Alison James

My research and teaching focus on twentieth and twenty-first century literature, with a particular interest in representations of everyday life, chance and contingency in literature, documentary narrative, and theories of fictionality. These concerns are united by an enduring fascination with literature’s varied modes of depicting and mediating reality, and by a commitment to exploring the social and collective meanings of literary forms.

My first book, Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern UP, 2009) delves into the work of a major French writer, examining Perec’s use of formal and semantic constraints both as a spur to literary inspiration and as a means of exploring the tension between chance and determinism, fate and freedom, historical forces and human agency. The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Oxford UP, 2020) analyzes works by a range of authors (Gide, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, Modiano) who integrate documentary materials to develop new forms of literary ethnography, archival autobiography, or testimonial writing. While that book investigates literature’s claim to grasp and represent facts, my current research turns to the other side of the coin and to recent literary production, exploring shifting conceptions and uses of fictionality in the last three decades. In a series of edited or co-edited volumes and journal issues, I have tackled complex conceptual issues in the theory and history of literature, such as the paradoxical cognitive attitudes associated with fiction (The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief) or the challenges of theorizing and representing chance and indeterminacy in narrative or artistic form (Figures of Chance II). My recent projects have also aimed to take stock of new directions and broad tendencies in contemporary literature (Écrire le quotidien aujourd’hui; Déplacements de la fiction?)

My teaching has a strong interdisciplinary component, often relating literature to the visual arts and/or cinema (“Littérature et photographie”; “Écrire le quotidien, XXe–XIXe siècles”). I have also taught undergraduate and graduate courses on twentieth-century poetry, history in the novel, literary games, the literary avant-garde, realism, travel writing, and autobiography.