William M. Burton

About

I am an intellectual historian and an assistant professor in the Department of French at the University of California ‒ Berkeley. In the broadest sense, my research concerns the history of ideas, tropes, and argumentative schemas as they circulate among the discourses of literature, philosophy, politics, and the sciences in the French-speaking world, principally in the 18th and 20th centuries. I trace the ways that these sectors and their subdivisions make and defend claims of autonomy, supremacy, expertise, and so on vis-à-vis one another: in a word, intellectual rivalries.

My previous research focused on queer theory and Quebec and translation studies.

Research

Peer-reviewed

Cover of The End of Sex: Science and the Social Contract between Monique Wittig and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My book The End of Sex: Science and the Social Contract between Monique Wittig and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (forthcoming from Fordham University Press) tells the surprising story of the antifeminist 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influence on the 20th-century lesbian writer, activist and theorist Monique Wittig. In debate with social scientists and natural historians (respectively), Wittig and Rousseau developed social contract theories that radically denaturalized the categories of sex and envisioned what a world without them would look like.

Other

  • “What the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake Can Teach Us Now.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 April 2020.
  • “Inverting the Text: A Proposed Queer Translation Praxis.” In Other Words: The Journal for Literary Translators, “Translating Queers, Queering Translation,” B.J. Epstein, ed., no. 36 (2010): 54–68.

Translations

Teaching

I teach courses in French and francophone literature, intellectual history, the history of science, and gender, sexuality, and feminism. Click on the course title for a brief description.

Undergraduate courses

Man, woman, other: Across and beyond the gender binary in Francophone cultures
Stories about gender variance and transgression have circulated in French and francophone cultures since the medieval period. Sometimes they have been the vehicle for philosophical and scientific debates (nature versus nurture, free will versus determination). In religious and spiritual contexts, gender-variant people have been used as metaphors for human diversity or divine transcendence. They have also played symbolic roles in discourses of emancipation, from anticolonialism to feminism. While we investigate these themes, we will also attend to issues of anachronism and power in these works. How can contemporary ideas and terms guide our recovery of LGBTTQI+ lives from history—or hinder it? What is at stake when apparently cisgender writers take non-cisgender people as their subject matter? How are their stories similar to or different from ones written by the “interested parties”? The class will begin with questions of terminology (using words like “queer” or “transgender” to describe figures from the past who used different words; the differences between French and English). We will also read a selection of classical texts that inform the works that follow (the Bible, Plato, Ovid). Our attention will then turn to a diverse series of readings (religious, literary, autobiographical, scientific and historiographic texts) as well as films. As we read, we will track five recurrent themes: (1) familial and economic considerations; (2) Christian mysticism; (3) Platonic androgyny and the arts; (4) scientific theories of sexual difference; (5) free will and determinism.
Montreal in film and literature
Founded in 1642, Montreal, Quebec is one of the largest francophone cities in the world and the largest in the Western hemisphere. Located on a continent where most people speak English, this multilingual metropolis lies at the crossroads of convergent histories of colonisation and Indigenous resistance to it. This situation has given its authors and filmmakers a unique perspective on life in North America. In this class, we will study the rich tradition of literature and film that depict the city over the course of the past century or so. Students will gain familiarity with the city’s history and culture as well as the major differences between Quebec French and European French. In our readings and viewings, we will focus on the city as a site of diversity, exploring how class, race, sex, and sexuality entwine to inflect city-dwellers’ experiences.
Elles: Solidarity, desire and conflict between women in second-wave feminism
The feminist and lesbian movements of the 1970s imagined a utopia of solidarity between all women. But by the 1980s, many activists across the French– and English-speaking world determined that the mainstream movements’ treatment of decolonisation, language, race, and sexuality was inadequate and they founded their own groups. For some, feminism represented the common will of womankind. But for others, the intersections between womanhood and other political identities and issues sapped the viability of any singular definition of “woman.” Both this utopian drive and critiques of it inspired innovative literary and cinematic depictions of women’s relationships to each other: in solidarity and conflict, in friendship and love, and across generations. In this course, we will study an international selection of such works and the urgent personal and political questions they raise. What do women have in common? What do they owe one another? Where is the line between friendship and love? Is there a historical women’s and/or lesbian tradition? How does a heterosexual woman live a feminist life? Are motherhood and feminism compatible? Is lesbianism “the feminist solution”? How can white women and Black and Indigenous women work together? How to reconcile the demands of feminism and other ideologies (socialism, nationalism)?
Pronoun wars
Pronouns have become a hot-button political issue across the Western world in the past decade or so. These bitter and sometimes violent controversies have primarily revolved around the relationship between third-person pronouns and sexual identity, and in particular new gender-neutral pronouns (or new, gender-neutral usages of existing pronouns, like “they”). But they also touch on antisexist or inclusive language more broadly. This course proposes a genealogy of these “pronoun wars.” We will begin the semester by looking at the current state of the debate in the francophone public sphere with a focus on France. Then we will turn our attention to the deeper roots of this issue, which lie in the decisive encounter, in the period running from roughly 1940 to 1990, between (1) the feminist, queer, and trans liberation movements, (2) experimental literature, and (3) structuralism in the social and human sciences. This is a course in intellectual and literary history. It is structured around Monique Wittig’s pronoun trilogy: the coming-of-age novel L’Opoponax (1964), the science-fiction utopia Les Guérillères (1968), and the collection of gothic-erotic prose-poems Le Corps lesbien (1973). We will read the first two books in their entirety, and excepts from the third. Also on the syllabus: primary sources from an array of academic disciplines (anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, sociology); literary texts (including work by Roland Barthes and Hélène Cixous); and ephemera (activist pamphlets, newspaper articles); as well as historiography about linguistics, feminism, and literature.

Graduate seminars

Le roman comme expérience: Littérature, savoirs, engagement, 1940-1990
In this course, we will study several francophone novelists’ responses to the dominant political and scientific interpretations of “literature” during the postwar period. Those interpretations were associated with Sartre’s call for politcal commitment (engagement) and structuralist theories of culture, more or less inspired by Lévi-Strauss. Each in its own way, these two interpretative systems subordinated literature to their own (political, scientific) ends. The debates sparked by Sartre and Lévi-Strauss would last for decades and extend beyond the borders of metropolitan France. Our course will ask: How did novelists navigate between the competing claims that politics and science laid on literature? We will study a group of authors who took up this challenge by producing a “double corpus” composed of novels (or narratives) and essays. These texts belong to diverse movements that span a half-century and several continents: the Nouveau Roman, semiotic theory, and decolonial, postcolonial, and feminist literatures. At the same time, the writers and their work were linked to one another through a web of intertextual reference and collaborations. One of these works’ central preoccupations was the autonomy of literature as a discipline. The course proposes that their double corpus sought to “protect” the literary field from scientific and political incursions. As we read, we will ask: How did the mixture of novel and essay permit our authors to contest the epistemological claims of the sciences and to propose countermodels of knowledge? Did this mixture help them articulate a rejection of engagement or to rearticulate the latter in another form? Finally, how can we understand the relationship between a given writer’s novels and essays? Is a general theory of the “double corpus” during the postwar period possible?
“Race” and “sex”: Entangled conceptual histories, 1945-1968
In this research seminar, the students and professor will work together on elements of a conceptual history of “race” and “sex” in the period 1945–68. During these years, women across the French Empire gradually gained the right to vote (1944–58); the Second World War and the Holocaust ended (1945); the First Indochinese War took place (1945–54); and the Algerian Revolution began (1954). Both alongside and in the aftermath of these events, the concepts of race and sex underwent complex and interrelated rearticulations: these will be our object of study. Our focus will fall primarily on the pre-May 68 development of social-constructionist accounts (as opposed to essentialist ones). The first weeks of the seminar will be devoted to an introduction to the methods and problems of concept history, and then some general scholarship on the history of “race” and “sex.” Then we will read some text-moments selected for their importance or interest. These readings range across the fields of literature, philosophy, politics, and science, permitting us to see the mutations of our concepts across intellectual space-time. They represent a fraction of what our corpus could include; students will be encouraged to expand the scope through independent research as well.
The Ends of Man
This seminar will offer an historical and interdisciplinary introduction to classic works of “French theory” and “French feminism.” Readings will constellate around the notion of antihumanism or the end of the subject and will include some key concepts (antihumanism, the death of the author, différance, discourse, écriture, interpellation, intertextuality, text). We will track the notion’s migration across different disciplinary sectors (anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, philosophy, literary criticism, and literature). We will set these developments against the backdrop of the transatlantic exchange that gave rise to the corpora of “French theory” and “French feminism,” as well as critiques of their claims and validity.

Other teaching experience

As a graduate student and then a lecturer in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University, I taught French as a second language (elementary, intermediate, and advanced); a survey of French literature before 1800; French translation for academic research (a graduate course); and literature humanities (the first-year Core Curriculum seminar). Prior to that, I taught English composition at the Université de Montréal.

C.V.

You can download my C.V. here.

Contact

Write me an email at wmb AT berkeley.edu