Academic & Teaching staff

Dr Claire Lozier

Teaching Fellow in French Literature, Cinema and Language

c.a.lozier@leeds.ac.uk

0113 343 7342

Biography

Licence (Nice), MA (Kent), Maîtrise (Nice), Ph.D (Kent), Doctorat (Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle), Agrégation de Lettres Modernes.

Claire Lozier was educated in France and in England. She studied for a BA in French and Comparative Literature at the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France (2000-2003). In 2003, she came to England as an Erasmus exchange student to study for an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. In the same year, she was awarded a 'Master' in Comparative Literature by the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis. She was awarded the CAPES and 'Agrégation de Lettres Modernes' in 2006. She returned to the UK to study for a PhD in cotutelle between the University of Kent and the Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her thesis examined the deconstruction of the relationship between the abject and the sublime in the works of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. In 2008, she was a 'pensionnaire étranger' at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Rue d'Ulm). Her PhD was awarded in 2010.

Claire worked as an Assistant Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Kent from 2006 to 2009. After a year of teaching practice as an 'Agrégée' in Paris (2009-2010), she worked as an Associate Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Kent (2010), and subsequently as a Teaching Fellow in French at the University of Leicester (2011). She joined French at Leeds in 2011.

Teaching

Claire teaches language (Levels 1,2 and 3), literature ('The Age of Extremes' and 'Foundations of Modern French Thought') and cinema ('The Seventh Art - Cinema in France') modules.

Administrative roles

Claire is a member of the French Exams Sub-group. She is also School Employability Officer.

Research

Claire's principal research interests are twentieth-century extreme aesthetics and stylistics; baroque aesthetics and art; the sublime; the abject; obscenity and pornography; representations of death in contemporary and baroque literature and art. She is also interested in rhetoric, narratology and in the presence of medieval, baroque and modern art in the work of Samuel Beckett.
Her thesis, entitled De l'abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, examines the destabilization of the hierarchical relationship between the abject and the sublime in the works of these authors. It shows that the question of the sublime is raised each time there is a crisis within representation (in the age of poetics, of aesthetics, or in the present day) in order to set up a confrontation between art and that which exceeds art, permitting art to renew itself. It also argues that whenever the notion of the sublime appears it moves in proximity to - and sometimes merges with - its opposite: the abject. This is the case in the works of Bataille, Genet and Beckett, in which a doxa that understands the world and organizes values in terms of purely antithetical paradigms is deconstructed. The thesis identifies the points of contact and exchange between the two concepts in the work of these writers and demonstrates the need to consider the links and affinities between them in all attempts at artistic renewal.

Her current research project, Journey to the Other Side of the Channel: Louis Ferdinand Céline and England, focuses on the role played by England and English in the work of Louis Ferdinand Céline. Drawing from literary and cultural studies, it analyses the influence of Céline's séjours in England on his work in aesthetic, stylistic, linguistic, thematic, and political terms. It also compares Céline's reception on either side of the Channel.

Publications

Monograph

De l'abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012)

Book Chapters

Forthcoming
'Au coeur de la fiction: la visite du coeur d'Harcamone dans Miracle de la rose de Jean Genet', Le Cur dans tous ses états (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012)

Under consideration
'Samuel Beckett's Funerary Sculpture' (accepted for publication in proceedings of Influence : Shifting Perspectives - conference held at University of Kent at Paris, 2011)

'La guerre comme « jeu cruel »: poétique de la guerre dans Le Funambule' (proceedings of Les Guerres de Jean Genet - conference held at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2010)

Articles

'Breath as Vanitas: Beckett's Debt to a Baroque Genre', Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 22 (2010)
'Becoming a Monstrous Text? The Process of Grafting in the Work of Jean Genet and in Jacques Derrida's Glas', Skepsi, 1 (Autumn 2008)

Forthcoming

'Présence de la sculpture funéraire de la fin du Moyen-Age et des débuts de l'ère moderne dans l'oeuvre narrative de Samuel Beckett: du motif artistique religieux à sa laïcisation scripturale', Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 24 (2012)

Under consideration

'Watt's Archive Fever', proceedings of Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive (conference held at the University of York, 2011)

Translations

'Iris Murdoch', entry by Elaine Morley for the Dictionnaire des femmes créatrices, eds. Béatrice Didier, Mireille Calle-Gruber and Antoinette Fouque (Paris: Les Éditions des Femmes, 2010)

'Christianisme ou communisme? L'hégélianisme marxien et le marxisme hégélien de iek', article by Lorenzo Chiesa, Actuel Marx, 46 (Paris: PUF, 2010)

Reviews 

In Les Lettres Romanes: Melina Balcàzar Moreno, Travailler pour les morts. Politiques de la mémoire dans l'uvre de Jean Genet (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010)

In Theatre Research International: Carl Lavery, The Politics of Jean Genet's Late Theatre. Spaces of Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010)