Stanford Humanities Center
Margaret Cohen will be directing Stanford's Center for the Study of the Novel beginning in the Fall of 2004. New to Stanford as of Fall 2003, she was formerly a Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.Cohen has written Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution and The Sentimental Education of the Novel, and was awarded the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione prize in French and Francophone literature. In addition, Cohen coedited The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel with Carolyn Dever, and Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre with Christopher Prendergast. She edited and translated Sophie Cottin's best-selling novel of 1799, Claire d'Albe, and has edited a new edition of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
SHC Project
"The Novel and Seafaring"
Her current research interests involve rethinking the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of its waterways. A part of that project is a book she is now writing on how the history and representation of open ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel; the working title is "The Novel and the Sea."From the advent of open ocean travel at the turn of the 16th century, seafaring helped define an emerging global world and participated in the development of modern science, technology, capitalism, and imperialism. An immense body of maritime writing developed across the early modern and modern eras, whose major works were rapidly translated into the European languages of the Atlantic world to be used instrumentally by governments and professionals and enthusiastically consumed by armchair readers. The non-fictional genres of this international literature included manuals on the mariner's craft and narratives of exploration, battle, shipwreck, piracy, and shipboard life. These genres edged imaginary voyage narratives and sensational pirates, biographies, and shaded into the novel, as is indicated by the maritime subject matter of seminal works in the trans-Atlantic literary tradition. During her residence at the Stanford Humanities Center, Cohen proposes to complete a book on how maritime writings have informed the novel, and beyond that, what the novel owes to forms of thought and representation deriving from the history of open ocean adventuring, transport, commerce, and battle.
