Peter Brooks

Biography

Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus. He was the founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center (1981-91), and served again as director from 1996-2001. He also chaired the Departments of Comparative Literature and of French. He taught also at the University of Virginia and Princeton University. He served as a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Bologna, and the Georgetown University Law Center. During the 2001-2002 academic year, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford University, and Fellow of Balliol College. He holds a BA and PhD from Harvard University.

His teaching and publication have been mainly on the novel (largely French and English) and the theory of narrative; on psychoanalysis in relation to literature; and on law and the humanities.  He received his BA and PhD from Harvard University, and studied also at the University of London and the University of Paris. 

He was decorated Officier des Palmes Académiques in 1986; and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris; and in 2001 an MA from Oxford.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and the American Philosophical Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.  He was given the William C. DeVane Prize for Scholarship and Teaching in 2012, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2008.

Publications

Selected Recent Publications

• Henry James Comes Home, New York Review Books, 2025.
• Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, New York Review Books, 2022. 
• Balzac’s Lives, New York Review Books, 2020.
• Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris.  Basic Books, 2017. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/peter-brooks/flaubert-in-the-ruins-of-…
• Enigmas of Identity.  Princeton University Press, 2011; reprint 2013.
• The Emperor’s Body (novel). W.W. Norton, 2011.
• Henry James Goes to Paris, Princeton University Press, 2007; reprint 2008.
• Realist Vision. Yale University Press, 2005; reprint 2008; Italian translation: Lo Sguardo realista.  Carocci Editore, 2017.
• Troubling Confessions. University of Chicago Press, 2000; reprint, 2001.
• World Elsewhere (novel). Simon & Schuster, 1999.
• Psychoanalysis and Storytelling.  Basil Blackwell, 1994; Turkish translation, 2015.
• Body Work.  Harvard University Press, 1993; Korean translation, 2000; Chinese, 2005.
• Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, 1984; reprint Vintage Books, 1985; reprint Harvard University Press, 1992; Italian translation:  Trame. Einaudi, 1995.
• The Melodramatic Imagination, Yale University Press, 1976; reprint Columbia University Press, 1985; reprint, with a new introduction, Yale University Press, 1995; Italian translation: L’Immaginazione melodrammatica. Pratiche,1984; Japanese translation, 2002; French: L’Imagination mélodramatique. Classiques Garnier, 2011; Korean, 2013.
• The Novel of Worldliness, Princeton University Press, 1969.

Edited Works

• The Humanities and Public Life, with Hilary Jewett. Fordham University Press, 2014.
• Honoré de Balzac, The Human Comedy: Selected Tales, edited with an Introduction by Peter Brooks. New York Review Books, 2014.
• Anthologie du mélodrame Classique, with Myriam Faten Sfar. Classiques Garnier, 2011.
• Dominique Vivant Denon, No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain), trans. Lydia Davis.  Introduction by Peter Brooks.  New York Review Books, 2009.
• Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, edited by Peter Brooks. Signet Classics, 2004.
• Whose Freud?  The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, with Alex Woloch.  Yale University Press, 2000.
• Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, edited by Peter Brooks.  W. W. Norton, 1998.
• Law’s Stories, with Paul Gewirtz.  Yale University Press, 1996.
• “The Lesson of Paul de Man,” with Shoshana Felman and J. Hillis Miller. Yale French Studies  No. 69 (1986).
• Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Peter Brooks. Oxford University Press, 1984.