Robert Doran
Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Affiliate in Music Theory
BIOGRAPHY
Robert Doran is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature for the Modern Languages and Cultures Department in the School of Arts, Sciences, and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Music Theory Department of the Eastman School of Music. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and a PhD in General and Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle-University of Paris 3. He also studied piano performance at the Serge Rachmaninoff Conservatory in Paris.
He is the author or editor of eight books, including the edited volume Liszt and Virtuosity (University of Rochester Press, 2020), co-winner of the 2023 Alan Walker Triennial Book Award, sponsored by the American Liszt Society. This volume was based on the conference “Liszt and Virtuosity—An International Symposium” held at Eastman on March 2-4, 2017 (organized by Robert Doran, Jonathan Dunsby, and Ralph Locke). He has authored the monographs The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge University Press, 2015/2017; Spanish translation 2021) and The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017), as well as two volumes of Hayden White’s late essays for Cornell University Press (The Ethics of Theory, vol. 1, 2022; vol. 2, 2023). His current book project is Revolutionary Aesthetics: The Sublime in Nineteenth-Century France.
He teaches courses on and has a research interest in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French literature and culture, continental philosophy, aesthetics, virtuosity, Liszt, philosophy of music, and modern and contemporary French thought.
LINKS:
WORKS AND PUBLICATIONS
Selected Publications
Single-Authored Books
The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature. Bloomsbury, 2017.
The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge UP, 2015. [Spanish Translation: La teoría de lo sublime de Longino a Kant. Trans. Luisa Fernanda Lassaque. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2021.]
Edited Books
Editor. The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, Volume II, 2007-2017. By Hayden White. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023.
Editor. The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, Volume I, 1998-2007. By Hayden White. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022.
Editor. Liszt and Virtuosity. University of Rochester Press, 2020. Co-winner, Alan Walker Triennial Book Award, 2023, sponsored by the American Liszt Society
Editor. Philosophy of History After Hayden White. Bloomsbury, 2013. Bloomsbury Studies in American Philosophy.
Editor. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007. By Hayden White, Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. [Spanish Translation: La ficción de la narrativa: Ensayos sobre historia, literatura y teoría, 1957-2007. Translated by María Julia de Ruschi, Eterna Cadencia, 2011. Chinese Translation by Lili Ma and Yun Ma. Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2013/2019.]
Editor. Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005. By René Girard, Stanford UP, 2008. Cultural Memory in the Present.
Journal Issues
Editor. Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). Spec. issue of Yale French Studies, no. 123, 2013. JSTOR
Editor. Cultural Theory After 9/11: Terror, Religion, Media. Spec. issue of SubStance, vol. 37, no. 1, 2008. JSTOR
Recent Articles
“The Tradition of the Sublime in 17th and 18th Centuries,” commissioned for The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, Vol. 4: Rhetoric from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Dietmar Til and Adam Potka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming 2023.
“Hayden White, History, and the Ethics of Narrative,” Editor’s introduction to Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, Volume I, 1998-2007. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, in press, forthcoming 2022.
“Existentialism as World Literature: De Beauvoir, Heidegger, and Tolstoy,” in Philosophy as World Literature, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 233-246.
Chinese only: “Hayden White and the Ethics of Truth,” trans. Zhang Zuocheng, The World History Review, forthcoming, 2020.
“From the Brilliant Style to the Bravura Style: Reconceptualizing Lisztian Virtuosity,” in Liszt and Virtuosity, ed. Robert Doran (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 267-307.
“Virtuosity and Liszt,” Editor’s introduction to Liszt and Virtuosity, ed. Robert Doran (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 1-38.
“The History and Fulfillment of Western Rationality: Martin Jay’s The Eclipse of Reason”: Journal of the Philosophy of History 14.1 (2020): 93-103.
“Writing in the Shadow of Sartre’s Genet: Derrida’s Glas and the Ethics of Biography,” in Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (London: Bloomsbury, 2019): 208-225.
“Kant and the Theory of the Sublime: A Response to Paul Guyer.” Nature and Freedom: Proceedings of the XII. International Kant Congress, ed. Violetta L. Waibel and Margit Ruffing (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018): 3007-3013.
“Meta-história e a ética da historiographia” in Do passado histórico ao passado pactico: 40 anos de Meta-história, trans. Hugo Ricardo Merlo, ed. Verónica Tozzi and Julio Bentivoglio (Serra: Editora Milfontes, 2017): 245-261. [Portuguese translation of “Metahistory and the Ethics of Historiography”]
“Metahistoria y la ética de la historiografía,” in Hayden White: cuarenta años de Metahistoria: Del “pasado histórico” al “pasado práctico” ed. Verónica Tozzi and Julio Bentivoglio (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2016): 189-200. [Spanish translation of “Metahistory and the Ethics of Historiography”]
“Metahistory and the Ethics of Historiography.” Metahistory Forty Years After, edited by Claudio Fogu and Kalle Pihlainen. Spec. issue of Storia della Storiografia, 65.1 (2014): 153-62.
“Imitation and Originality: Thinking Creative Mimesis in Longinus, Kant, and Girard.” René Girard and Creative Mimesis, edited by Vern Neufeld Redekop and Thomas Ryba, Lexington-Rowman and Littlefield, 2014, pp. 111-22.
“Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and the Debate with Lévi-Strauss.” Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), edited by Robert Doran. Spec. issue of Yale French Studies, no. 123, 2013, pp. 41-62. JSTOR
“Choosing the Past: Hayden White and the Philosophy of History.” Philosophy of History After Hayden White, edited by Robert Doran, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 1-33. Bloomsbury Studies in American Philosophy.
“The Work of Hayden White I: Mimesis, Figuration, and the Writing of History.” The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, edited by Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot, SAGE, 2013, pp. 106-18.
“Mimesis and Aesthetic Redemption.” Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation, edited by Saija Isomaa, et al., Cambridge Scholars, 2012, pp. 203-27.
“René Girard’s Concept of Conversion and the Via Negativa: Revisiting Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.” Religion and Literature, vol. 43, vol. 3, Autumn 2011, 170-79. JSTOR
“René Girard’s Apocalyptic Modernity.” Sagrado e Modernidade. Spec. issue of Comunicação e Cultura, no. 11, 2011, 37-52.
“Ambiguity in Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu.” Contemporary French Civilization, vol. 34, no. 2, 2010, 167-90. Liverpool UP Online.
“Introduction: Humanism, Formalism, and the Discourse of History.” The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007, by Hayden White, edited by Robert Doran, Johns Hopkins UP, 2010, pp. xiii-xxxii.
“Erich Auerbach’s Humanism and the Criticism of the Future.” Erich Auerbach, edited by Mario Domenichelli and Maria Luisa Meneghetti. Spec. issue of Moderna: Semestrale di teoria e critica della letteratura, vol. 11, no. 1-2, 2009, pp. 99-108.
“Logique et Sublimité: Dupuy et Vertigo de Hitchcock.” De l’auto-organisation au temps du projet. Autour de Jean-Pierre Dupuy – Colloque de Cerisy, Carnets Nord, 2009, pp. 1-17.
“Introduction: Terrorism and Cultural Theory: The Singularity of 9/11.” Cultural Theory After 9/11: Terror, Religion, Media, edited by Robert Doran. Spec. issue of SubStance, vol. 37, no. 1, 2008, pp. 3-19. JSTOR
“Literature as Theory.” Introduction. Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, by René Girard, edited by Robert Doran, Stanford UP, 2008, pp. xi-xxvi.
“Literary History and the Sublime in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.” New Literary History, vol. 38, no. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 353-69. JSTOR
