Nicolas Estournel

Position
Lecturer
Office Phone
Office
313 East Pyne
Office Hours

Mon: 11:00am-12:00pm in East Pyne 313 and by appointment

Bio/Description

Profile

Nicolas Estournel received his Ph.D. in French Literature, Thought, and Culture from New York University, and his M.A. in Comparative Literature from University College London.

His current project analyzes how the structure of language echoes that of fashion in Roland Barthes’ works, and how the analogy between text and textile imposes a set of meanings on the dressed body. He develops this idea beyond Barthes, from 19th-century dandyism to the literary and social fashion phenomenon of SAPE, and shows how the representation of clothes and clothed surfaces in literature and film follows a specific logic of aesthetics. He demonstrates that this vision of clothes, fabric, and textile, and their connection with the linguistic structure reveals the confusion between sensibility and intelligibility on the very body of the subject.

In 2020, he conducted an extensive interview on the plasticity of the surface with contemporary philosopher Catherine Malabou which has been published by French Studies along with a section of his dissertation on plastic reading.

At the intersection of literature and visual studies, his dissertation, “Scratching the Surface: The Concepts of Surface and Plasticity in the works of Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Resnais”, is the first to examine how French writers and film-makers in the 1960s and 1970s engage with the concept of surface as a medium connecting the world and the individual. His project draws on contemporary theory to examine the representations of various types of surfaces — skin, clothes, and screens — in literature and cinema, and demonstrates how these representations shape a cognizant subject’s perception of her world.

Selected Publications

"'Ce qui se passe à la surface' : Surface and Plasticity in Catherine Malabou's work, in French Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 2022.

An Interview with Catherine Malabou, in French Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, April 2022.

"Politique de la Surface dans La Noire de..., d'Ousmane Sembène", in Penser l’espace avec le cinéma et la littérature. Film Cultures, Cambridge: Peter Lang, February 2022.

"Punctuation as the Mark of Experience, or How Barthesian Photography has a Point", in Modern French Identities, Cambridge: Peter Lang, 2019.

"Alain Mabanckou and the Sense of SAPE: Self-Creation on the Surface", in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES. Volume 22, issue 5, London: Routledge, 2018.

"L'autre nom d'Aurore Dupin: Blaise Bonnin, lecteur de George Sand", in Les voix du lecteur dans la presse française du XIXe siècle, Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2018