ASECS at 50: Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand

Pierre Saint-Amand is Benjamin F. Barge Professor of French at Yale University. He received a B.A. from the Université de Montréal, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in French from Johns Hopkins University. After completing his Ph.D., he spent a year at Yale, several at Stanford University, and the next three decades at Brown University, where he was Francis Wayland Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French Studies, before returning to Yale in 2016. He has also held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Iowa, and on the faculty of the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. Saint-Amand has research interests in the literature of the eighteenth century, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and literary criticism and theory. He is author of Diderot: Le Labyrinthe de la relation (1984); Séduire ou la passion des Lumières (1987) (The Libertine's Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 1994); Les lois de l'hostilité: La politique à l'âge des Lumières (1992) (The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment, 1996); and Paresse des Lumières (2014) (The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment, 2011). He has edited two eighteenth-century erotic novels, Thérèse philosophe (2000) and Confession d'une jeune fille (2005). Saint-Amand's work has appeared widely in journals such as Critique, Diderot Studies, Dix-huitième siècle, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Studies, L'Esprit Créateur, MLN, Modern Language Studies, Romanic Review, Stanford French Review, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, and Yale French Studies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, was named the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Year, and was inducted Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the government of France. He has served on the editorial board of Stanford French Review and on committees of the Modern Language Association and ASECS.

Adam Schoene:

You began your academic pathway as a youth in Haiti, journeyed to Canada to study at the Université de Montréal, then moved to the United States for graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. What were some of the formative moments for you in this international scholarly trajectory, and how did these experiences lead you to eighteenth-century studies?

Pierre Saint-Amand:

This international trajectory you just recalled confirmed my interest in the study of the eighteenth century. It was in Montreal that I was first exposed to the period via professors who later became my mentors (I think especially of Christie McDonald). When I started studying literature there, I was first interested in the modern period. But I quickly settled in the eighteenth century with a strong desire to become a true specialist. I immersed myself thoroughly in the books of the period, reading largely across genres and domains, literary and philosophical texts. I am grateful for the education I received in Montreal. It was an exciting milieu that prepared me well for graduate studies at Johns Hopkins. I studied in all the periods: early and modern, and benefited from the teaching of a charismatic and contagious philosopher, Pierre Granel, an ebullient specialist of Greek tragedy and of Sophocles, more specifically. The transition to the United States was therefore easy, because I did not really change academic culture; the passage to Hopkins only prolonged and developed what I had started to learn in Canada. I also owe a lot to my professors at Johns Hopkins: René Girard, Michel Serres, Louis Marin. Their seminars became a means to buttress my knowledge of theory. In many ways, the teaching at Hopkins cleared the passage between theory and literature for me, allowing greater focus in what I thought was an original way to approach the Enlightenment, at the time. After being dominated by deconstruction, Hopkins was changing and gesturing toward different models of French theory, I would say alternative paradigms. They included a dissident form of...