Henriette Korthals Altes

Henriette Korthals Altes is a specialist in 20th and 21st French Literature. She has held several positions as a lecturer in French (Oxford, Queen Mary, London, Aberdeen and Essex). Her research has developed along several lines of enquiry. Firstly, she has published on the ethics of mourning and melancholia in Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Michon and Pascal Quignard. Secondly she has worked on the cultural mourning of the Vichy period as reflected in fiction and film. Thirdly, she has published several articles on the relations between the arts, notably the role of music in Roland Barthes’s work and of dance and music in Pascal Quignard’s work. Her current project on surveillance fiction and film is interdisciplinary and comparative. Covering both the French and English domains, it focuses on surveillance and shows in particular how fiction and film have offered counter-narratives to dominant national or globalized myths.