Margaret Cohen

Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization
Professor of Comparative Literature

Contact:

Building 260, Room 211
Phone: 650 724 0106
macohen@stanford.edu

On leave 2011-12

OVERVIEW:

Please email comparativelit@stanford.edu to schedule a meeting with Professor Cohen or ask questions regarding the undergraduate major/minor.

Her publications include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), that was awarded the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione prize in French and Francophone literature. In addition, Margaret Cohen coedited two collections of scholarship on the European novel: The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel with Carolyn Dever Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre with Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). She edited and translated Sophie Cottin's best-selling novel of 1799, Claire d'Albe (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003), and has edited a new critical edition of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary that appeared with W.W. Norton in 2004.

EDUCATION:

1988: Ph.D., Yale University
1982: M.A., New York University 
1980-81: Universitaet Konstanz
1980: B.A., Yale University

AFFINITY LINKS:

literary theory
transatlantic
The novel
modernity

News & Events

Teagle Foundation grant awarded to Russell Berman for the project, “Graduate Student and Faculty Collaborative Teaching in the Humanities”

May 3, 2012

The DLCL is pleased to announce that Russell Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities,...

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: "How I Think (and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (Literature)"

Oct 26, 2011

Oct 17, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on:"How I Think (and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (...

Courses

COMPLIT

199

Senior Seminar: Pleasures of Reading

Win

2010-11

Required of Comparative Literature seniors; others by consent of instructor. Different paradigms for the kind of enjoyment readers get from literature: entertainment instruction; ideological comfort critical distance; inspiration and incitation to their own creativity. Works read may include Aristotle Hegel and Brecht on tragedy; Longinus and Burke on the sublime; Roland Barthes S/Z; sonnets by Mallarmé and Eliot's Wasteland; Cixous on écriture féminine; Bakthin's book on Rabelais and carnival and Rabelais and the French fabliaux; Adorno on kitsch and literature of entertainment; Benjamin's essay on The Storyteller; Janice Radway's Reading the Romance. GER:DB-Hum
COMPLIT

123

The Novel The World

Spr

2010-11

The novel as the cultural force which has changed our sense of reality and the protean form that has reshaped the literary universe. Readings from: ancient Greece; medieval Japan and France; early modern Spain China and Britain; 19th-century popular fiction; modernist experiments; and postmodern pastiches. GER:DB-Hum

Publications

Cohen, Margaret The Novel and the Sea. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary : contexts, critical reception. Eds. Margaret Cohen. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Cohen, Margaret, and Carolyn Dever The literary channel : the inter-national invention of the novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Cottin, Sophie Claire d'Albe : an English translation. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002.
Cottin, Sophie Claire d'Albe : the original French text. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002.
Cohen, Margaret The sentimental education of the novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Spectacles of realism : body, gender, genre. Eds. Margaret Cohen, and Christopher Prendergast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
Cohen, Margaret Profane illumination : Walter Benjamin and the Paris of surrealist revolution. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California press, 1993.