Michael Hugh Tempest Sheringham (1948–2016)

The premature death from cancer of Michael Sheringham only months after he retired is a tragic loss to his family, his friends, the numerous colleagues with whom he collaborated over the course of his career, and indeed French studies as a whole. One of the finest scholars of modern French literature of his generation, Michael played a leading role in the discipline both within the UK and beyond. The origins of the core preoccupation of his work — his unflagging interest in the specificity of literature, and in how literature relates to the extra-literary world — can be traced back to his childhood. Born in Cairo on 2 June 1948 to a francophone poet mother of Egyptian Coptic ancestry and to a British father who was working in Palestine as part of the British Mandate that had momentously ended only a few weeks earlier, Michael found in his family background an early laboratory for the differing claims of literature and history, as well as a reservoir of direct experience of the virtues and value of multilingualism. These lessons remained with him when the family returned to the very different environment of the Thames Valley, where he pursued his schooling at Wallingford Grammar School. In 1966 he went on to read French at the then recently founded University of Kent at Canterbury, attracted by the innovative interdisciplinary curriculum which sowed the seeds for the pluridisciplinary approaches that would later characterize so much of his work; he would later be awarded his PhD there. He moved to the New University of Ulster in 1973 to take up his first lecturing position, the first of many professional engagements with the Celtic fringe, the other space of otherness (after France) for which he harboured particular affection throughout his life. He returned in 1974 to Kent where he built his career, as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and (from 1992) Professor. In 1995 he was appointed to a Chair at Royal Holloway, remaining there until his election in 2004 to the Maréchal Foch Chair of French at Oxford University, and an associated Fellowship at All Souls College. This was the position from which he retired at the end of the academic year in 2015.

From the outset, the poetic, understood both as what is proper to poetry and as a metonym for the literary, was a central focus of Michael Sheringham’s work. His doctoral research on surrealism led to his first book, André Breton: A Bibliography (London: Grant & Cutler, 1972), and launched him on the path of exploring the difference between literary and other forms of expression that was to sustain his work for the rest of his career. He quickly widened his field of interest to experimental writing of all types and genres, and forged a name for himself as an acute and sensitive reader of many of the great post-war writers. His study of Beckett’s Molloy (London: Grant & Cutler, 1985) remains a primary reference on many undergraduate reading lists three decades later. But it was especially with his substantial French Autobiography: Devices and Desires. Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) that the exceptional quality of Michael’s contribution to the discipline was revealed. This book quickly established itself as the most important reference point in the study of French autobiography since Philippe Lejeune’s definition of the genre nearly twenty years previously. It makes a major theoretical contribution in its foregrounding of intertextual relations within autobiography, situating a wide range of authors in relation to the different models of the self developed in the chapters on Rousseau and Stendhal. Also of wider theoretical interest are its insightful discussions of such issues as the function of the reader of autobiography, or the particular relations between that genre and ideology. But it is above all a superb work of criticism, with its analyses of writers such as Leiris, Sartre, Duras, and Perec, now obligatory reading for all those interested in these authors. It showcases Michael’s writing at its generous best: scholarly and ambitious in scope, but also clear and accessible, deftly deploying theory in the service of the argument, but wholly without jargon...