Patrick Bray
Office: 2103 FLB
Phone: 265-6479
Email: pbray@illinois.edu
Patrick Bray (PhD Harvard, 2005) is Assistant Professor of French. His research and teaching interests span a variety of topics in nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature and theory – especially narrative literature, the interaction between text and image, theories of space and time, and cinema.
Prof Bray has published articles on Nerval (French Forum) and Paul Virilio (Yale French Studies), and is preparing articles on Proust and cinema, Jacques Rancière's notion of the partage du sensible, and the idea of theory in the novel.
His current book project, "The Subject of Space: Mapping the Self in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction," argues that nineteenth-century French fiction represents and negotiates the relationship between the self and the world as a function of space in a novel turned map. With the rise of the novel and of autobiography, in the wake of the French Revolution, the literary and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century France reconfigured both the ways literature could represent subjects and the ways subjects related to space. In the first-person works of Stendhal, Nerval, Sand, Zola, and Proust, maps situate the narrator within the imaginary space of the novel. Yet the time inherent in the text's narrative unsettles the spatial self drawn by the maps and so creates a novel self, one which is both new and literary, that transcends the rigid confines of a map.
With Phillip Usher (Barnard College, Columbia University), he is co-editing a volume of collected essays, Building the Louvre: Architectures of Art and Politics, which will trace the evolving connection between art and politics as articulated by the Louvre as physical site and productive concept.