Marta Figlerowicz
Biography
I am a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Within these timeframes, I study how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Working in over seven languages, I have tended to focus on European and American authors, though recently my research has become more global. My academic writing often returns to modernism, its genealogies, and its afterlives. In public-facing essays, I comment on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics. I am a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
My first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. I am currently finishing a third book, It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Transcultural Knowledge, which offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers.
My next monograph, tentatively called Myth and Meme: Notes Toward a Genre History of the Present, will aim to refocus our understanding of contemporary digital culture around its experiments with older aesthetic genres such as Roman pantomime, figural sculpture, myth, the fairy tale, and the occasional poem. I also recently completed The Maria Janion Reader (forthcoming in 2025): a book-length translation that introduces the Anglophone public to the work of the Polish critical theorist Maria Janion.
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 2013
M.A. University of California, Berkeley, 2011
B.A. Harvard University, 2009
Research Interests
Twentieth- and twenty-first century American, British, and French literature; critical theory and art practice in post-socialist countries; eighteenth-century British and French literature; contemporary cinema; the novel; philosophy; theories of new media.
Publication Highlights
Selected Recent Publications:
“Auerbach’s Hunger: Mimesis as an Anthropology of Violence,” boundary 2, forthcoming.
“Joyce-Pidgin-Man,” English Literary History 90.2 (2023): 519-538.
“Maria Janion’s Uncanny Slavdom,” PMLA 137.1 (2023): 110-126, translated from Polish.
“Short Form Proust,” L’Esprit Créateur 62.3 (2022): 25-39.
“Imagining Ukraine,” Boston Review, March 23, 2022, online.
“Widzieć nie znaczy wiedzieć,” [“Seeing is not knowing,”] interviewed by Jacek Żakowski, Polityka 34 (3326): 22-25.
“It Me,” The Yale Review 109.1 (2021): 109-120. Republished in Polish as “It Me: Problem z memami,” Almanach Concilium Civitas 2021-2022, ed. Jacek Żakowski (Warsaw: Collegium Civitas), 47-60.
“Democracy on Pause in Pandemic Poland,” Foreign Affairs, May 13, 2020 online.
Courses
Undergraduate: James Joyce and Marcel Proust, Introduction to Narrative, How to Compare, Internet Cultures, Feminist and Queer Theory, Six Pretty Good Selves, Tragedy, World Cinema
Graduate: Keywords of Recent Critical Theory, Literary Theory, Publication Workshop, Dissertation Writing Workshop
Working Languages
English, Polish, French, German, Yiddish, Portuguese, Yorùbá, Latin, Classical Chinese, and others.