About

Morgane Cadieu is an Associate Professor of French at Yale University, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone prose, experimental fiction, and literature theory. Her research explores themes such as randomness in literature, materialist philosophies with a focus on atomism and feminism, spaces studies, narratives of social emancipation and migration, and the aesthetics of trains. Her first book, Marcher au hasard: clinamen et création dans la prose du XXe siècle, examines works by Georges Perec and his experimental peers through the lens of ancient atomist philosophy to reflect on creativity and free will, proposing new ways of envisioning literary walks in urban settings. Her upcoming book, On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature, demonstrates that socially mobile writers and characters are central to contemporary literary and political discourse, analyzing texts by authors such as Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye. Cadieu has also co-edited special journal issues and engaged in innovative projects like 3D printing a train based on Emile Zola’s La Bête humaine, with the help of undergraduate students and the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Art history
• Archaeology
• Chemistry
• Philosophy
• Oceanography
• Theology
• Geology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Reviews

  Contemporary French Civilization · 2024-07-02

  articleSenior author
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• On Both Sides of the Tracks

  2024 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Chemistry
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• Afterword: The Littoral Museum of the Twenty-First Century

  Comparative Literature · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Art
  • Art history

  Abstract The museum, the mausoleum, and the memorial are key concepts for theorizing beaches and ports in twenty-first-century literature and cinema. On the littoral, these constructions suggest the very opposite of a sealed off monumentality to become living museums of women’s labor in modern and contemporary France (Sciamma, Varda), bodily mausolea of migration on the Senegalese shoreline (Diop), and shapeshifting war memorials in Atlantic and Pacific tidelands (Darrieussecq, Rolin, Virilio). Examples of anamorphic seascapes, especially in photography, underscore the reversibility of sand and cement in Japan (Narahashi, Ono), as well as the dereliction of Cuban beach architecture and American industrial harbors (Morales, Sekula). In art as in criticism, the waterfront stages gender and class crossings (Dumont) and tangles fields. The afterword thereby weaves the major threads of the special issue: textures, labor, and ruins; social mobility and migration; marine life, geological time, and the history of sensation.

  PublisherDOI

• How the Grass Grows in the Works of Patrick Modiano

  Contemporary French and Francophone Studies · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • History

  This article is an attempt at deciphering the enigmatic title of Patrick Modiano’s 2012 novel: why did he choose to call it L’Herbe des nuits, despite the book’s apparent lack of engagement with plants? In Jardins de papier, Evelyne Bloch-Dano understands the references to nature in the rest of Modiano’s œuvre as metaphors for the author’s poetics of memory and childhood. I want to argue that another interpretation is possible if we fully consider the plant physiology of grass: unlike trees, it grows from the middle and in between other crops. My article builds on this singularity to flesh out the forms of “middleness” in Modiano’s plots, writing style, and social “milieu.” Such an attention to the specific process of plant germination provides a new entry point into his works and their numerous allusions to vegetation, such as the metaphor of Occupied Paris as a soil, a manure, or an “artificial flower.” Like the narrator of Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, Modiano should be viewed as a “Buffon des arbres et des fleurs,” notably because of the various connections between flora and fauna throughout his texts. To sustain these hypotheses, the article engages with botanical and ecocritical writings on plants, meadows, grass and class (Rachel Bouvet, Alain Corbin, Gilles Deleuze, Francis Hallé, Denise Le Dantec, Stephanie Posthumus).

  PublisherDOI

• Index des noms

  Classiques GARNIER · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Marcher au hasard

  Classiques GARNIER · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Cet ouvrage explore les enjeux du hasard, de l’antihasard et du clinamen lorsqu’il s’agit d’écrire, d’énumérer et de marcher, renouvelant ainsi l’analyse du déterminisme, du libre-arbitre, de la création et du désir de rencontre chez Queneau, Perec, Beckett, Garréta, Calvino, Calle, Duras et Modiano.

  PublisherDOI

• Le De rerum natura du vingtième siècle

  Classiques GARNIER · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Conclusion

  Classiques GARNIER · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bibliographie

  Classiques GARNIER · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Stallone meurt : l’auteur et ses fins de vie dans les romans d’Emmanuèle Bernheim

  Fabula-LhT littérature histoire théorie · 2019-06-24

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Resume :Et si la mort d’Emmanuèle Bernheim faisait partie de son corpus romanesque ? Serge Toubiana dans Les Bouées jaunes, et Marion Ruggieri dans Donne‑moi la main pour traverser, offrent de nouvelles pistes pour relire le corpus de Bernheim et penser sa fin de vie comme une œuvre littéraire et cinématographique. Partant de ces récits biographiques et de ces interprétations psychologiques, mon approche consiste à lire la fin de vie de Bernheim de façon stylistique, comme une technique de soi ayant la même esthétique qu’une technique romanesque. Je montre qu’il existe un nœud entre la mort du personnage de médecin dans la nouvelle Stallone, l’euthanasie du père de l’auteur dans Tout s’est bien passé, et la « cérémonie des adieux » de la romancière à l’hôpital Bichat en 2017. Mon analyse se concentre notamment sur le nom de l’auteur, la fascination de Bernheim et de ses personnages pour les films de boxe, le mot « aïe » dans Stallone, et la topographie de l’appartement dans Sa femme, examinée en relation avec la volonté de l’auteur de mourir à l’hôpital. En mobilisant des textes de Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett et Michel Foucault, je propose d’aborder non pas « la mort de l’auteur » mais sa « fin de vie » comme un art poétique du combat.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sonja Stojanovic

  Texas Tech University

  1 shared