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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Polly Dickson

pld28

College:

Wolfson

Email:

pld28@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor:

Professor Andrew Webber (German)

Dr. Nick White (French)

Research:

My Ph.D. thesis is called ‘The Stakes of Mimesis: E. T. A. Hoffmann and Honoré de Balzac’. The project both offers a set of comparative close readings of works by these two nineteenth-century writers and aims to articulate a new account of literary ‘mimesis’: the tacit claim made by a narrative to copy or imitate forms found in the world, associated particularly with the writing of the nineteenth-century realists. With the help of twentieth-century thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Walter Benjamin, I re-read traditional accounts of mimesis, suggesting that to reproduce the forms of the world means also to reproduce the self’s sensory encounter with those forms. This re-reading of mimesis allows me to open up new perspectives on the intersection between Balzac and Hoffmann, and on the intersection between the genres of ‘realism’ and ‘romanticism’ traditionally attributed to them.

My research in Berlin extends this thinking. It takes the form of a short postdoctoral project dealing with Hoffmann’s drawings and paintings, located in the State Library of Berlin. This new project leads from the work developed in my thesis concerning Hoffmann's representational practice, drawing it out to question what it might mean to 'read' his visual artworks alongside his literary works.

Scholarships/Prizes: 

AHRC Scholarship for MPhil, 2012-13.

Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities for doctoral research, 2013-16.

Hanseatic Scholarship from the Alfred Töpfer Stiftung, 2016-17.

Publications:

‘Alexandre Mikhalevitch, Balzac et Bianchon (Review)’, French Studies 69.1 (2015), 99-100.

‘Interior Matters: Secrecy and Hunger in Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss’, Katherine Mansfield Studies 8 (2016), 11-22.

‘Feeling Figures: Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies (forthcoming 2017).

‘Marion Mas, Le Père Balzac (Review)’, French Studies (Forthcoming 2017).

Conference papers:

University of Chicago – ‘Border-Matter and the Limits of Play in the Works of E. T. A. Hoffmann’, June 2014.

New York University – ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Turns of Mimesis’, March 2015.

Queen Mary University, London – ‘“An infinitesimal number of leaf-life skins”: Honoré de Balzac and the Skin of Mimesis’ – June 2015.

Teaching:

I have lectured on the undergraduate module Ge5 (‘Romanticism: Poetic Vision and Altered Sight’). I have supervised and am willing to supervise undergraduates on topics for papers Ge5, Ge9 and CS5.