Claire Lyu
Associate Professor
Department of French
308 Cabell Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904
434/924-4630
cl9t@virginia.edu

Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University

Spring 2008 Office Hours:

Monday 1:00-3:30

 Research:
1. Nineteenth-century poetry, especially Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Poetry's convergence with and divergence from other non-poetic experiences -- such as intoxication and fashion -- and the concomitant negation and perpetuation of poetry's specific identity.
2. Interrogation of how constructions of certain core concepts -- such as body, knowledge, coherence, beauty, and elegance, for example -- intersect across different disciplines from the sciences (natural, medical, physical, and mathematical) to the humanities (literature, art, philosophy). In particular, the ways in which medical scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers have opened the human body -- whether literally or figuratively -- in order to expose its inside, and how the accessing of its interior is conceived as one of the most powerful ways of knowing the body.

 Representative Publications:

• "Mallarmé's Fashion" (2000)
• "Stéphane Mallarmé as Miss Satin: The Texture of Fashion and Poetry" (2000)
• "The Poetics of the Penult: Mallarmé, Death, and Syntax" (1998)
• "High Poetics: Baudelaire's 'Le Poeme du hachisch'" (1994)

 Teaching:
Three main areas of teaching: 19th century (and modern) literature, poetry, and cultural studies.

Courses taught:

• 332: Reading, Writing, Texts
• 343: Literature of the 19th and 20th Centuries
• 405: Topics in 19th Century Literature
• 445: Advanced Cultural Studies -- Bodily Knowledge
• 452: Topics in French Poetry:
           1. Survey
           2. Baudelaire
  
• 550/850: 19th Century Graduate Seminars:
           1. Mallarmé
           2. Baudelaire

 Honors:
All-University Outstanding Teaching Award, 2000-2001.
Z-Society Distinguished Faculty Award, 2001.
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, 2001-2002.