Senior Lecturer

al.milne@ulip.lon.ac.uk

I completed my first degree in Philosophy and French Studies at Oxford University, embarked on graduate work in philosophy in France before deciding that the Comparative Literature Department of Columbia University in New York was the best place to develop my interdisciplinary interests. My research and writing to date has focused on the work of Jean Paulhan, the milieu he established around the Nouvelle Revue Française and the connections between this review and the broader moment of European literary modernism. Currently I am extending my exploration of early to mid-twentieth-century press and pamphlets to include architectural and design publications for a book entitled Beyond Paris on the utopian visions that contributed to the rhetorical and material construction of the Parisian suburbs, generally perceived as the dystopian ‘badlands’ of the city of light. I also have a strong interest in translation studies and practice and have published and spoken on translations of Proust, Gide, Conrad, James, Sartre and Tournier. This work is due to be consolidated in book form under the title of The Limits of Idiom. Translation and Voice.

As a President’s Graduate Fellow of Columbia University I taught in the undergraduate programme of Columbia College. In Paris I have taught for the Ecole normale supérieure, the universities of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris Diderot-Paris VII and the American University in Paris.

I am currently supervising two research students, the first working on contemporary French novelist Linda Lê, the second on the relation between image and text in Matisse’s illustrated volume of Ronsard’s poetry. In addition to literary projects, I would be happy to consider working with students interested in urban cultural studies, particularly as they relate to visions of and for the city.

Books

• The Extreme In-Between: Jean Paulhan's Place in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), pp 164.
• Correspondance Jean Paulhan–Yvon Belaval (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Cahiers de la NRF, 2004), pp 309.

Translations

• Translation of Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

• Translation of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1999)

Edited collections

• Guest editing of special issue of The Romanic Review (99:1-2) entitled 'La Nouvelle Revue Française' in the Age of Modernism (2008)

Articles/Chapters (2000-2008)

• "La tâche aveugle: l’impensé de la rhétorique chez Jean Paulhan", Cahiers de l’Association internationale des etudes françaises, 61, 2009
• "Next to Nothing. The Space of Political Potential in Jean Paulhan’s Critical Work", Culture, Theory and Critique, Routledge, 2008
• "Gide's Polymorphous Perversity, or French Modernism's Arrested Development", Romanic Review, 99.1, 2008, pp. 103-118
• "La Nouvelle Revue Française in the Age of Modernism", Romanic Review, 99.1, 2008, pp. 3-8
• "Linguistic Intuition, or the Limits of Analytical Translation", review of Michel Ballard, Versus: La Version réfléchie, deux volumes (Paris: Ophrys, 2004), Franco-British Studies, 37, 2007, pp. 103-109
• "From Thirdworldism to Fourth-World Flânerie: François Maspero’s Recent Journeys", French Studies, 60.4, 2006, pp. 489-502
• "Une avant-garde paisible: le modernisme d’une petite revue française prise dans la guerre", in Benoît Tadié (dir.), Revues modernistes anglo-américaines. Lieux d’échanges, lieux d’exil, Paris: Entr’revues, 2006
• "Seeing Under the Skin", review of Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics, The Senses and Society, 1.2 (July 2006), pp 273-275.
• "Hallucinatory Figures: Some Examples from Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and its Translation Friday by Norman Denny", Palimpsestes, 17 (September 2005), pp 95-111.
• "The Power of Dissimulation: ‘When you are only three white men...’" Yale French Studies, 106 (March 2005), pp 109-124.
• "Sensing the Obscure, Obscuring the Sense: Estrangement in the Translation and Re-Translation of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu", Palimpsestes, 15 (October 2004), pp 109-119.
• "Getting Impersonal", review article of Christophe Charle, La Crise des sociétés impériales : Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne 1900–1940, Franco-British Studies, 32 (Spring 2003), pp 72-77.
• "Food for Thought: ethnographie et rhétorique selon Jean Paulhan", Littérature, 129 (March 2003), pp 107-123.
• "Faux et usage de faux: Paulhan joue Stendhal contre Valéry", Bulletin des Etudes Valériennes, 14 (January 2003), pp 101-116.
• Review article of Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, Cambridge Quarterly, 30, no 3 (Spring 2001), pp 275-278.
• "Placing the Commonplace: Translation According to Jean Paulhan", Palimpsestes, 13 (Summer 2001), pp 129-140.
• "Préface à une traduction à venir", Dossier Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, L'Infini, 70 (Summer 2000), pp 65-69.

Other

Recently co-organised an international colloquium entitled ‘Mai 68, forty years on’ in collaboration with Queen Mary and Royal Holloway Universities.

Invited to convene an international conference at the Maison française, Columbia University. The event was funded by the Sterling Currier Foundation and written up in Le Monde des Livres.

Recent invited papers for the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Trinity College, Dublin, the Association internationale des etudes françaises

Formerly a reader for Autrement and Plon

Reviews

Years’ Work in Modern Languages (vol. 68) described The Extreme In-Between as "an excellent book."

Professor Michael Syrothinski wrote: "Is Jean Paulhan’s ‘time’ finally coming? The recent appearance of the first volume of Gallimard’s fine re-edition of his Oeuvres Complètes has been one of the highlights of a resurgent interest in that most enigmatic of figures of the Twentieth Century. Dr Milne’s critical reappraisal of his work in The Extreme In-Between lights up the firmament of scholarship on Paulhan with equal brilliance. Milne situates his writing within the French intellectual currents and literary contexts of the time in which he was writing (the volatile middle decades of the twentieth century), providing an admirably ‘thick’ historical contextualisation of the often surprising and controversial positions he adopted. More than this, though, she sets his ideas into eloquent dialogue with a number of key contemporary literary and political theorists (notably Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man)." French Studies

Professor Richard Rand wrote: "il s’agit d’un livre remarquable, même incontournable et l’image d’un Paulhan champion de « l'art pour l’art » devient fausse, et n'est même plus envisageable. Merci donc à A.-L. M. de nous avoir mis sur l’une des pistes les plus pertinentes des études paulhaniennes." Bulletin de la Société des Lecteurs de Jean Paulhan

La Quinzaine littéraire, n° 890 described La Correspondance Jean Paulhan-Yvan Belaval as "une passionnate correspondance". 

See also:

L’Humanité, http://www.humanite.fr/2005-01-25_Cultures_Du-commerce-entre-honnetes-hommes,455459

L’Europe, n°913

Biographie, n°28.1