Dr Nathalie Wourm

LèsL, MèsL (Lyon), DPhil (Oxon)

Lecturer: new French writing, new modes of narrative, literature with digital interface, poetry post-1995, contemporary radical and anticapitalist literature.

Co-Director, Birkbeck Research in Representations of Kinship & Community (BRRKC)

Contact details

Department of European Cultures and Languages
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
E-mail: n.wourm@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7631 6191

Profile

She is particularly interested in the influence of post-structuralist thought on a new generation of writers, and the way in which this is leading to a redefinition of the literary activity in form and content. Authors studied include Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Anne-James Chaton, Jérôme Game, Christophe Hanna, Vannina Maestri and Eric Sadin.

She has also published in the fields of comparative literature and literature in English, especially in relation to Symbolism and Modernism.

She convenes the undergraduate modules French V and French VI and teaches on the following degree programmes:

• BA French Studies (French Thought: from the Renaissance to Postmodernity; Kith or Kin? Forms of Relation and Community in Contemporary French Literature and Cinema; French VI)
• MA European Cultures (Time, Memory and the Novel)
  

She is currently supervising two PhD students, one working on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Slavoj Žižek, and one working on Julien Green.  

She is co-founder and co-director (with Dr Andrew Asibong) of Birkbeck Research in Representations of Kinship and Community (BRRKC).

Publications

Articles in refereed journals

• Forthcoming - 'Non-Readings, Misreadings, Unreadings: Deleuze and Cadiot on Robinson Crusoe and Capitalism', French Literature Series, 2010, XXXVII.

• 'Anticapitalism and the Poetic Function of Language', L'Esprit Créateur, 2009, 49:2, 119-131.
• 'Dylan Thomas and John Donne: the Magpie’s Magpie', Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 2004, IX, 190-199.
• 'L'Acquisition de la Compétence Socio-Pragmatique en Langue Étrangère', Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, 2002, VII-2, 129-143 (co-authored with Jean-Marc Dewaele).
• 'Dylan Thomas and the French Symbolists', Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays, 1999, V, 27-41.
  

Chapters in books:

• ‘Poetry in Moving Image: the French Avant-Garde’, Porous Boundaries: Texts and Images in Modern French Culture, edited by Jérôme Game (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 101-120.
• ‘The Smell of God: Scent Trails from Ficino to Baudelaire’, Sense and Scent: An Exploration of Olfactory Meaning, edited by Bronwen Martin & Felitzias Ringham (Dublin: Philomel, 2003), 79-98.
• 'Subjugating the Beast and the Angel: Suggestions of Dante's Inferno in 'Altarwise by owl-light'', Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall, edited by John Goodby & Christopher Wigginton (Swansea Review: 2000), 143-149.
  

Articles in literary journals:

• 'Enfants de Sterne: Current Trends in French Poetry', Areté: the Arts tri-Quarterly, 2003, XIII, 147-153.
• 'Fascist France - Then and Now', Areté: the Arts Tri-Quarterly, 2001, V, 69-78.
• 'Illuminations of all the mind', a profile of Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, New Welsh Review, 2001, LIV, 4-7.
  

Forthcoming and recent papers

• September 2010: 'The Art of Becoming Minor: French Literature after Deleuze', International Conference on 21st Century European Literatures, University of St Andrews.
• March 2009: 'Non-Readings, Misreadings, Unreadings: Deleuze and Cadiot on Robinson Crusoe and Capitalism', Thirty-Seventh French Literature Conference, University of South Carolina, USA.
• December 2007, as guest speaker: 'The Schizophrenia of Robinson Crusoe as Aesthetic Paradigm', French Seminar Series on the Avant-Garde, University of Birmingham.
• July 2007: 'French Lyrical Mechanics and Second Hand Engines', Real Things: Matter, Materiality, Representation, 1880 to the Present, University of York.
  

Current projects

• A book provisionally entitled Radical French Literature of the Twenty-First Century: The Aesthetics and Politics of an Undercurrent.
• An article entitled 'The Post-European Act of Writing', due for publication in a special issue of Nottingham French Studies, forthcoming 2011.