Thomas Pavel (born April 4, 1941 in Bucharest, Romania) is a literary theorist, critic, and novelist currently teaching at the University of Chicago.
Thomas Pavel received an MA in Linguistics from the University of Bucharest in 1962 and a PhD from the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1971, with a thesis on textual semiotics. He taught at the University of Ottawa from 1970 to 1981, the University of Quebec at Montreal from 1981 to 1986, the University of California Santa Cruz from 1986 to 1990, and Princeton University from 1990 to 1998. Since 1998, he has been teaching at the University of Chicago, where he is now Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature and the Committee on Social Thought.
In 1999, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2004, he was named Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, one of France's most prestigious honors.[1] In 2005-2006 he held the International Chair at the Collège de France, Paris, and in 2010-2011 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
Pavel began his career as part of the structuralist movement that experimented with linguistic techniques in the study of literature. His early works, which include La Syntaxe narrative des tragedies de Corneille and The Poetics of Plot, sketched out a transformational grammar of literary plots. He criticized, however, the dogmatic use of structuralism as a universal method for the study of literature in Le Mirage linguistique translated as The Spell of Language. More interested in the content of literature than in formal analysis, in Fictional Worlds he built a theory of fiction based on the logic of possible worlds. Later, his work in literary history emphasized the inner diversity of cultural periods rather than zeitgeist homogeneity. L’Art de l’éloignement explores the various imaginary worlds put forth by French 17th-century literature and La Pensée du roman (English version forthcoming) describes the history of the novel as a cross-centuries debate between the idealization of human action and the critique of its imperfection.
Pavel wrote two works of fiction, Le Miroir persan and La sixième branche.
He founded and co-edited the series New French Thought, Princeton University Press (1994 – 2010), dedicated to bringing innovative French intellectual debates to an English-speaking audience.
His works have been published in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, and Japanese.
This article is partly based on the corresponding entry on the French Wikipedia site.