Professor Dennis

What made you choose comparative literature and creative writing as subjects?

I’d always had an interest in reading novels and writing, but I started out as a philosophy student. I wrote my dissertation on the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He’s best known for the idea that the self, or the subject, is not some “thinking thing” divorced from the world, but rather the body itself and the way it interacts with its environment. My dissertation research brought me to Paris. I was lucky enough to be studying in an interdisciplinary department, so I could bridge easily into literary criticism. I became especially interested in modernism and in Samuel Beckett, who has also had an incredible influence on contemporary literature.  

Was it the Beckett connection that introduced you to AUP?

I had certainly followed in Beckett’s footsteps in coming to Paris. I was studying on an exchange at the École normale supérieure, and something clicked between me and the city. I felt at ease here, and I loved the value that French culture attaches to the life of the mind. I discovered AUP through Dan Gunn, a fellow Beckett scholar. (Anglophone Beckett scholars in Paris just found each other like magnets.) I started working as an adjunct lecturer and helped Professor Gunn with archival research for the third volume of Beckett’s letters, which he was editing at the time. I loved teaching at AUP. The students were worldly, mature and thoughtful – and multilingual beyond belief! When I came back to Paris years later, I applied for the job I have now.

What made you decide to become a novelist?

After I’d filed my dissertation, I went to work as a postdoctoral fellow in Madrid. While I was there, I had this revelation: I’d been working on a novel all along, and I thought, if I’m ever going to finish this, I’ve got to do something drastic. I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was an incredible experience. I learned so much about what it takes to live a life where you do this strange thing every day: consecrate time to worlds that don’t exist. I’m grateful for and amazed by the things I learned in Iowa, which informed the revisions I later made to the novel.

How does the novel play out?

A friend once described Her Here as a missing girl story told from the point of view of the missing girl. I think this is a good description, but half the story is narrated by the searcher, a researcher, Elena, who has come to Paris to study the filmmaker, Chris Marker. Instead, she finds herself swept up in a mother-daughter story of great complexity, which moves her to piece together fragments from the journals of a young woman, Ella, who disappeared six years earlier in Thailand. As Elena moves deeper into the journals, she becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to Ella, even taking on characteristics of the missing girl. The book is interested in how much of others’ stories we can know and in how we make (and unmake) the narratives we live by.

What experience from your work as a novelist do you bring to your teaching at AUP?

It’s important to have a sense of how one’s readers will experience things. In a creative writing class, there is the opportunity to have 15 writers react to what you have written. You’ll learn which parts move people, and you’ll use that to develop muscle memory; you discover where the vital parts of your writing are. One of the invigorating things about teaching for me is the sense of experimentation and playfulness that students have. When students take a prompt and run with it, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But keeping that creative imagination alive is an important part of my creative work and my classes. I aim to stimulate and deepen creativity. Last spring, I also taught about modernism and fragmentation, thinking about the changing relationships that modernist writers – like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin – have to the body.