French Program, Dr. Priya Wadhera

Absence  in Georges Perec

Priya Wadhera, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

The celebrated 20th-century French author Georges Perec was a member of the influential OuLiPo group of writers who believe constraints are liberating. Perec made an indelible mark on the history of French literature with his varied and virtuosic œuvre. Case in point is Perec’s La Disparition (1969), a 300-page novel that entirely lacks the letter “e.” This gesture of literary bravado also has a deeper meaning. The lack of “e” evokes a lack of “eux” or them, those who died in the Holocaust, including Perec’s mother. In this paper, Dr. Wadhera studies another stark absence that pervades his works:  the lack of food. Perec’s protagonists rarely eat and the little food one sees are mere scraps, crumbs, morsels. She aims to understand this gesture in an era inaugurated by Marcel Proust, an author whom Perec greatly admired, and his “madeleine episode” which offers a position of privilege to food.        

Priya Wadhera is Associate Professor of French at Adelphi University in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.  She earned her doctorate at Columbia University where she stayed on for three years as a lecturer in the department and Director of the Maison française before joining Adelphi in 2007. She has been the most senior member of the French program for over a decade at Adelphi where she savors her time in the classroom.

  

Over the years, Dr. Wadhera has established herself as a specialist of Georges Perec.  Her first book, entitled “Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol,” came out in 2017 with Brill | Rodopi.  She has given papers throughout the US and France on his works, including by invitation at the Association Georges Perec in Paris, and later this semester in Australia at a conference drawing scholars from around the world who will be speaking on the OuLiPo.  Her published articles on Perec include one recently accepted to the authoritative Cahier Georges Perec, which gathers scholarship from the world’s foremost perecquiens.  In fact, this article was one of four she placed in peer-reviewed journals while on a recent yearlong sabbatical.  “Absence in Georges Perec” is based on another one of those articles.