Michael Lucey specializes in French literature and culture of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. He also teaches regularly about nineteenth and twentieth-century British and American literature and culture, the novel in particular. Other areas of interest include sexuality studies; social and literary theory; cultural studies of music. Publications include: Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities from Colette to Hervé Guibert (University of Chicago Press, 2019);Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Duke University Press, 2006); The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2003); Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford University Press, 1995). His latest book, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, which discusses Proust alongside Balzac, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Sarraute, and Cusk, was published by the University of Chicago Press in early 2022. His current projects are "Thinking About Sexuality with Novels" and "Novels and Language-in-Use."
The Misfit of the Family has been translated into French as Les ratés de la famille (Fayard, 2008). He also co-edited (with Tom McEnaney and Tristram Wolff) a special issue of Representations (Winter 2017) on “Language-in-Use and the Literary Artifact,” as well as a special issue of Paragraph called "Approaching Proust in 2022." (Ph.D., Princeton University)
Spring 2024: Tuesdays 2-3 in 4210 Dwinelle and Fridays 2-3 on Zoom. To sign up for office hours, go to: https://calendly.com/mlucey-mpy/officehours
What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. (French Translation: Les ratés de la famille. Balzac et les formes sociales de la sexualité. Paris: Fayard, 2008.)
Gide's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
“Translation and Polylanguaging: Sexuality and Novels from James Baldwin to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.” Comparative Literature. Forthcoming. 2024.
“Conceptualizing Trajectories of Readability.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 52, nos. 1-2 (2023-2024): 1-35.
“Sociological.” In “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani,” eds. Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco. A special issue of differences. Volume 34, no. 1 (2023): 244-51.
“Introduction: Proust’s Modernist Sociology.” In “Approaching Proust in 2022.” A special issue of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 45, no. 1 (March 2022).
“Speech.” In Anna Elsner and Tom Stern, eds., The Proustian Mind. Pp. 191-208. New York: Routledge, 2023.
“How You Read Madame Bovary.” Representations 156 (Fall 2021): 27-54.
“Real-Time Literary Texts.” College English 82, no. 1 (2019): 41-54.
“Ami ou protégé: Balzac, Proust and the Variability of Friendship.” In The Art of Friendship in France, 1789-1914, a special issue of Romanic Review 110 (2019): 187-202.
“‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’: Proust with Bourdieu.” In Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan, eds., What forms can do: attending to the real in 20th and 21st century French culture. Pp. 219-35. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Forthcoming.
“What You Might Hear When People Talk, or Proust as a Linguistic Anthropologist.” In Matt Phillips and Tomas Weber, eds., Parasites: Exploitation and Interference in French Thought and Culture. Pp. 113-46. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018.
“On Proust and Talking to Yourself.” Qui Parle 26, no. 2 (2017): 281-293.
“Proust’s Bifurs.” In Patrick McGuinness and Emily McLaughlin, eds., The Made and the Found: Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michael Sheringham. Pp. 145-156. Oxford: Legenda, 2017.
“Introduction: Language-in-Use and Literary Fieldwork,” co-authored with Tom McEnaney. In “Language-in-Use and the Literary Artifact.” A special issue of Representations, no. 137 (Winter 2017): 1-22.
“Playing with Variables: Leduc au village.” Romanic Review 107 (2016): 199-213.
“On André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902).” Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin. Volume 7, Issue 1. October 2016. http://h-france.net/fffh/classics/on-andre-gides-the-immoralist-1902/.
“Translating Sexuality Contextually.” Available at https://www.academia.edu/20157011/Translating_Sexuality_Contextually
“Proust and Language-in-Use.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 48, no. 2 (2015): 261-279.
Afterword to Thérèse and Isabelle, by Violette Leduc. New York: Feminist Press, 2015. 215-243.
“The Contexts of Marguerite Duras’s Homophobia.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 341-379.
“Mystères de la chair.” In Gerard Bonal and Frédéric Maget, eds., Cahiers de l’Herne. Colette. Pp. 231-38. Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 2011.
“A Literary Object’s Contextual Life.” In Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, eds., A Companion to Comparative Literature. Pp. 120-35. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011.
“When? Where? What?” In Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, eds., After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory. Pp. 221-44. Durham: Duke University Press. 2011.
“Aesthetic Apprehension and the Novel.” PMLA 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 404-409.
“Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality in the Third Person.” Representations 109 (Winter 2010): 95-121.