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 Aesthetics of Kinship & Community (BRAKC).

Programme Director, MA in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community.

Tutor for Admissions, MA AKC.

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
http://bbk.academia.edu/NathalieWourm

Profile

Nathalie Wourm's current research and publications are in the field of contemporary avant-garde writing in France.

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, Christophe Fiat, Jérôme Game, Christophe Hanna, Vannina Maestri, Anne Portugal, Nathalie Quintane, 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 is programme director of the MA Aesthetics of Kinship and Community, 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)
• MA European Cultures (Time, Memory and the Novel)
• MA Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (Core Course)
  
  

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

Nathalie studied in France, the USA, and at Oxford, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Birkbeck in 1991.

Publications (excluding book reviews)

Articles in refereed journals

• 'On Just the Other Side of Intimacy: Pierre Alferi's La Protection des Animaux', Nottingham French Studies, 2011, 50:3, 128-138.
  

• 'Non-Readings, Misreadings, Unreadings: Deleuze and Cadiot on Robinson Crusoe and Capitalism', French Literature Series, 2010, XXXVII, 177-190.

• '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 & Felizitas 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.

Current Projects

Books

• A monograph entitled The Deconstructionist Movement in French Literature.

• A collection of interviews entitled Mécaniciens Lyriques: Ecrivains du Vingt-et-Unième Siècle.