Professor Wimmers does research on 17th-, 19th- and 20th- century literature, literary theory and analysis, poetics of the novel, and reader-oriented approaches to literature. Her books include: Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel , Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affect in "A la recherche du temps perdu," and Approaches to Teaching Proust's Fiction and Criticism.

My first book reflects my early training in stylistics, semantics, and semiotics and is entitled Metaphoric Narration: The Nature and Function of Metaphors in 'A la recherche du temps perdu' (1978). It grew out of my dissertation on Proust, directed by Michael Riffaterre at Columbia University, where I received my Ph.D in 1971. Given the nature of my approach in that study, I was invited by Robert Scholes to teach several courses in what was then called the Semiotcs Program, now known as Modern Culture and Media. We team taught a course on metaphor, one on narrative, and another, with Mary Ann Doane, on narrative and film.




While at Brown, where I arrived in 1973 after having taught for three years at Williams College, I was asked to teach several courses on the novel, using different approaches. I soon became very interested in reader-oriented theories to literary texts. To encourage an open dialogue on that subject, I organized and participated in several sessions at conferences devoted to readers and reading, notably a seminar at the 1980 Modern Language Association that I organized and co-chaired with Susan Suleiman on "The Reader in Fiction: Approached through Semiotics, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology." The enthusiastic response to our session was overwhelming: some 500 people showed up! We obviously had hit on a hot topic and decided to co-edit a book of original essays, which was published by Princeton University Press in 1980 under the title The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation .

I spent my first sabbatical year (1979-80) on a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Konstanz in Germany, at the invitation of one of the most prominent theorists of the aesthetics of reception, Wolfgang Iser, whom I had met the previous year while we were both on the same panel at a poetics conference at Brown. This experience definitely influenced and informed my next book, Poetics of Reading: Approaches to the Novel (Princeton University Press, 1988).

Around 1990, I refocused my attention on my first research interest, Proust. By this time his work had "fallen into the public domain," which meant that new discoveries were made, including the resurfacing of hitherto unseen manuscripts, which led to more than one new edition of A la recherche du temps perdu . To keep up with this new information and the predominant approach to the study of texts, known in France as "la génétique," I organized three lectures, with prominent scholars in the field, on reading Proust in the new editions. These lectures enhanced the work we were doing in a graduate seminar devoted to a genetic approach to Proust's novel during the same semester (Fall, 1990). In turn, this work led to several invited lectures elsewhere (Princeton University, the University of Texas at Austin, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia Unviversity, Urbino, and Cerisy) and to research at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, at the Centre Nacional de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, where for several years now I have been a member of the "Equipe Proust"--an international research team that is presently engaged in transcribing the Proust notebooks for publication.

A few years later, given our joint interest in editing texts, Julio Ortega and I organized "The Status of the Text: A Franco-Hispanic Workshop on Editing Manuscripts," sponsored by our two departments and the Centre Nacional de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), March 1997.

Besides these new ventures into genetic criticism, I have, in the past ten years, taken a great interest in the study of emotions, which has informed my scholarship and teaching. I pay attention to both the representation of literary emotions and the reader's affective response. I approach the study of emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective, including psychological and philosophical theories as well as aesthetic and ethical concerns.

My work on emotions led to a symposium I organized at Brown in 1995 ("Reading Emotions") and to courses and graduate seminars focused on the French novel from the 17th to the 20th centuries, on Proust, and on novels from different cultures (including French, German, and English novels). I also participated for a semester, thanks to a faculty research fellowship, in a seminar at the Pembroke Center on "The Question of Emotion" (Spring, 2001). All this eventually led to a rethinking of my approach to Proust and informed my next book, Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affect in 'A la recherche du temps perdu' (Toronto, 2003). Concurrently, I co-edited a book, with Elyane Dezon-Jones, for the Modern Language Association series on Approaches to literature, entitled Approaches to Teaching Proust's Fiction and Criticism (2003).

I am presently working on Proustian ethics as conveyed in A la recherche du temps perdu , paying particular attention to what I call the "maternal paradigm"--an affect based system of caring that structures the personal relationships of the novel's central characters, one that the narrator extends to the reader as well in a solicitous dialogue that reaches beyond the borders of the text.

My long-standing interest in autobiographical fiction (a favorite seminar topic in my teaching in the 1970's and 80's) will, I hope, stand me in good stead when I try my hand at this genre in the coming years, as I endeavour to come to terms with what it means to have lived in three cultures (German, French, and American). After all, I came to the United States from Germany to study and teach French.

Funded Research
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Fellowship, 1968-1969.

Columbia University President's Fellowship 1968-1969.

Humboldt Research Fellowship, 1979-1980 and 1983 at the University of Constance, Germany.

Awarded a grant from the Council for International Studies (Brown University) for research abroad, 1983.

Awarded a summer stipend for study in France by the Brown University Small Grants Program (1984) and a research grant for 1993.

Awarded grant by the Brown University Lectureships Committee to organize a symposium on Literary and Cultural Emotions.

Received an award from the Small Grants Program for research in Berlin and Paris (1997) and another for research at the CNRS in Paris (Fall 2000).

Awarded a Curricular Development Grant to design a new course on "Narrative Fiction and Emotions," given in 1998-99.

Awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship by the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women to participate in a seminar on "The Question of Emotion" (2000-2001).

Elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1961.

American Association of University Women (AAUW) Fellowship, 1968-1969.

Columbia University President's Fellowship 1968-1969.

F.J.E. Woodbridge Distinguished Fellow, 1969-1970.

Brown University, M.A. ad eundem, 1977.

Humboldt Research Fellowship, 1979-1980 and 1983 at the University of Constance, Germany.

Member of the Board of Fellows of the Wayland Collegium at Brown University, since 1996.

Member of the Proust Research Team (Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France).

Awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship by the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women to participate in a seminar on "The Question of Emotion" (2000-2001).

Transatlantic Travelogues: A Colloquium in Honor of Inge Wimmers (April 22, 2005), organized by Julio Ortega, Director of the Transatlantic Project, in conjunction with French and Hispanic Studies, Brown University.

Professor of French Studies (research) and Professor emerita (2006).
Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques, 2006.

Listed in "The World Who's Who of Women" and in "Who's Who in the East", and "Who is Who in American Education".

Modern Language Association
Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
Twentieth-Century French Studies
Marcel Proust Gesellschaft
Société des Amis de Marcel Proust; L'Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (CNRS)

I have taught a wide range of courses in French literature, language, and current critical theory and practice, including Introduction to French Literature and Literary Methods; XVIIth and XXth-Century French Literature; Studies in the French Novel (dealing with different approaches to the novel, aspects of narrative technique, metaphor, irony, reference, truth and fiction, and the reader-text relationship, with special emphasis on emotions); Symbolist Poetry; Foundations of the Theory of Signs (a semiotics course); graduate seminars and tutorials on the modern French novel, seventeenth-century French literature, Proust, Molière, Racine, Sartre, Style and Text Analysis, Metaphor, Critical Theory, Narratology, Autobiographical Fiction, Modernism and Postmodernism, and inter-disciplinary courses on intertextuality and on the problematics of defining and reading the avant-garde in literature and the visual arts.