Emeritus Professor of French

MA Hons (University of Glasgow), DPhil (University of Oxford)

Jean Duffy has published extensively on the nouveau roman, on the relationship between literature and the visual arts and on the role of ritual in modern French narrative.  Her publications include monographs on Claude Simon and Michel Butor which examine a range of issues relating to verbal/visual inquiry: the artwork as narrative generator and mise en abyme, the exploitation of the ‘artistic biography’ as intertext, visual/ textual collaboration and the exchange and adaptation of visual and literary concepts and practices.   Her 2011 monograph,Thresholds of Meaning explores the centrality within recent French fiction and autofiction of the themes of passage, ritual and liminality and examines the thematic continuity which links this work with its literary ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s. Her most recent book, Perceiving Dubuffet: Art, Embodiment, and the Viewer (2021), offers a comprehensive reconsideration of Jean Dubuffet’s work which contextualizes it within contemporary developments in phenomenology and examines the central role played by questions relating to embodiment in the evolution of his aesthetic thinking and artistic practice.  Jean has also contributed scholarly editions of La Bataille de Pharsale and Le Jardin des Plantes to the Pléiade volume devoted to Claude Simon (2006).  She is the author of the Michel Butor website.