Tracy McNulty, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Director of Graduate Studies

Tracy McNulty, Associate Professor of French Literature, received her B.A. in French and English from U.C. Berkeley and her PhD in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine. Her research interests include 20th-century French literature and comparative modernism, contemporary philosophy and critical thought, and psychoanalytic theory. In addition to these fields, she enjoys teaching interdisciplinary seminars on such questions as the origins of language, myth and symbolic thought, eroticism and perversion, and philosophical, scientific, and psychological theories of subjectivity and human agency. She has published essays on Jacques Lacan, Pierre Klossowski, Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Hebrew Bible. Her first book, The Hostess, My Neighbor: Hospitality and the Expropriation of Identity, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. She is now writing a new book on the father, the symbolic, and group psychology (focused primarily on the Bible and on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan), and is also interested in exploring the intersection of aesthetic philosophy and psychoanalysis in the works of Kant, Lacan, Lyotard and Rancière.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

Wrestling with the Angel: Rethinking the Symbolic in the Age of the Superego (in progress).

The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Nominated for the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies, and for the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History.

Edited Volumes

Jason Frank and Tracy McNulty, guest editors, "Taking Exception to the Exception," special issue of diacritics with papers by Susan Buck-Morss, Gert Buelens, Jason Frank, Dominiek Hoens, Bonnie Honig, Jeffrey Librett, Tracy McNulty, Andrew Norris, Kam Shapiro, and Erik Vogt, vol. 37, nos. 2-3 (summer-fall 2007).

Articles

"Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change," differences, vol. 20, no. 1 (2009): 1-39.

"The Event of the Letter: Two Approaches to the Law and its Real" [on Alain Badiou], Cardozo Law Review, vol. 29, no. 5: 101-131.

"The Gap in the Law and the Border-Breaching Function of the Exception" [on Carl Schmitt], Konturen, vol. I (Nov. 2008). http://konturen.uoregon.edu/vol1 McNulty.html

"Taking Exception to the Exception" (with Jason Frank), diacritics, vol. 37, nos. 2-3 (summer-fall 2007), 3-10.

"The Commandment Against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence,'" diacritics, vol. 37, nos. 2-3 (summer-fall 2007): 34-60.

"Weibliche Liebe und der Paulinische Universalismus," in Verschränkungen von Symbolischem und Realem. Zur Aktualität von Lacans Denken in den Kulturwisenschaften, eds. Jochen Bonz, Gisela Febel, Insa Härtel (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2006).

“Hospitality after the Death of God,” [on Pierre Klossowski], diacritics, vol. 35, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 71-98.

“The Exceptional Father,” (a):  a journal of culture and the unconscious, vols. I and II (2005): 23-33. 

“Wrestling with the Angel” [on Lévinas and Saint Paul], Umbr(a) (2005): 73-84.

“Mit dem Engel ringen,” in Wieder Religion? Christentum im zeitgenössischen kritischen Denken (Lacan, Zizek, Badiou u.a.), eds. Marc De Kesel and Dominiek Hoens (Wenen: Turia + Kant, Nov. 2005): 66-80.

“Feminine Love and the Pauline Universal,” in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005): 185-212.

“Signed, Dionysus: Nietzsche’s Lost Letter to Freud,” (a): a journal of culture and the unconscious, vol. II, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 7-24.

“Solving the Sexual Impasse: Female Orgasm, Viagra, and the ‘Natural Law’ of Jouissance,”Savoir, vol. 5, no. 1 (Sept. 2000): 75-100.

“Klossowski, ce soir,” (a): a journal of culture and the unconscious, vol. I, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 81-103.

“Israel as Host(ess): Hospitality in the Bible and Beyond,” Jouvert: A Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, vol. 3, issues 1 and 2 (1999): unpaginated.

“The Other Jouissance, a Gay Sçavoir” Qui Parle, vol. 9, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1996: 126-159.

RECENT COURSES

Graduate:

Rethinking the Symbolic
The End of Narrative
Political Theology, the Sovereign Exception, and the Dead Father
Fiction after the Death of God: In and Around the Collège de Sociologie
Femininity, Ethics and Aesthetics
Biblical Diasporas in French Thought
Libertinage and Perversion
Anthropology and Genealogy

Undergraduate:

In Search of the Origins of Language
Marguerite Duras
Introduction to Psychoanalysis
The Space of Literature
Libertine Literature
Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and Autofiction
Twentieth Century French Novel
Introduction to Textual Analysis
A Year in French History: 1933