Literary studies in the U.S. has been influenced by a cast of postwar French thinkers whose names are by now familiar: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Barthes, and others. And yet some of the most generative concepts associated with these thinkers—and so, with what has come to be known as “French Theory”—emerged from a broader intellectual milieu, one whose own central figures have received comparatively little attention in contemporary anglophone criticism. This seminar seeks to return to a constellation of mid-century French thinkers—including Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, Jean Piaget, Raymond Ruyer, and others—in order to reconsider their relevance to literary studies today.

At a moment when literary scholars are increasingly engaging with cognitive science, affect theory, media theory, medical humanities, environmental humanities, histories of knowledge, and science and technology studies, many of these earlier thinkers appear strikingly contemporary. The goal of this seminar is thus to examine the resources that mid-century French thinkers offer for addressing some of our discipline’s most pressing concerns. We welcome contributions that place mid-century French thinkers in dialogue with literary texts, literary theory, interdisciplinary literary scholarship, and contemporary critical debates. We are particularly interested in papers that move beyond narratives of historical influence and instead explore how these figures might help us rethink the objects, methods, and ambitions of literary scholarship today.

Possible topics include:

• French epistemology and literary analysis
• Canguilhem and the environmental humanities
• Bachelard, imagination, materiality, and poetics
• French theories of normativity and literary engagements with concepts of health, illness, and disability
• Piaget, developmental theory, and the cognitive turn in literary studies
• Hyppolite, Hegelianism, and literary history
• Ruyer and the prehistory of posthumanism
• Form, information, and emergence in literature and media
• Literary history and histories of science and technology
• Concepts of life, organism, and milieu
• French phenomenology and aesthetic embodiment
• Literary archives, translation, and the circulation of concepts

Because a number of scholars have already been invited to participate in the seminar, please email Audrey Wasser ([email protected]) before submitting a proposal.