Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture

Room: Arts 1.01
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8310
Fax: +44 (0)20 8980 5400
Email: s.a.jordan@qmul.ac.uk

Office hours:
Semester 1: Tues 2-3; Wed 1-2
Semester 2: Wed 1-2; Thurs 2-3

Areas of specialisation

Twentieth- and twenty-first century French literature and visual culture. New women's writing in French. Feminisms. Francis Ponge's poetry and art criticism. Ethnography in advanced intercultural learning. Photography.

I welcome enquiries from prospective postgraduate students in these areas.

Recent publications

Books

• Contemporary French Women's Writing: Women's Visions, Women's Voices, Women's Lives (Amsterdam & New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
• The Art Criticism of Francis Ponge (Leeds: W.S. Maney & Son, Modern Humanities Research Association, Vol.36, 1994).

Guest editorship of journals

• Watch this Space: Women’s Conceptualisations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art, L’Esprit Créateur 51:1 (Spring 2011) (with Marie-Claire Barnet).
• Space, Place and Landscape in Contemporary French Women’s Writing, Dalhousie French Studies 93 (Winter 2010) (with Marie-Claire Barnet).
• Marie NDiaye: l’étrangeté à l’œuvre, Paris: Septentrion. Coll. Revue des Sciences Humaines, 293:1 (2009) (with Andrew Asibong).
• The Public and the Private in Contemporary France: Retracing the Boundaries, French Cultural Studies, 18:2 (2007) (with Raymond Kuhn).
  

Articles and chapters

• ‘Writing Age: Annie Ernaux’s Les Années’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47:2 (2011).
• ‘Valérie Mréjen’s Confining Camera’, in L’Esprit Créateur 51:1 (Spring 2011).
• ‘Fantastic Spaces in Marie NDiaye’, Dalhousie French Studies, 93 (Winter 2010).
• ‘Marie-Claire Bancquart, “Essentiel”’, in P. Collier and H. Azérad (eds), Twentieth-Century French Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• ‘Value, Meaning, Method: Nathalie Heinich’s Sociological Perspectives on Visual Culture’, in N. Saint and A. Stafford (eds), Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
  
• ‘Spatial and Emotional Limits in Installation Art: Agnès Varda’s L’Île et Elle’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites 13:5 (2009).
  
• ‘The Poetics of Scale in Urban Photography’, in C. Lindner (ed.), Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities (London & New York: Routledge, 2009).
  
• Review article: ‘Romance, Pornography and Body Politics’, Journal of Romance Studies 9:2 (2009).
  
• ‘Marie NDiaye: énigmes photographiques, albums éclatés’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 293:1 (2009).
  
• 'La quête familiale dans les écrits de Marie NDiaye: nomadisme, (in)hospitalité, différence', in A. Simon (ed.), Nomadismes de romancières contemporaines de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007).
• 'Improper Exposure: L'Usage de la photo by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie', in Journal of Romance Studies, 7:2 (summer, 2007).
• 'Reconfiguring the Public and the Private: Intimacy, Exposure and Vulnerability in Christine Angot's Rendez-vous', French Cultural Studies, 18:2 (June 2007).
• 'Exhibiting Pain: Sophie Calle's Participatory Douleur exquise', French Studies, 61:2 (April 2007).
• 'New Women's Writing and the Feminist Heritage in France' in J. Waters and A. Giorgio (eds), Contemporary European Women Writers: Gender and Generation (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
• 'Close up and Impersonal: Sexual/Textual Bodies in Contemporary French Women's Writing', Nottingham French Studies, 45:3 (Autumn 2006).
• 'Family as Everyday Practice in Contemporary French Women's Writing' in M.-C. Barnet and E. Welch (eds), Family Matters: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006).
• '« Un grand coup de pied dans le château de cubes »: Formal Experimentation in Marie Darrieussecq's Bref séjour chez les vivants', The Modern Language Review, 100:1 (2005), 51-67.
• 'Erudition, Wit and Weaponry in Amélie Nothomb's Combative Dialogues' in S. Bainbrigge and J. den Toonder (eds) Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice (Amsterdam & New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
• 'Saying the Unsayable: Identities in Crisis in the Early Novels of Marie Darrieussecq' in G. Rye and M. Worton (eds) Women's Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
• ' « Dans le mauvais goût pour le mauvais goût »? Pornographie, violence et sexualité féminine dans la fiction de Virginie Despentes' in C. Rodgers and N. Morello (eds) Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix? (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002).
• 'Moving Still Life: Jean-Daniel Pollet's Francis Ponge', French Studies, 54:4 (2000), 479-492.
• 'The Construction of the Female in the Texts of Francis Ponge', The Modern Language Review, 94:1 (1999), 35-45.

Published research on ethnography

• 'Ethnographic Encounters: The Processes of Cultural Translation', Language and Intercultural Communication, 2:2 (2002), 96-110.
• 'Writing the Other, Writing the Self: Transforming Consciousness through Ethnographic Writing', Language and Intercultural Communication, 1:1 (2001), 40-57.
• Barro, A., Byram, M., Jordan, S., Roberts, C., Street, B., Language Learners as Ethnographers (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000).
• 'Self- and Peer- Assessment in Ethnography for Language Learners' in S. Brown and A. Glasner (eds) Assessment Matters in Higher Education (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 172-182.
• Barro, A., Jordan, S., and Roberts, C., 'Cultural Practice in Everyday Life: The Language Learner as Ethnographer' in M. Byram and M. Fleming (eds) Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76-97.
• 'The Effect of Ethnographic Training on the Year Abroad', in G. Parker and A. Rouxeville (eds) The Year Abroad: Preparation, Monitoring, Evaluation (Association for French Language Studies and Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research, 1995), 76-90.

Current research projects

I am completing a monograph entitled Private Lives, Public Display: Intimacy and Excess in French Women’s Self-Narrative Experiment for Liverpool University Press. The book explores the cultural category of the intime as it relates to women, and analyses the current tendency towards troublingly explicit revelatory modes. It studies literature, cinema, phototextual work and project art produced since the 1980s, in which intimate self-portraiture, revelations about others, and various 'private' subjects receive significant new expression. Further projects include a monograph on the problem of hospitality in Marie NDiaye, and research on recent French city photography.

Current membership of editorial boards

• Member of the Editorial Board of French Cultural Studies
• Member of the Advisory Board of the book series Cities and Cultures (Amsterdam, Chicago and Manchester University Presses)