Patricia Hodges, Associate Lecturer in the Department of French, has just been awarded her doctorate for her thesis ‘Reading for The Subject: Plots of Desire in the Work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras’
The thesis is an exploration of the sex/gender distinction that is so central to feminist theory and the way that this distinction is inscribed in the work of authors Robbe-Grillet and Duras. She investigated how they articulate female agency in their narratives and how they illustrate relations of power between the sexes.
The historical element in her thesis helps readers to understand not just the aesthetic frameworks and debates within which their writing took shape, but also the wider intellectual territory of that writing. That is, the presuppositions and values which may have been consciously or unconsciously held by the two authors regarding personal identity, the social and political fields, gender and those many other components of knowledge that create the point of contact between narrative fiction and the real world.
So our congratulations to Dr Hodges.
For more details of research programmes in French, please see the page:
www.kent.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/41/french