Peter Brooks (writer)

For other people named Peter Brooks, see Peter Brooks (disambiguation).

Peter Preston Brooks (born 1938) is an American literary theorist who is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has been Professor in the Department of English and School of Law at the University of Virginia. Among his many accomplishments is the founding of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003. Brooks is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work cuts across French and English literature, law, and psychoanalysis. He was influenced by fellow Yale scholar, Paul de Man, to whom his book Reading for the Plot is dedicated. His 2022 book Seduced By Story was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in criticism.

Education

Brooks obtained his B.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1965) from Harvard University. He also studied at University College, London as a Marshall Scholar, and at the University of Paris.

Personal life

Brooks has five children. On July 18, 1959, Brooks married Margaret Elisabeth Waters. On May 12, 2001, Brooks married the law professor, author and commentator, Rosa Brooks. The couple later divorced.

Bibliography

Books

Non-fiction

• The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (1969)
• The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976), ISBN 0-300-06553-1
• Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984), ISBN 0-674-74892-1
• Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (1993), ISBN 0-674-07725-3
• Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), ISBN 0-631-19008-2
• Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (co-editor with Paul Gewirtz, 1996), ISBN 0-300-07490-5
• Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), ISBN 0-226-07585-0
• Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (co-editor with Alex Woloch) (2000), ISBN 0-300-08116-2
• Realist Vision (2005), ISBN 0-300-10680-7
• Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), ISBN 0-691-12954-1
• Enigmas of Identity (2011), ISBN 978-0-691-15158-8
• Anthologie du mélodrame classique (with Myriam Faten Sfar, 2011), ISBN 978-2-8124-0328-6
• Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year (2017), ISBN 9780465096022
• Balzac's Lives (2020), ISBN 978-1-68137-449-9
• Seduced by Story (2022), ISBN 978-1-68137-663-9

Fiction

• World Elsewhere (2000), ISBN 0-684-85333-7
• The Emperor's Body (2010), ISBN 0-393-07958-9

Papers

• Brooks, Peter (1972), "Romania and the Widening Gyre", PMLA, 87 (1): 7–11, doi:10.2307/460779, JSTOR 460779, S2CID 251027567

• Brooks, Peter (1973), "Virtue and Terror: The Monk", ELH, 40 (2): 249–263, doi:10.2307/2872659, JSTOR 2872659

• Brooks, Peter (1973), "Man and His Fictions: One Approach to the Teaching of Literature", College English, 35 (1): 40–49, doi:10.2307/375195, JSTOR 375195

• "Structuralist Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature by Jonathan Culler", Diacritics, 6 (1): 23–26, 1976, doi:10.2307/465029, ISSN 0300-7162, JSTOR 465029

• Brooks, Peter (1977), "Freud's Masterplot", Yale French Studies (55/56): 280–300, doi:10.2307/2930440, JSTOR 2930440

• Brooks, Peter (1978), "Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts: Language and Monstrosity in Frankenstein", New Literary History, 9 (3): 591–605, doi:10.2307/468457, JSTOR 468457

• Brooks, Peter (1979), "Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding", Diacritics, 9 (1): 71–81, doi:10.2307/464701, JSTOR 464701

• Brooks, Peter (1980), "Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot", New Literary History, 11 (3): 503–526, doi:10.2307/468941, JSTOR 468941

• Brooks, Peter (1982), "The Novel and the Guillotine; Or, Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le noir", PMLA, 97 (3): 348–362, doi:10.2307/462227, JSTOR 462227, S2CID 163976852

• Brooks, Peter (1982), "Narrative Transaction and Transference (Unburying "Le Colonel Chabert")", Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 15 (2): 101–110, doi:10.2307/1345218, JSTOR 1345218

• Brooks, Peter (1982), "Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!", Comparative Literature, 34 (3): 247–268, doi:10.2307/1770556, JSTOR 1770556

• Brooks, Peter (1987), "The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism", Critical Inquiry, 13 (2): 334–348, doi:10.1086/448394, JSTOR 1343497, S2CID 162403206

• Brooks, Peter (1989), "Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil'd", Critical Inquiry, 16 (1): 1–32, doi:10.1086/448524, JSTOR 1343624, S2CID 161653973

• Brooks, Peter (1994), "Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?", Critical Inquiry, 20 (3): 509–523, doi:10.1086/448723, JSTOR 1343867, S2CID 170321271

• Brooks, Peter (2000), "A Beginning in the Humanities", PMLA, 115 (7), PMLA, Vol. 115, No. 7: 1955–1957, doi:10.2307/463614, JSTOR 463614, S2CID 163549351

External links

• Emeritus Faculty bio at Yale Comp Lit department
• bio at Princeton Comp Lit department