Anne-Lise Francois, Associate Professor
Office: 453 Wheeler
Phone: 510-642-2201
Email: afrancoi@socrates.berkeley.edu
Areas of Interest
Restoration & 18th-Century British Literature. 19th-Century British Literature. Critical Theory. Narrative & the Novel. Poetry.Current Research
Anne-Lise François' book - Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford University Press, December 2007) --presents a study of reticent assertion and recessive action in the fiction of Mme de Lafayette and Jane Austen, and the poetry of William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy. Rather than read these novels and poems as narratives of denial, the book argues that they make an open secret of fulfilled experience, where the term "open secret" refers to non-emphatic revelation--revelation without insistence and without rhetorical underscoring. These works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity or slightness of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular the work of self-concealment and self-presentation. Questions of how to value unused powers and recognize inconsequential action also inform her essay on Wordsworthian natural piety and genetically engineered foods (Diacritics, Fall 2005), as wlell as an earlier published work on the gentle force of habit in Hume and Wordsworth). She has also published on fashion and popular music in the 1970s.Professional Statement
Anne-Lise François joined the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1999, after receiving her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her teaching and research focus on (mostly) 19th-century British, American and European (French and German) fiction, poetry and thought, with some excursions into the 17th, 18th, and early 20th centuries. She has taught courses on the modern period in British and American literary history, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, as well as seminars and graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department on European Romanticism and aesthetic theory, and on the writing and epistemology of love.
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford University Press, December 2007)
"'O Happy Living Things!': Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety," Diacritics, forthcoming 2005.
Fashion as Compulsive Artifice in Pop and Performance: Re-evaluating the 1970s, ed. Shelton Waldrep. Routledge Press, 1999.
'Fakin' it/Makin' it: Falsetto's Bid for Transcendence in 1970s Disco Highs, in Perspectives of New Music, Spring 1996.
To Hold in Common and Know by Heart: The Prevalence of Gentle Forces in Humean Empiricism and Romantic Experience, The Yale Journal of Criticism, April 1994.
Office Hours
by appointment
