The Elephant in the Text

Thangam Ravindranathan is Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at Brown University. She received her PhD in Comparative/French Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint-Denis). Her teaching and research interests are 20th- and 21st-century literature and criticism/theory; poetry; narratives of travel; the contemporary novel; the question of the animal; ecological perspectives. She is the author of Là où je ne suis pas: récits de dévoyage (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2012), a reflection on travel as a disappointed poetics and a dismantled epistemology in 20th century French literature (revisiting writings by Henri Michaux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Eric Chevillard and others). Other book projects, Donner le change (with Antoine Traisnel, Éditions Hermann, 2016) and Animals Missing (in progress), focus on animals in contemporary literary and critical thought.