Alison James

Alison James is Assistant Professor of French Literature and the College. Her research and teaching interests are in twentieth and twenty-first century French literature, with a particular focus on postwar experimental writing (both poetry and prose), the Oulipo group, representations of everyday life, and the connections between literature and philosophy. Her book Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern, 2009) analyzes the formal and thematic functions of chance in the works of Georges Perec, a major figure of postwar French literature. Her current book project traces a documentary tendency in twentieth-century French literature via a study of key works that place the relationship of fact and fiction into question.