#  Annabel L. Kim 

Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures 

 

 

 



 person 

 laptop\_windows [Scholar site](https://scholar.harvard.edu/annabelkim) 

 

 



 

I received a B.A. in French and Art History from Williams College in 2007 and a Ph.D in French from Yale University in 2014.

I am interested in feminist writing and theory, the novel (in particular, the contemporary novel), and, more broadly, the ethical and political implications of writing and reading fiction. While I specialize in 20th- and 21st-century French literature, I have a soft spot for literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, despite the myriad ways it has of killing off its women.

My first book, *Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions* (Ohio State University Press, 2018), uses the collective corpus of Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta to theorize a feminist poetics that hollows out difference and reworks our subjectivities so that we can break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. My second book, *Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature* (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), works to combat the deodorization of the French literary imaginary and argues that the persistent excrementality of the modern French canon puts forth fecality as a corporeal, concrete corrective to abstract universalism as a site of exclusion and violence. My current book project, *Ought to Fiction*, is a critique of contemporary French literature's domination by autofiction and exofiction and its unquenchable thirst for the real.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## People Terms
    
     [Standing Committee](/people-terms/standing-committee)
- ## Specialty
    
     [BGLTQ Studies](/specialty/bgltq-studies) [Romance Languages and Literatures](/specialty/romance-languages-and-literatures)