Dr Damian Catani

MA, DPhil (Oxon)

BA Chair of Exams for French; BA Programme Director for French and Modern Languages; BA Programme Director for Modern Languages and Management Studies; MA Programme Director and Chair of Exams for French (2011-12)

Lecturer: 19th and 20th Century French literature and thought

Contact details

Department of European Cultures and Languages
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
E-mail: d.catani@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7631 6174

Profile

Before coming to Birkbeck in 2007 Damian Catani taught at the Universities of Nanterre (Paris X), Oxford and Cambridge.

Research and teaching interests are as follows:

• 19th and 20th century French literature and thought, with a particular emphasis on notions and representations of evil.
• 19th Century French poetry (especially Mallarmé and Baudelaire) and the role of poetry in society.
• The 19th Century French novel and short story (Zola and Villiers).
• The visual arts.

In final stages of book project entitled Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought , which through close analysis of a range of seminal writers and thinkers from the late eighteenth century to the present day, maps the complex evolution in modern conceptualisations and representations of evil.

Steering Committee member of the Birkbeck Centre for Research in Representations of Kinship and Community.

PhD supervision: one AHRC-funded PhD on Jules Laforgue and German philosophy submitted 2011); one PhD on Zola and Myth.

Course convener for two MA options: Evil in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Thought and Notions of the Public Intellectual in France and for three BA modules: Transgression in Ninteenth-Century French Culture,  French Thought from the Renaissance to Post-modernity and The French Novel of Disillusionment.

Publications

Books

Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought, (Continuum: forthcoming 2012).

The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism and Politics in Mallarmé (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 284 pages.

Book chapters

'The French Revolution: Historical necessity or historical evil? Terror and Slavery in Hugo’s Quatre-vingt treize and Confiant’s L’archet du colonel’,  in The Nineteenth Century: Institutions and Power , edited by David Evans and Kate Griffiths (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 51-69

‘Capitalism Reviewed: The Perspectives of Villiers, Zola and Mallarmé’, Currencies: Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by Sarah Capitanio, Lisa Downing, Paul Rowe, Nicholas White (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 59-71.   

‘Visual and Textual Synergy in Stéphane Mallarmé’, Across the Arts, edited by Antonia Braida and Giuliana Pieri (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), 190-206.

 ‘The Poet as Democrat: Art in Relation to Consumerism in Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode’ in Situating Mallarmé, edited by Gordon Millan (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 69-83.

Articles in refereed journals

'The Dichotomy of Evil: Victims and Perpetrators in Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes' (in preparation)

'Baudelaire Revisited: A Sartrean and Bataillean reading of ‘Le Jeu’’, Dix-Neuf, forthcoming 2012. 

‘Notions of Evil in Baudelaire’, Modern Language Review, October 2007, Vol. 102, no.3, 990-1007

‘Consumerism and the Discourse of Fashion in Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode’, Mots Pluriels, May 1999, no. 10, edited by Jean-Marie Volet and Phillip Winn.

Book reviews and editorial work for refereed journals

Regular editor for Dix-neuf and Modern Language Review and has written a number of  book reviews for French Studies, The Journal of European Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, Modern Language Review.

Member of editorial panel (with Gordon Millan, Bertrand Marchal, Pascal Durand and Helen Abbott) for 'Cahiers Mallarmé'.