Professor MORIMOTO, Atsuo
Professor MORIMOTO, Atsuo
- Academic Degree
- Ph.D. in French literature and culture, Blaise Pascal University
- Expertise
- French literature
- Research Theme
- French symbolism and literary modernity
French symbolism and literary modernity
My past research has centered on Paul Valéry (1871–1945), a French symbolist poet and critic who developed a unique poetics and also became known as thinker whose Cahiers recorded his intellectual explorations over the course of half a century. I have also written on Kobayashi Hideo, who was heavily influenced by Valéry, and led collaborative research project on the various modern institutions (literature, academic knowledge) that take as their object traces of life (“life-representations”), taking into account Valéry's ambiguous attitude toward to the autobiographical. I intend to continue my research on Valéry, partly in light of the new biographical materials and correspondences currently being published, from a broader perspective that also encompasses Stéphane Mallarmé and other symbolist poets. At the same time, I mean to leverage the understanding of literary modernity that this research on symbolism will generate to consider it more broadly, searching for its origins in, for example, the late eighteenth-century author Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, while considering how twentieth-century literature has taken up and responded to the various challenges of symbolism.