Margaret Cohen on Claire de Duras: "Who Has the Right to Tragedy"?

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKERS: Margaret Cohen, Stanford University; Christie McDonald, Harvard University

"Who Has the Right to Tragedy? This paper discusses the novels of Claire de Duras, the author chosen to represent the 19th century for the French agrégation 2026, as inheritor of the post-Revolutionary sentimental novel where women writers took a leading role. One essential feature of these novels is to represent a crisis in community that examines conflicts in Revolutionary ideals when they are put into practice, as I have argued in The Sentimental Education of the Novel. In Ourika, Edouard and Olivier, Duras modifies post-Revolutionary sentimental fiction to ask how readers engage with the sufferings of characters when the values of the community are the source of their oppression. If the protagonist does not have the ability to act within a community, how does such isolation impact tragic poetics?  

About the Speakers

Margaret Cohen is a scholar of transatlantic literary and cultural modernity, with particular expertise in the history of the novel and the imagination of the oceans. She s Andrew B. Hammond Professor in French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, USA, where she teaches in the Department of English, and by courtesy, in the Departments of French and Italian and of Comparative Literature. 

She is the author of multiple edited collections, article and monographs: her award-wining Novel and the Sea (2010) and The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1999), as well as Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993) and most recently The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed the Imagination (2022). 

Her current research interests include the literary history of the cross-Channel Gothic and building intellectual infrastructures for the growing interdisciplinary field of ocean humanities in collaboration with communities across Stanford, and notably the ocean science. She will be pursuing the ocean-focused research a 2025-2026 fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center where her project focuses on "Ocean Science for the Ocean Humanities: The Case of Monterey Bay."

Christie McDonald, who will be guiding our discussion of Professor Cohen's paper, is the Smith Professor emerita of French Language and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor emerita of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.  A literary historian, as well as cultural critic and theorist, McDonald has worked on eighteenth and twentieth to twenty-first-century French literature and thought in a comparative context. She has also published in the areas of literature and philosophy, anthropology, feminist theory, and the arts (music and painting). 

Pre-circulated paper attached below. Register here for the password to access the paper.

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu. 

Co-sponsored by France and the World.