Jean-Charles Darmon

Jean-Charles Darmon is a French literary critic born in 1961.

Biography

After entering the École Normale Supérieure in 1982, his first teaching post was at Amherst College (USA). While a fellow of the Fondation Thiers, he completed his thesis titled Philosophie épicurienne et littérature au xviie siècle en France : études sur Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-Évremond (Epicurean philosophy and literature in seventeenth-century France: studies on Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-Evremond), concerning the heterodox currents of thought in classical France.

He is Professor of French literature at the Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University, Honorary Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2001-2006) and from 2005 to 2009 he was deputy director of the École Normale Supérieure.

A specialist in connections between literature, philosophy and ethics in the classical age, he is the author of numerous books on Erudite Libertinism and Epicureanism and the forms of fable and satire from an interdisciplinary perspective.

His editions of La Fontaine and Cyrano de Bergerac, "swordsman scholar and polygraph" seized by a "demon of freedom", are now considered reference works.