Bertrand Westphal

Bertrand Westphal (born May 10, 1962, in Strasbourg, France), is a French scholar and essayist.

Career Westphal, a professor of comparative literature and literary theory, has been teaching at the University of Limoges since 1998. He has been directing the "Human Spaces and Cultural Interactions" research team (EA 1087) since 2000.

He was a visiting professor at Texas Tech University (2005) and at the University of North Carolina Charlotte (2013-2015).

Westphal is the founder of Geocriticism, a method of literary analysis and literary theory that incorporates the study of geographic space. After editing the first collective work on this topic (La Géocritique mode d'emploi), he published the essay La Géocritique. Réel, fiction, espace in 2007. In 2011, the book was translated into English (United States), under the title of Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces by Robert Tally, who has become one of the main promoters of this literary approach in the United States. Geocriticism lays the foundations of the homonymous theory, i.e. an interdisciplinary method of literary analysis that focuses on spatial representations.

In 2011, Westphal published the essay Le Monde plausible. Espace, lieu, carte, which proposes a diachronic study of the models of spatial representation. In this book, he distinguishes open space and closed place and gives special value to maps. In 2013, Le Monde plausible was translated into English (United States) by Amy Wells, under the title The Plausible World.

A third volume, La Cage des méridiens. La littérature et l’art contemporain face à la globalisation, published in March 2016, completes what appears to be a Geocriticism trilogy. This work examines the specific role of literature and contemporary art on a global scale and focuses on transcultural logics and decentering.

Westphal is the author of several other books, such as Roman et Evangile (2000), about the transposition, in a plain narratological sense, of episodes or characters drawn from the Gospels in the contemporary European novel. He is also the author of L’œil de la Méditerranée. Une odyssée littéraire (2005), which brings together a series of studies of Mediterranean places, and Austro-fictions. Une géographie de l’intime (2010), which explores the works of a dozen of contemporary Austrian writers.