Visiting Faculty

Bayard, Pierre

  • Portrait
  • Pierre Bayard
  • Pierre Bayard is Professor of French literature at Université Paris 8 - Saint-Denis, and currently a Visiting Professor in the French Department at Rutgers
  • Email: pbayard@french.rutgers.edu

A leading explorer of the effects and affects of literature, and a relentless (albeit hilarious) inventor of paradoxical, proactive reading methods designed to make us aware of what texts do to us and of what we might do with them (let alone with our lives), he is the author of many books, including the world-wide sensation Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus ? (2007). Among his other works are Il était deux fois Romain Gary, 1990; Le Paradoxe du menteur. Sur Laclos, 1993; Maupassant, juste avant Freud, 1994; Le Hors-sujet. Proust et la digression, 1996; Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd ?, 1998; Comment améliorer les œuvres ratées ?, 2000; Enquête sur Hamlet. Le dialogue de sourds, 2002; Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse ?, 2004; Demain est écrit, 2005; L’Affaire du Chien des Baskerville, 2008; Le Plagiat par anticipation, 2009; Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur ?, 2010; Comment parler des lieux où l’on n’a pas été ?, 2012; Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau ?, 2013; Il existe d’autres mondes, 2014; Aurais- je sauvé Geneviève Dixmer?, 2015; and Le Titanic fera naufrage, 2016. His last book, L’énigme Tolstoïevski (2017), is the first study of a doubly major yet (until now) bizarrely overlooked Russian novelist.

Professor Bayard is teaching, "Studies in 19th Century French Literature - La représentation de la folie dans la littérature française du 19e siècle" for the Graduate Program this Fall, and will deliver a lecture, "Hitchcock s'est trompé: Fenêtre sur cour, contre-enquête” on September 26th.

Rykner, Arnaud

Arnaud Rykner is an academic, writer and former theatrical producer. He is currently a Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where he leads the IRET Research Team (Institut de Recherche en Etudes Théâtrales). He has authored a dozen essays and edited many collected works. He was responsible for the critical edition of the theatrical works of Nathalie Sarraute in the prestigious Pléiade series, as well as those of several modern authors (as Marguerite Duras) or older works (Marivaux, Maeterlinck), in paperback collections. As a theatrical producer he has notably put on the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Maurice Maeterlinck and Bernard-Marie Koltès. He is a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University and a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Durham and, for the second time, a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has also published two plays and eight novels, several of which have appeared in paperback and two of which have been translated into English (Snuggly Books Publisher).