Jacques Lezra, Professor
Department of English and Department of Spanish

M.Phil., Ph.D., Yale University (Comparative Literature), 1990.
Office: 7137 Helen C. White Hall
Office telephone: 608 265-3393
Campus E-mail: lezra@facstaff.wisc.edu

Research and Teaching Interests:

Literary theory and comparative literature; Shakespeare; Cervantes; the literary and visual culture of Early Modern Europe.

Publications:

• Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford 1997)
• Visión y ceguera: Ensayos sobre la retórica de la crítica contemporánea, an ed. and tr. of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1992)
• ed. Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labor of Reading (Yale 1995)
• ed., Suplemento al Tesoro de la Lengua Española Castellana de Sebastián de Covarrubias (Polifemo 2001)
• Articles on Althusser, Freud, Foucault, Goya and Wittgenstein, Stein, Cervantes, Shakespeare
• The 2002 Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory features my long entry on "Kant and Hegel."

Prizes and Awards:

• 2002 Laurence-Urdang Dictionary Society of North America Award (for Suplemento al Tesoro de la Lengua Española Castellana de Sebastián de Covarrubias)
• 1993 PEN Writers Club Award (for Visión y ceguera); Morse Fellowship, Faculty Development Grant.

Work in Progress:

I am completing work on two books, The Political Economy of the Soul: Imagining "Spain" in the Golden Age, on the uses to which Spanish fascism in the 1930's to middle 1940's puts the literary and visual culture of the Golden Age; and The Ethic of Terror in Radical Democracy, on the notion of "constitutive antagonism" in the social sphere (with chapters on Poe, Marx with Kant, Sade, the Unabomber, Levinas's essay "Substitution," ETA's assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers, etc.).

Graduate and undergraduate teaching:

Classes on Shakespeare; on Spanish and Spanish-American Golden Age and Baroque literature and culture; on "Aesthetics and Social Change" in 20th Century American literature; on "Postmodernism in 'America';" on "Literature and Philosophy," "Literature and Psychoanalysis,"and "Literature and Ideology;" on "El Barroco transatlántico." Graduate seminars on critical methods, on "The Subject in Theory," on "Ethics/Terror/Aesthetics," on "Allegory and Materialism," on "Literature and Philosophy of the Sublime," and on "Fetishism."