After studying French and comparative literature in Grenoble, Montpellier and at the Paris 8 University-Vincennes (doctorate), Mireille Calle-Gruber published several books on New Novel authors, in particular Claude Ollier and Michel Butor, whose “Oeuvres Complètes” [Complete Works] she edited (2006-2010); her biography of Claude Simon (2011) won the Salon de Nevers prize in 2012. With “L’Effet-fiction, de l’illusion Romanesque” ([Fiction-Effect, on Novelesque Illusion], 1989), she began to think of literary criticism in terms of the effects of reading, and critical method as inseparable from the exercise of her writing (Marguerite Duras, Nelly Kaplan, Unica Zürn, Simone Weil). While on secondment to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she undertook missions in various countries, including Canada, where she was elected to the Royal Society Academy of Arts and Humanities in 1997. When she was a professor at Queen’s University (Ontario), she discovered research on women’s studies: she worked, from those years onwards, with Luce Irigaray, then with Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and finally with Hélène Cixous. She succeeded her at the head of the Centre for Women’s Studies at Paris 8 University, where she created a multidisciplinary master’s degree, “Gender(s), theories of difference and the social relations of sex”. Elected to the Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2006, she established the team she directs (The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies) and set up a course for a master’s degree in modern literature: “Gender Studies, Francophone Literature”. The originality of the approach, combining literature, philosophy and the arts, comes from what she articulated as the question of gender in its plurality (sexual differences, women’s studies, feminism) and the analysis of its inclusion in artistic forms. It is thus a question of learning to read differently and to reinterpret works according to new social relations and the dynamics of cultural diversity. She therefore crosses theoretical reflection and French-speaking literature. Working with and on the works of Assia Djebar, to whom she dedicated two books and a conference in Cerisy-la-Salle, but also on those of Abdelkébir Khatibi and Kateb Yacine, she strives to deconstruct, here again, ideological divisions by focusing on the languages of writing. “Hospitalities” of literature and the arts, “transmission” of works, “memory”, and “poetics of the archive” are the innovative modalities for a mind of generosity and responsibility. The attention paid to the text is nourished by fictional writing: the writer has published five novels of demanding poetic prose.
