This early-career project led me to investigate more broadly the interrelationship between literary representations and lived space. The historical event recedes in the face of quotidian rhythms that for all its apparent banality is not without its human, formative character.
If Perec’s investment in descriptions of place in such projects as “Lieux” was originally an oblique means by which to compensate for the absence created by the Shoah, the texts that resulted from these experiments enter into dialogue with key ideas that Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel de Certeau were developing from the turn of the 1950s into the mid-1970s. The book argues that the strong autobiographical current in Perec’s work stands in productive tension with its ludic neohumanism and openness. Later works of the 1970s, like Espèces d’espaces (1974), broach questions of habitat and habit, underscoring the need to revitalize public culture by questioning those elements of quotidian existence that appear to go without saying.
His first novel Les choses (1965) exposes through deceptively simple means the clichés of an emergent consumer society fraught with contradiction. In Mémoires du quotidien: les lieux de Perec, I examined the relation between postwar theoretical discourse on the everyday and everydayness and the “sociological” works of Georges Perec (1936-1982), who in compiling commonplaces of 1960’s and 1970’s French culture drew on the rhetorical notion of lieux de mémoire. My secondary field is cinema esthetics and the history, ideology, and theory of filmic representation during the celluloid era. Central to my concerns as a reader and critic is the dialogue that literature entertains with an evolving spatial imaginary itself correlated to historical transformations of lived and built space. My scholarship bears primarily on modern and contemporary French literature, with an emphasis on socially conscious novels of the interwar period as well as on the experimental, generically hybrid fictions that have arisen since the 1950s.
Dahmer 2002 filmic representation series#
In 2018 he joined the Editorial Board of “Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures”, the noted monograph series published by Liverpool University Press. He serves on the editorial boards of Johns Hopkins’ own MLN, French Forum, Symposium, La Revue des Sciences Humaines, and the French Review, for which he is a standing reviewer of works in literary criticism and film. Professor Schilling has received grants from the NEH, DAAD (Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst), and the SPFFA (Société des professeurs français et francophones d’Amérique). Previous academic positions were held at Stanford University and at Reed College. Prior to joining the Hopkins faculty in 2012, Professor Schilling taught for 10 years at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, where he directed the graduate program in French from 2006 to 2010 and was a member of the executive board for Cinema Studies.
In 1997 he completed a coordinated doctorate between the University of Pennsylvania and the Université Paris VIII (Vincennes/Saint-Denis) with a dissertation on the discourses of the quotidian in the work of Georges Perec. Professor Schilling was educated in the United States (BA, Williams College 1992 MA, University of Pennsylvania, 1993) and in France (Paris IV/SBCJYF).
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