Steven Ungar CV

Steven Ungar teaches Cinema, French Studies, and Comparative Literature. His book-length publications include Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (1983), Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930 (1995), Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005, with Dudley Andrew), and Cléo de 5 à 7 (2008). He has written essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Ponge, Jean Rouch, Jean Vigo, Patrick Modiano, W.G. Sebald, René Vautier, André Bazin, and Jean-Luc Godard. Ungar completed research on his forthcoming Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France (1928-1963), with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Other forthcoming work includes a book chapter on Céline and Malraux, another titled “Toward a Proustian Cinema,” and a short piece on Jean-Luc Godard and André Breton.

Research Interests:
20th-21st century French fiction, poetry, & thought; first-person narration; everyday life in word & image; French film of the 1930s; Left-Bank cinema (Resnais, Marker, Varda, & Rouch)

Selected Recent Publications:

• “Making Waves: René Vautier’s Afrique 50 and the Emergence of Anti-Colonial Cinema,” Esprit Créateur, 51, no. 3 (fall 2011): 34-46 IN PRESS
• “Scènes dans une bibliothèque: Toute la mémoire du monde de Alain Resnais (1956),” in Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, ed., Quand Clio réclame le documentaire. Paris: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel/Harmattan, 2011.
• “Radical Ambitions: Bazin’s Questions to and from Documentary,” in Dudley Andrew & Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, eds. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011: 254-161.