Professor Ian Maclachlan

Tutor in French, Professor of French Literature
Research

The main focus of my research is on modern French literature and philosophy, and especially the relationship between those domains. I have worked on writers and thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Beckett, Roger Laporte, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and on topics that include literary time, reading and the senses, the role of the imagination, and the responsibilities of the writer. Life-writing is another interest of mine, as is reflected in my recent study of the autobiographical works of Louis-René des Forêts.

Teaching

French language and literature, especially of the 19th and 20th centuries; literary theory; modern French philosophy.

Publications

My most recent book is a study of one modern French author’s innovative approach to life-writing: Louis-René des Forêts and Inner Autobiography. Prior to that, in a book entitled Marking Time, I explored temporalities of writing and reading in relation to Derrida, Blanchot, Beckett, des Forêts, Laporte and Klossowski. My first book, Roger Laporte: The Orphic Text, examined Laporte’s writings in the context of the thought of Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida. I have edited a collection of essays on the work of Derrida, co-edited collections on reading and the senses, and on Derrida’s landmark book Of Grammatology, and edited a special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies on the writer and responsibility. I also serve as an editor of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.