Thomas Pavel

Thomas Pavel (born Toma Pavel, April 4, 1941 in Bucharest, Romania) is a literary theorist, critic, and novelist currently teaching at the University of Chicago.

Thomas Pavel received an MA in Linguistics from the University of Bucharest in 1962 and a Doctorat 3e cycle from the Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in 1971, after defecting to France in 1969. He taught at the University of Ottawa from 1971 to 1981, the University of Québec at Montréal from 1981 to 1986, the University of California Santa Cruz from 1986 to 1990, and Princeton University from 1990 to 1998. He was a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Since 1998, he has been teaching at the University of Chicago, where he is now Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Departments of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature.

In 1999, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2004 and received the Romanian Order of Cultural Merit in 2011. He held the International Chair at the Collège de France, Paris in 2005-2006 and was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin in 2010-2011.

Pavel began his scholarly career as a contributor to structuralism and semiotics, two movements that experimented with linguistic techniques in the study of literature. His books La Syntaxe narrative des tragédies de Corneille (1976) and The Poetics of Plot (1985), sketched out a transformational grammar of literary plots inspired by Noam Chomsky's linguistics. A story or a play, he argued, is not a mere succession of pre-established moves, but involves the passage from an initial problem (a transgression or a lack) to a series of successful or unsuccessful solutions. Pavel’s model used tree-like structures to represent the links between the challenges faced by the characters and the actions they take. To explain these actions, Pavel’s plot-grammar included “maxims” expressing the right or wrong ideals that guide the characters. The plot of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, for instance, wouldn’t make sense if the main characters didn’t follow the maxim according to which “an earthly crown is the highest good”. Pavel also criticized period-style notions, e.g. baroque, showing that they do not always account for the way in which narrative and dramatic plots are structured.

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