Matthis Hervieux (LèsL Rouen, MSc Edin)

French Language Assistant

  • French and Francophone Studies
  • Department of European Languages and Cultures
  • School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Contact details

Address

Street

50 George Square
Room 2.40

City
Edinburgh
Post code

Availability

  • During term-time, students can pop in to see me every Tuesday from 2 to 4pm.
    Alternatively, please email me to arrange an appointment.
    I do not work on Thursdays and Fridays, and I do not work at all in July and August.

Biography

Background

I am from a part of Normandy called Pays de Caux; one of the last places in France where the Norman language is still spoken, in the form of the Cauchois dialect.

I moved to Scotland straight after I graduated from the University of Rouen, to take up a post of lecteur at the University of Edinburgh. After a stint working in a market research firm in London, I returned to Edinburgh where I earned an MSc in Comparative Literature before enrolling on a PhD shortly after.

Qualifications

2015 - Licence ès Lettres Anglais, Université de Rouen

2018 - Master of Science in Comparative Literature, University of Edinburgh

Ongoing - PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Edinburgh

Undergraduate teaching

Since 2022

  • French 1B Oral
  • French 1B Language
  • French 2 Oral
  • French 2 Language
  • French Hons. Language Paper 1

2020-22

  • French 1B Literature & Civilisation

2015-16

  • French 1B Oral
  • French 2 Oral
  • French 3 Oral (Hons.)
  • Oral for French (Hons.)
  • 2nd-year French grammar workshops and exam feedback lecture

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Research summary

  • Encounters between Japan and the Francophone world
  • Exoticism and Japonisme
  • Intermediality
  • Translingualism
  • Inter- and hyper-textuality
  • Literary theory
  • Ethical criticism (Emmanuel Levinas)
  • Eco-criticism
  • French theory
  • Écrivains du corail

Current research interests

My current doctoral research focusses on three francophone writers (Roland Barthes, Michel Butor and Dany Laferrière) and the intermedial aspects of their works on Japan. I seek to examine how these authors engage with Japanese artistic forms (literature, visual arts and theatre) to create their own works, and how this process affects the creation or negation of a possible Japanese "essence", understood in relation to a traditionally reductive or stereotypical japoniste treatment of Japan as a mere aesthetic theme.

Affiliated research centres

Papers delivered

“Michel Butor’s Sentimental Journeys through Japan: Photography and Writing in Tables d’orientation (1993) and Cent instants japonais (2013).” Workshop of the Edinburgh-Meiji Research Partnership, 18 December 2022, Tokyo.

"Intermedial Aspects of Roland Barthes’s Encounter with Bunraku in L’Empire des signes." Inaugural Workshop of the Edinburgh-Meiji Research Partnership: "Intermedial Encounters Between Image, Music and Text With and Beyond Roland Barthes", 16 March 2022, Edinburgh.

"Photography and Identities in Gustave Flaubert, Michel Butor and JMG le Clézio." Doctoral Workshop on “Identité/Identity”, Franco-Scottish Research Network in the Humanities and Social Sciences , 8 November 2019, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Workshop Presentation.

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