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“Flitting through all the books I came across during my early years gave me a taste for enriching myself by sharing the experiences they provided me. It was this very pronounced appetite for literature and poetry that led me to devote my career to these. At university I discovered a literature laboratory, and I was fortunate that my research centre held the archives of Paul Claudel – an author associated with the research work that I had done on Saint-John Perse. In the Pléiade volume containing his complete works, there is a series of correspondence called “Letters from Asia”, and when I studied this in detail, certain things intrigued me. I had found virtually no manuscripts of these letters. This made me realise that these “Letters from Asia” had been written for Pléiade, and the author had in fact invented a correspondence fifty years after it was supposed to have taken place. This discovery created an opportunity for my thesis.

Contemporary poetry is a subject that awakens a lot of interest amongst students. These students might move into teaching, or also perhaps into other careers. Looking after the professional development of doctoral students forms part of the functions I currently occupy at the university –essentially so that we can continue to have research in all areas; it thus also feeds the mind of our society. All sorts of companies or authorities look for literary minds, and it is worth noting that companies reinvent themselves through the cultural diversity of their personnel. What is often lacking in companies nowadays is people who have studied literature and can bring a different approach to projects. They have a richness and expertise that can generate entirely surprising results in companies that are far away from the environment they originally started in.”

Catherine Mayaux
Professor of French Literature, University of Cergy-Pontoise

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