1 (Spring 2000).
“¢ "Lire, écrire la honte," Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, Presses Universitaires de Lyon (2007).
“¢ "Penser la terreur," Actes du Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, Presses Universitaires de Dijon (2010).
Articles:
“¢ ““˜La mort ne recí¨le pas tant de mystí¨re’: Robert Antelme’s Defaced Humanism,“ L’Esprit Créateur XL:1 (Spring 2000).
“¢ “Ce que chier veut dire: les ultima excreta de Robert Antelme,“ Revue des Sciences Humaines 261 (February 2001).
“¢ “Noli me legere: Renaud Camus et le livre étoilé,“ Revue des Sciences Humaines 266/267 (Spring/Summer 2002).
“¢ “Being in France,“ September 2005, Modern Language Notes, Volume 120, Number 4.
“¢ “Forty Years of Suffering,“ L’Esprit Créateur, Fall 2005, Volume 15, Number 3, special issue “Suffering, Writing, Reading.“ Guest-editors: Martine Delvaux and Alexandre Dauge-Roth.
“¢ “L’Amérique í fleur de peau,“ Sites: The Journal of 20th-Century/Contemporary French Studies, 8:4.
“¢ “In the Image of Auschwitz,“ Diacritics, volume 36, number 1, Spring 2006.
“¢ “Langues de terre : Au-delí du philosémitisme,“ Critique, numéro 714, 2006.
“¢ “Impasse: Entre Albert Memmi et Jacques Derrida,“ Le Coq héron, special issue on shame, guest edited by Monique Selz, 2006.
“¢ “Nouvelles questions juives aprí¨s le 11 septembre,“ Controverses, numéro 5, juin 2007.
“¢ “Out of Palestine: Jean Genet’s Shooting Stars,“ Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World,
“¢ “Tropismes juifs dans la pensée franí§aise,“ Pardí¨s, 2009.
“¢ “La Place de l’Etoile, quarante ans aprí¨s,“ Lectures de Modiano, ed. Roger-Yves Roche, Editions Cécile Defaut, 2009.
“¢ “Colí¨re de Richard Millet,“ March 2009, Colí¨res d’écrivains, sous la direction de Jean-Pierre Martin, Edition Cécile Defaut.
“¢ “Moroseness in Post-Cold War France,“ Yale French Studies, special issue entitled Turn to the Right?, ed. Larry Schehr, 2010.
“¢ “Un vent d’obscénité,“ Contemporary French Civilization, forthcoming, 35:1, Fall 2010.
“¢ “Humain, inhumain : Apories théoriques et littéraires aprí¨s la Shoah,“ forthcoming, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
“¢ “Du négationnisme au néga-sionisme,“ L’Arche , Paris, September 2010.
“¢ “Les Juifs ont-ils viré í droite?“ L’Arche, Paris, forthcoming 2011.