Cécile Roudeau

My main object of research is nineteenth-century American literature. My work explores how literature interferes with our ways of apprehending the world; to what extent it affects the epistemic categories we live by and henceforth the world we live in. Because it emerges from the experiment with, and experience of, contingent relations that never quite stabilize into a concept, because it opens the concept and makes it differ from itself, literature—the kind of literature that I am interested in—hones and alters the very instruments whereby we seize the world—politically, aesthetically – as relation. My first book, *La Nouvelle-Angleterre : Politique d’une écriture. Récits, genres, lieu* (PUPS/AFEA, 2012), revisits New England literature, especially women regionalist writers of the turn of the nineteenth-century, from the angle of “place.” I started from a rather simple question: What does it mean for a story to take place? I suggest that texts take place — as do events or characters — in or outside a literary tradition, a national or global history. In French, “place” implies a preexisting order in which one is able, is willing, to fit. I examine therefore the tension between “place” and “*lieu*.” “*Lieu*,” as I understand it, is not indexed on a stable configuration. Rather, it emerges from the reshuffling of categories, the undoing of the “distribution of the sensible” through the agency of unassignable creative energies. I argue then that regionalist texts written by New England women writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and others play with, and question, the demarcations of gender, genres. They destabilize hierarchies (region/nation; women/ men; country/city; stories/novels…). More broadly, they negociate between the imperative of generality and the urge of singularity, making up, or rather writing up, a “*lieu*” of their own at a time when the United States was tempted by a new form of imperialism imposing a rearticulation between singularities within a new scale of universality: empire. The articulation between singularities and different scales of aggregation is at the heart of my current manuscript around the aesthetic expression of the commons in nineteenth-century American literature. The emphasis on non essentialist singularities in regionalist, and more broadly, modernist, literature, I argue, should not be opposed to what I see as a constant attention in literary texts to “what we have in common.” While it requires new imaginings of old universals (the human, the nation, womanhood…), the commons must be distinguished from an essentialist vision of community since it questions the fragile articulation between an “I” that is not an identity and a larger ensemble whose fluid borders are ever contingent on a question, a problem, or an urge. This book, provisionally entitled *Fictions d’un en-commun*, to be published by Honoré Champion, explores how US literature was engaged in making up a commons throughout the long nineteenth-century. The project reads together canonical and lesser known texts to explore the questions of “language,” “war,” “sentiment,” and “the body (politic).” Université Paris Diderot (Paris Sorbonne Cité) UFR Etudes anglophones 5 rue Thomas Mann 75205 Paris cedex 13, France <cecile.roudeau@gmail.com> **Current position (since 2015)** Professor of American Literature, Departement of English Studies, Université Paris Diderot, France Head editor of *Transatlantica: American Studies Journal* (literature and arts) **Education** 2007 Ph.D with distinction.University Paris IV-Sorbonne. Director : Pierre-Yves Pétillon. *La Nouvelle-Angleterre : Questions de lieu. Autour de l’œuvre de Sarah Orne Jewett.* 1998 MA (DEA) with distinction (Université Paris Sorbonne/ENS) 1994 MA (maîtrise) with distinction (Université Paris Sorbonne/ENS) 1992-1998 Ecole normale supérieure (ENS-Ulm) -Paris **Fellowships/prizes/ invitations** 2014 Associate researcher (Karla Scherer Center for American Studies, University of Chicago) 2011 French Association for American Studies (RFEA) Annual Book Prize 2000 Fulbright Research Fellowship (Harvard University) 1996-1997 ENS Student Fellow (Princeton University)