Bertrand Westphal
Bertrand Westphal (born May 10, 1962, in Strasbourg, France), is a French scholar and essayist. Career Westphal, a professor of comparative literature and literary theory, has been teaching at the University of Limoges since 1998. He has been directing the "Human Spaces and Cultural Interactions" research team (EA 1087) since 2000. He was a visiting professor at Texas Tech University (2005) and at the University of North Carolina Charlotte (2013-2015). Westphal is the founder of Geocriticism, a method of literary analysis and literary theory that incorporates the study of geographic space. After editing the first collective work on this topic (La Géocritique mode d'emploi), he published the essay La Géocritique. Réel, fiction, espace in 2007. In 2011, the book was translated into English (United States), under the title of Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces by Robert Tally, who has become one of the main promoters of this literary approach in the United States. Geocriticism lays the foundations of the homonymous theory, i.e. an interdisciplinary method of literary analysis that focuses on spatial representations. In 2011, Westphal published the essay Le Monde plausible. Espace, lieu, carte, which proposes a diachronic study of the models of spatial representation. In this book, he