Audrey Wasser

Audrey Wasser, Ph.D. joined Miami’s department of French, Italian, and Classics in 2014, following an appointment as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on twentieth-century French and comparative literature, French philosophy, and literary theory. Her first book, The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form (Fordham, 2016) develops an original critique of persistently romantic assumptions in contemporary criticism, and features studies of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein. With Warren Montag, she recently co-edited Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production (Northwestern, 2022), which re-examines Macherey’s innovative literary thinking in light of contemporary critical debates and translates three new texts by Macherey into English. She is currently at work on a new project, On Literary Judgment, which works through studies of Spinoza, Kant, Proust, and Althusser to examine the way scholars make and evaluate knowledge claims about literary texts.

Teaching and Research Interests

• Twentieth-century French literature
• Literary theory
• Comparative modernisms
• Comparative romanticisms
• Continental philosophy

Selected Publications

Books

• With Warren Montag, eds. Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production. (Northwestern UP, 2022)
• The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)

Articles

• “Mutatis Mutandis; Or, Analogy and Justification in Simondon’s System.” SubStance 54, no. 2 (2025):189-206.
• “Empiricism, Criticism, and the Object of Criticism.” New Literary History 55, no. 3-4 (2024): 473-488.
• “Performative Contexts.” Special Issue on Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.” Nonsite 45 (2024).
• “Critical Thinking.” New Literary History 52, no. 2 (2021): 191-209.
• “Spinoza and the Claims of Meaning: ‘A Word to the Wise.’” diacritics 47.2 (2019): 106-127.
• “How Do We Recognise Problems?” Deleuze Studies Journal 11.1 (2017): 48-67.
• “Hyperbole in Proust.” Modern Language Notes 129.4 (2014): 829-54.
• “What is a Literary Problem? Proust, Beckett, Deleuze.” Frakcija: International Performing Arts Magazine 64/65 (2013): 114-121.
• “A Relentless Spinozism: Deleuze’s Encounter with Beckett.” SubStance 41.1 (2012): 124-36.
• “From Figure to Fissure: Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.” Modern Philology 109.2 (2011): 245-265.
• “Deleuze’s Expressionism.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 12.2 (2007). 49-66. 

Book Chapters

• “The Clinic and the Waiting Room: Deleuze on Literature.” In The Deleuzian Mind. Ed. Jeffrey Bell and Henry Somers-Hall. Routledge, 2025.
• With Warren Montag, Introduction to Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production (Northwestern UP, 2022), 1-16.
• “Why Read, Macherey?” In Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production, eds. Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser (Northwestern UP, 2022), 29-42.
• “On Several Regimes of Signs,” In A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy, eds. Jeffrey Bell, Henry Somers-Hall, James Williams (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 83-98.

Translations

• “Postface to Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (2014),”by Pierre Macherey. Co-translated with Warren Montag. In Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production. Northwestern UP, 2022.
• “Reading Althusser,” by Pierre Macherey. Co-translated with Warren Montag. In Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production. Northwestern UP, 2022.
• “Between Literature and Philosophy: An Interview with Pierre Macherey,” by Pierre Macherey and Joseph Serrano. Co-translated with Warren Montag. In Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production. Northwestern UP, 2022.
• “The Literary Thing,” by Pierre Macherey. diacritics4 (2007): 21-31.

 

Works in Progress

• On Literary Judgment  (book manuscript)
• “Proust’s Error” (article)

Education

Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Cornell University (2010)

M.A. English, Cornell University (2005)

M.A. English, University of Florida (2002)

B.A. Comparative Literature, Oberlin College (1999)