Julie LeBlanc
Professor of Comparative Literature and French
PhD
Contact Information
Email: julie.leblanc@utoronto.ca
Phone:
Office: Northrop Frye
Leave Status:
Biography
Julie LeBlanc is a Full Professor in the Department of French and Centre for Comparative Literature. Her areas of teaching and research are autobiographical narratives, word and image theories, photography and literature, genetic criticism, and feminist theories of autobiography. She is presently working on a monograph on a newly funded SSHRC research project on illustrated WWI and WWII autobiographical narratives.
Research
My research is driven by my passion for life-writing, word and image relationships, genetic criticism and literary theory (semiotics, hermeneutics, narratology, visual semiotics, feminist theories of autobiography, discursive analysis). Although my literary corpus is predominantly French from the 20th and 21st centuries, I have also worked extensively on English and Spanish autobiographical narratives. The integration of visual media (photographic, painted and cinematic images) into life narratives helps to foreground the complex relationship between the subjective nature of identity and its textual/visual representation. Using an interdisciplinary perspective and a multicultural corpus of visual autobiographical narratives written and produced by contemporary writers and artists, my research is focused on studying how these subjects become endowed with visual and performative skills to narrate their subjective experiences and to illustrate their personal and collective memories. The forces at the heart of my research are the inexhaustible variety of human experience and identity and the irrepressible impulse to explore, express and intellectualize identity through textual, visual and performative media. More importantly my work on illustrated autobiographical narratives and their manuscripts has led me to treat my multi-lingual corpus as visual cultural constructions deeply involved with societies, ethics, politics and the epistemology of “seeing and being seen” (Mitchell).
CV
Recent Publications
Books :
1. Genèses de soi: l’écriture du sujet féminin dans quelques journaux d’écrivaines. Montréal:Editions du Remue-Ménage, 2008, 230 pages.
2. Énonciation et inscription du sujet: textes et avant-textes de Gilbert La Rocque. Toronto: Éditions du GREF, Collection “Theoria”, 2000, 300 pages.
3. Les Masques de Gilbert La Rocque. Édition critique. Collection Bibliothèque du Nouveau Monde. Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1998, 298 pages.
Book manuscript accepted for publication :
Narrativité et iconicité au féminin (2016).
Volumes edited :
1. Editor of a special issue of Texte. Revue de critique et de théorie littéraire.
“L’autobiographique I”, vol. 39/40, 2006, 294 pages.
2. Co-editor (with Brian Fitch and Andrew Oliver) of a special issue of Texte. Revue de critique et de théorie littéraire “L’autobiographique II”, vol. 41/42, 2007, 280 pages.
3. Editor of a special issue of Voix et images. “Le Laboratoire de l’écriture: manuscrits et variantes,” vol. 86, hiver 2004, 130 pages.
4. Editor (with Brian Fitch and Parth Bhatt) of a special issue of Texte. “L’énonciation: la pensée dans le texte”, vol. 27/28, (2000-2001), 433 pages.
5. Editor of a special issue of Texte. “Narrativité et iconicité”, vol. 21-22, (1997/1998), 407 pages.
6. Editor (with B. Havercroft) of a special issue of Voix et images. “Effets
autobiographiques au féminin”, vol. XXII, no 1, (automne 1996), 180 pages.
7. Editor (with A. Halsall) of a special issue of Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry RS/Sl “Rhétorique et sémiotique”, vol. 12, no 3, (automne 1994), 120 pages.
