Email: dennis.duncan@ucl.ac.uk Ìę |
Education and ExperienceÌę
Dennis Duncan studied English at Manchester University, before completing a PhD at Birkbeck in 2011. After teaching at Birkbeck, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, then Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge. He joined the department at MyAV·¶ in 2019.
Research Interests
Dennisâs research interests include book history, translation, and avant-garde literature, particularly French groups like the Oulipo and the CollĂšge de âPataphysique.
His most recent book,Ìę (Penguin, 2021)Ìęwas named as one of the books of the year by TIMEÌęmagazine, theÌęNew York Times, theÌęWashington Post, theÌęNew Yorker, theÌęFinancial Times, andÌęHistory Today.
Earlier books include (Oxford, 2019) edited with Adam Smyth, which tells the histories of twenty-two paratexts (the parts of a book that not the main text, things like indexes, title pages, errata listsâŠ), (Oxford, 2019), and Babel: Adventures in Translation (Bodleian, 2018), a collection of essays to accompany an exhibition of the same name. He has also edited a collection of essays on the novelist Tom McCarthy, as well as editing and translating an edition of the Surrealist little magazine, Le Grand Jeu.
Books
Index, A History of theÌę(London: Penguin, 2021; New York: W. W. Norton, 2022).
Book Parts, ed. by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
The Oulipo and Modern Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Babel: Adventures in Translation, by Dennis Duncan, Stephen Harrison, Katrin Kohl, and Matthew Reynolds (Oxford: Bodleian Libraries, 2018).
Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays ed. by Dennis Duncan (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016).
Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu (London: Atlas, 2015).
Pataphysical Letters: The Correspondence of René Daumal and Julien Torma (London: Atlas, 2012).
Articles and Chapters in Books
âLess than Paper-Thin: Pseudotranslation, Absent Fathers, and Harry Mathewsâs Armenian Papersâ, in Matthew Reynolds (ed.), Prismatic Translation (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), pp. 339-51.
âThe Protean Ptyx: Nonsense, Non-Translation and Word Magic in MallarmĂ©âs âSonnet en -yxââ, in John Nash and Jason Harding (eds), Modernism and Non-Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 34-48.
âIntroductionsâ and âIndexesâ in Book Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 1-10, 263-74.
ââDebabelizationâ: Creating a Universal Languageâ and âThe Fragility of Languagesâ, in Babel: Adventures in Translation (Oxford: Bodleian Libraries, 2018), pp. 34-57, 152-65.
(as translator) Boris Vian, âLetters to the CollĂšge de âPataphysiqueâ, LIP: Journal of the London Institute of âPataphysics, 14 (2018): 36-62.
âAcĂ©phaleâ, âCollĂšge de Sociologieâ, âOulipoâ, and ââPataphysicsâ, in Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou (eds), The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 9-10, 73-74, 281-2, 284-5.
(as translator) Michel Foucault,ÌęâSeven Remarks on the Seventh Angelâ, PMLA, 132.5 (2017): 1251-62.
âThe Compositorâs Constraintâ, in G. N. Forester and M. J. Nichols (eds), The Oulipo: Festschrift (Singapore: Verbivoracious, 2017), pp. 262-65.
âCalling All Agentsâ, in Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016), pp. 1-18.
ââJoyce, un pornographeâ: Ulysses, Portrait and the Sally Mara Novels of Raymond Queneauâ, James Joyce Quarterly, 52.2 (2015): 115-32.
âAs If We Were Reading a Good Novel: Fiction and the Index from Richardson to Ballardâ, The Indexer, 32.1 (2014): 2-11.
âBackwards and Forwards with the Atomic Priesthoodâ, Alluvium, 2 (2014).
âCalvino, Llull, Lucretius: Two Models of Literary Combinatoricsâ, Comparative Literature, 64.1 (2012): 93-109.
âForm and Anxiety in Translation: Two Case Studiesâ, PEER English, 5 (2011): 125-37.
(as translator) IrĂ©nĂ©e-Louis Sandomir, âExegesis of MallarmĂ©âs Ptyxâ, LIP: Journal of the London Institute of âPataphysics, 4 (2011): 7-17.
(as translator)ÌęAlfred Jarry, âFiligerâ, LIP: Journal of the London Institute of âPataphysics, 1 (2010): 41-50.
âUrchin, Coney, Rock Badger: Genus Hopping with the Choirogrulliosâ, Dandelion, 1 (2010).
Reviews
âTranslating Constrained Literature/Traduire la littĂ©rature Ă contraintesâ, Translation Studies, 11.3 (2018).
âCheap Modernismâ, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 112.3 (2018): 405-8.
âWhat is the History of the Book?â, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 28 (2018): 78-79.
âThe Death of the Bookâ, Modernist Cultures, 13.1 (2018): 137-40.
âModern Print Artefactsâ, Modernism/Modernity, 24.3 (2017): 657-60.
âBeyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Touryâ, Comparative Critical Studies, 8.2 (2011): 358-61.
âTranslation as Stylistic Evolutionâ, Translation and Literature, 20.2 (2011): 266-69.