Anne-Lise Francois
Associate ProfessorWheeler Hall, room 453
Fall 2017 and Spring 2018: not in residence
afrancoi@berkeley.edu
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, as well as seminars and graduate courses in the Comparative Literature Department on European “Green” Romanticism and aesthetic theory, and on the writing and epistemology of love; her current teaching focuses on the convergence of literary and environmental studies. In areas as diverse as contemporary food and farming politics and debates on climate change and the temporality of environmental violence, she continues to seek alternatives to Enlightenment models of heroic action, productive activity, and accumulation, and to identify examples of the ethos of recessive fulfillment and non-actualization theorized in Open Secrets.
Specialties
Books
| Title | Fields | |
|---|---|---|
|
Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience Open Secrets identifies an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action in Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), and poems by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy. The author argues that these works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity of formal means and a freedom from w.... |
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
“‘The Feel of Not to Feel It,’ or the Pleasures of Enduring Form,” Blackwell Companion to British Romanticism (ed. Charles Mahoney) (forthcoming 2010)
“‘Not Thinking of You as Left Behind’: Virgil and the Missing of Love in Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13,“ ELH 75 (2008).
“Unspeakable Weather, or the Rain Romantic Constatives Know” in Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann Banfield, ed. Robert S. Kawashima, Gilles Philippe and Thelma Sowley. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008.
Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford University Press: 2008; recipient of the ACLA’s 2010 René Wellek Prize.
"'O Happy Living Things!': Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety," Diacritics, Summer 2003 (published 2005), reprinted in Between Terror and Freedom: Philosophy, Politics and Fiction Speak of Modernity, ed. Simona Goi. Lexington Books, 2006.
“The Starring of Loss in Wordsworth and Dickinson,” European Romantic Review, June 2004.
“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.
Current Research
Recent English Courses Taught
Spring, 2019
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 26/1 | Introduction to the Study of Poetry: The Reading of Poetry |
Poetry |
Fall, 2018
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 121/1 | The Romantic Period |
British 19th-Century |
Spring, 2017
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 166/2 | Special Topics: Studies in Literature and Environment (Shelter and Weather) |
Special Topics |
Spring, 2016
| Course & Section | Course Name | Course Areas |
| 190/13 | Research Seminar: Keats and Literary Tradition |
British 19th-Century Poetry Research Seminars |
University of California, Berkeley
English Department
322 Wheeler Hall,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1030
general phone: 510-642-3467
