Dr Michael Holland, Tutorial Fellow in French, recently published Avant dire, a collection of articles about French writer Maurice Blanchot.
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was one of the foremost French writers and thinkers of the post-war period. As a novelist, he inspired generations of writers; as a critic he set the agenda for decades of French thinking about literature; as a philosopher he enabled the likes of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to develop original bodies of work; as a political activist and thinker he was at the heart of radical anti-colonialist and leftist movements in the 50s, 60s and beyond.
Michael Holland was one of the first scholars to work on Blanchot. He published the first comprehensive bibliography of his work in the 1970s, and after completing his thesis in 1982 he went on to write numerous studies of aspects of Blanchot’s work in both English and French. His Blanchot Reader (1995) presented a range of writings from the 1930s to the 1990s to English-speaking readers, with an introduction to each section of the book. He has currently published three volumes of a four-volume translation of Blanchot’s wartime writings with Fordham University Press (New York), with an introduction to each. In 2012 he was one of the founders of a new annual journal devoted to Blanchot studies, the Cahiers Maurice Blanchot.
Michael Holland is currently working on a book-length study of time and narrative in Blanchot’s writing. However, he has always preferred to pursue his research in articles. Over several decades he has produced a significant body of material in both English and French. Avant dire contains most of the articles he has written in French. The majority have been revised for publication. A number are unpublished.
