Personalia

Manet van Montfrans studied Romance languages (French and Spanish) at the University of Amsterdam, where she obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees cum laude. From 1982 to 1986 she taught French Literature at COCMA, (Centrale Opleiding Middelbare Akten) in Utrecht, and from 1986 to 2009 she was assistant professor of Modern European and French Literature and Culture at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 she has worked as a researcher for the chair in Modern European Literature. From 1982 to 1998 she reviewed South-African and French Literature for NRC Handelsblad, and in 1999 obtained her doctorate degree cum laude with a literary dissertation, namedGeorges Perec. La Contrainte du réel.

As editor-in-chief of the French Library (Publ. G.A.van Oorschot) she supervised some 30 translations of contemporary French fiction.

Since 2002 she has been a board member of the Marcel Proust Society, coeditor of the annual bilingual journal Marcel Proust aujourd’hui and of the Marcel Proust Bulletin. In addition, she was president and is now member of the board of SNRU (Stichting van Romanisten aan Nederlandse Universiteiten), the Foundation of Romanists at Dutch Universities.

Links:

• http://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/organisatie/medewerkers/content/m/o/m.a.e.vanmontfrans/m.a.e.van-montfrans-van-oers.html
• Marcel Proust Vereniging
• SRNU (Stichting van Romanisten aan de Nederlandse Universiteiten)
• http://www.brill.com/about/imprints/brill-rodopiRodopi/Brill
• http://www.vanoorschot.nl

Research interests

Manet van Montfrans has specialized in the work of Georges Perec – her doctorate dissertation dealt with autobiography and the constraint of form in the prose of Perec, while the focus of her present research is on other aspects of his work such as the intertextual dimension (Barthes, Calvino, Cayrol, Proust) and the part played by topography and space. Her publications on Patrick Modiano follow naturally from her Perec research since the two writers are thematically related.

French literature after 1980 is another area of special interest, and more particularly the so called ‘récits de filiation’ with their representation of the disappearance of traditional communities from the French countryside and the former industrial areas, largely as a result of demografic and technological developments after World Wars I and II (Bergounioux, Bon, Jourde, Lafon, Michon and Rouaud). A third area of research is the reflection on the wars of decolonization of the 50s and the 60s by writers such as Didier Daeninckx, Laurent Mauvignier and Patrick Deville.

Current research projects:

• Film and Literature in the novels of Patrick Modiano
• Comité scientifique colloquium ‘Des arts visuels à l’écriture romanesque dans l’œuvre de Pierre Michon’,  Université Babeş-Bolyai de Cluj-Napoca, 26-28 mei 2016, Cluj Napoca Roumanie.
• Editor of the  collected works of Pierre Michon (Publ. G.A. van Oorschot).