Morgane Cadieu
Ph.D., Cornell University, 2014
M.A., Université Rennes 2, 2008
Morgane Cadieu specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone prose, experimental fiction, randomness in literature and theory, materialist philosophies (especially atomism and feminism), spaces studies, narratives of social emancipation and migration, and the aesthetics of trains.
Her second book, On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature (The University of Chicago Press, 2024) demonstrates that socially mobile writers and characters are the digest of our literary and political moment. It offers a new perspective on class mobility as a formal, literary issue in texts by Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye among others.
She co-edited two special issues: Beaches and Ports with Hannah Freed-Thall (Comparative Literature, 2021) and Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig with Annabel Kim (Yale French Studies, 2023).
Her first book, Marcher au hasard: clinamen et création dans la prose du XXe siècle, reads works by Georges Perec and his experimental peers alongside the ancient philosophy of atomism as a way to reflect on creativity and free will, and to propose new ways of envisioning literary walks in urban settings.
With the help of undergraduate French major students and members of the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design, she 3D printed a train based on Emile Zola’s La Bête humaine (https://news.yale.edu/2015/02/16/next-stop-bringing-literary-train-life-3d-printer).
Books
On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature (The University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Marcher au hasard: clinamen et création dans la prose du XXe siècle (Classiques Garnier, 2019)
Reviews: The French Review; Acta Fabula; Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Edited Journal Issues
Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig, volume co-edited with Annabel Kim, Yale French Studies 142, Fall 2023.
Beaches & Ports, special issue co-edited with Hannah Freed-Thall, Comparative Literature 73:2, 2021.
Articles
“Afterword: Lesbian Atomism,” Yale French Studies 142, Fall 2023.
“How the Grass Grows in the Works of Patrick Modiano,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 25:2, 2021
“Afterword: The Littoral Museum of the Twenty-First Century,” Comparative Literature 73:2, 2021.
“The Muddy Parvenu: Reading the Urban Signs of Social Mobility,” The Balzac Review, n° 3, 2020.
“Stallone meurt: l’auteur et ses fins de vie dans les romans d’Emmanuèle Bernheim,” Fabula-LhT, n° 22, “La Mort de l’auteur,” June 2019
“L’épopée ferroviaire: migrations et mémoire postcoloniale dans le récit contemporain,” Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, n° 14, 2017.
“Stratification of the Urban Space in Contemporary Paris: Modiano, Vasset, and the Data Centers of Memory,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, volume 21, n° 2, 2017.
“‘Au tapin ! Saisis ta plume !’ Régler les comptes de l’Histoire sur le terrain de la prose française dans le premier roman de Modiano,” French Forum, volume 41, n° 3, 2016.
“La préhistoire du clinamen dans la ville de l’homme qui dort,” Les Cahiers Georges Perec, volume 12, Paris, Le Castor Astral, 2015.
“Et puis et: la littérature à bout de ficelle,” Formules: la revue des littératures à contraintes, n° 17, 2013.
Undergraduate Courses
- Novels of the Twenty-First Century (FREN 233)
- France by Rail: Trains in French Literature, Film, and History (FREN 307/LITR 302)
- Social Mobility and Migration (FREN 416/WGSS 416/ER&M 335)
- Experimental Literature, Theory, and Manifesto (FREN 247/LITR 446)
- Fictions of Consumer Society (FREN 309)
- Women Vagabonds in Literature and Cinema (FREN 333/WGSS 357)
Graduate Courses
- Contemporary French Literature in the Making (FREN 690)
- Chance and Constraints in Literature (FREN 929/CPLT 728)
- Social Mobility Today (FREN 958/WGSS 783)
- May 68: Building a Corpus (FREN 918, co-taught with Alice Kaplan)
- Flâneuses and Vagabondes in 20th-century Novel and Film (FREN 928)