Dr. Pierre-Héli Monot

Pierre-Héli Monot was Postdoc at the Research Training Group from 2016 to 2019. Since 2020 he works as Assistant Professor of Transnational American Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Univerity Munich.

Abstract of the Research Project

One Hundred Years of Tenderness: The Hidden Transcripts of Global Modernity

My project for a second book, One Hundred Years of Tenderness: The Hidden Transcripts of Global Modernity, discusses the construction of "legitimate kindness" in agonistic and antagonistic discourse. This project focuses on the post-Darwinian and Kropotkinian hypothesis of a "Survival of the Kindest" and its reappearance as a literary device from early realism onwards. The primary sources will include Leo Strauss’s studies of Platonic esotericism, Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Mort à Crédit, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, and Wendell Berry’s Agrarian Essays. This study traces the rise and fall of kindness narratives in either totalitarian, globalized, or communal political imaginaries, and explores how kindness and tenderness are plotted through novelistic structures that are otherwise formally committed to conflict or agon.
I argue that the emergence of "readability" as a sociopolitical category from 1850 onwards triggered off a counter-reaction in literature from European realism onwards. The rise of state-enforced legibility led many of those realists and modernists who were canonized by the mid-20th century to implement zones or layers of non-discursive opacity in their works that, in turn, allowed for a critique of state power, instrumental reason, and early anthropometric and deterministic discourses. My study is structured chronologically and retraces the progressive globalization and current deglobalization of this literary counter-reaction.

Publications

Monot, Pierre-Héli: "Poetik des Macronismus: Michel Houellebecqs Serotonin", Merkur (Blog), 16th January 2019.

Monot, Pierre-Héli: "Antiacademism as Anticapitalism: The Rise of American Cultural Conservationism", American Studies Journal, Vol. 65 (2018), Special Issue: Cultures of US-American Conservatism, ed. Andrew S. Gross and Susann Köhler, September 2018. 10.18422/65-06.

Monot, Pierre-Héli: "La Lumière, la Vie, la Lettre et Le Pain: de l’Eucharistie à la Découverte de la Faim" ["Light, Life, Letter, and Loaf: From the Eucharist to the Discovery of Hunger"], in: La Littérature et la Vie, ed. Christophe Ippolito, Collection Perspectives Comparatistes, vol. 351, Paris: Classiques Garnier, p. 51-67.

Monot, Pierre-Héli: "The One, the Many and the Few: A Philological Problem and its Political Form". In: SPELL, vol. 35, Special Issue: American Communities: Between the Popular and the Political, ed. Lukas Etter, Julia Straub, Tübingen: Narr, p. 85-103.