Visiting Faculty Member

Hélène Merlin-Kajman, founder of the Transitions movement, is an eminent specialist of 17th-century French letters and one of today’s most creative theorists of what she still proposes to call literature (sans quotation marks). In such works as Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (1994), L’absolutisme dans les Lettres et la théorie des deux corps (2000), and L’excentricité académique (2001), she showed how the literary domain, after the traumatism of the Wars of Religion, created forms of civility that mediated, rather than erased or petrified, political passions. In La langue est-elle fasciste? (2003), she probed the relation between civility and language, denouncing, along the way, the pedagogical impasse that attempts to teach the latter while exposing it as an instrument of coercion. In her most recent books, Lire dans la gueule du loup and L’animal ensorcelé (both published in 2016), Hélène Merlin-Kajman develops an anthropological approach that seeks to account for literature’s trans-historicity yet separates it from myth and other sacred objects: in the “transitional” space it can – but may also forget to – inhabit, moving between the public and the private, between interiority and exteriority, literature is at once sacralized and desecrated. As such, it invites us to play with what connects and divides, seduces and threatens us; it suggests a commonality of the diverse, which can be shared without being obeyed.