Department of French and Italian

Christopher Braider

Professor of French and Comparative Literature
and Acting Director of the Center for the Humanitiesand the Arts

Bio | Publications | Research Interests | Curriculum Vitae

Bio

Christopher Braider received a B.A. in French and English and a Ph.D. in French Literature from Trinity College, Dublin. He specializes in 17th-century French literature, interart problems in early modern Europe, the history of philosophy, and literary theory. He is the author of Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 (Princeton University Press, 1993), Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 2002), and Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads (Ashgate Publishing Co., 2004). He is currently working on a new book project entitled The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes, for which he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He came to the University of Colorado in 1992 and from 1994 to 2001 he served as Chair of the Department of French and Italian. He has served on the board of the American Comparative Literature Association, as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Humanities, and as Acting Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts, which he helped found in 1996-97. In 2008 he was named Chair of the Division on 17th-Century French Literature in the MLA.

Publications:

Books:

• Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700, Princeton University Press 1993
• Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama, in North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth: Hercules at the Crossroads(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing CO., 2004)

Selected Articles:

• ""'Cet Hymen différé': The Figuration of Authority in Corneille's Le Cid," Representations, v. 54 (1996).
• "The Fountain of Narcissus: The Invention of Subjectivity and the Pauline Ontology of Art in Caravaggio and Rembrandt," Comparative Literature, 50.4 (1998).
• "Image and Imaginaire in Molière's Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire," (PMLA, October 2002)
• "Pascal's Machine: Science and Theology in the Provinciales and the Pensées," in John D. Lyons and Cara Welch (eds.), Le Savoir au XVII Siècle (Tubingen: Gunter Navv, 2003), pp. 345-355.
• "Hercules at the Crossroads: Image and Soliloquy in Annibale Carracci," in Ellen Spolsky (ed.),Iconotropism: Turning toward Images(Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University PRess, 2004), 89-115.
• "Of Monuments and Documents: Comparative Literature and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Studies, or The Art of Historical Tact," in Haun Saussy (ed.), _Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 155-74
• "The Witch from Colchis: Corneille's _Médée_, Chimène's _Le Cid_, and the Invention of Classical Genius," Modern Language Quarterly 69.3 (September 2008): 315-45
  

Research Interests:

• 17th-century French literature
• Interart problems in early modern Europe
• The history of philosophy
• Literary theory