Faculty Fellow

Alison James

Professor of French Literature, and the College University of Chicago

Biography

Alison James works on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, with a particular focus on post–World War II experimental writing, representations of everyday life, chance and contingency in literature, and nonfiction narrative. What unites these interests is her enduring concern with literature’s varied modes of engagement with reality, and a fascination with the social and collective meanings of literary forms. James is the author of Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern University Press, 2009) and, most recently, The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Press, 2020).

To learn more about Alison James's research and publications, please see her profile page at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

asj@uchicago.edu

Topics

Featured Project

In René Magritte's "Golconda" (1953), men in suits rain down over the city.

Possible and Impossible Fictions

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2021 – 2022

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Projects

Fact and Fiction: Creation, Forms, Boundaries

Why do humans create fictions, and what kinds of truth can fictions convey? How do we distinguish between fact and fiction, and what is at stake in this separation? This project convened a working group to advance research on such questions.

The boundary between fact and fiction is a contested site in contemporary culture. On the one hand, a familiar set of binaries opposes fiction to its various others: the fiction/nonfiction divide that structures the literary market (in the United States and elsewhere); fiction film versus ...

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2016 – 2017

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