Françoise Meltzer

Françoise Meltzer is a professor of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is also the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of the Humanities in French and in Comparative literature.

Work

Meltzer's scholarship include work on contemporary critical theory and nineteenth-century French literature. She marshals postmodern critical theories in order to explore literary representations of the subject.

In her book "Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality", she examines the ideas of originality and authorship in a series of case studies from Descartes to Walter Benjamin. In her book on Joan of Arc, she undertakes a study of that figure in relation to subjectivity as it is treated in philosophical and literary theoretical courses.

Meltzer recently co-edited a "Symposium on [God] " for the journal "Critical Inquiry". She is presently co-editing a book on religion and postmodernist texts as well as working on a special issue of "Critical Inquiry" on saints in the three monotheistic religions. She is also working on two books; one about 1848 in France, and the concept of rupture from a philosophical, political, and literary point of view; the other about the gendering of subjectivity.

Education

*Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 1975
*M.A. Comparative Literature, University of California, San Luis Obispo, 1971
*B.A. Universitäts Freiburg in Breisgau, 1969

Bibliography

*(1987) "Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Diegesis in Literature"
*(1988) "The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis", sed.
*(1994) "Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality"
*(2001) "For Fear, Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity"

ee also

*deconstruction
*deconstruction-and-religion
*list of deconstructionists
*weak theology