Professor of French
About
My research into how Renaissance authors financed the printing of their books, published in Montaigne's Career (Oxford, 1998) led to a more general interest in how historical contexts shape forms of literary experience. Reforming French Culture argues that religious satire not only fostered the crucial reformed experience of spiritual alienation but that this experience informed the trajectory of French culture more broadly, descending to today’s republican universalism and laïcité.
Current projects include To Make Believe: Literature, Religion, and the Reformation which examines how personal struggles with doubt in the Renaissance formed one's personal religious culture. In particular, I am interested in how the 'suspension of disbelief' inherent in individuals' practice of faith contributed to the ways in which they read and wrote literature, and to developing the peculiarly hypothetical frame of mind that literature requires.
I continue to work regularly on Montaigne and currently am completing a three-essay series on Montaigne’s political involvement in the 1560s. New archival discoveries confirm Montaigne’s staunch Catholic loyalty and direct involvement in repressing reformers. This leads to a rereading of the Essays that suggests Montaigne never supported toleration policies. However, his Gallican focus on the Wars of Religion as a jurisdictional problem allows one to make sense of his position as a coherent and tempered response to the conflict.
Recent and Selected Publications
The Reformation of French Culture: Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018).
Itineraries in French Renaissance Literature, co-edited with Jeff Persels and Kendall Tart (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
“Was Montaigne a Good Friend?” Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France. Eds. Lewis C. Seifert and Rebecca Wilkin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 31-60.
“Littérature dissidente ou tributaire de la polémique réformée?” special issue on Expressions de la dissidence à la Renaissance, ed. Nadine Kuperty-Tsur and Mathilde Bernard, Dossiers du Grihl 2013: 1 (2013), http://dossiersgrihl.revues.org/5570
“From Communion to Communication: The Creation of a Reformation Public,” Memory and Community, ed. Cathy Yandell and David LaGuardia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 113-33.
“An Ethics for Anti-Humanism? Belief and Practice,” Anti-Humanism, ed. Jan Miernowski (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 25-48.
“Atheism as a Devotional Category,” Republics of Letters 1: 2 (2010).
http://arcade.stanford.edu/journals/rofl/node/55.
"Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne's 'Of cannibals,'" Publications of the Modern Language Association 117: 2 (2002), 207-21.
Montaigne's Career. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
>>summary and reviews of Montaigne's Career
"Hoffmann's book is a tour de force, poised delicately between literary interpretation, social and economic history, and archival scholarship."
--Ullrich Langer, South Central Review
Recent graduate courses taught:
Theory and Criticism of the Secular
Montaigne
Theories of the Object
Recent undergraduate courses taught:
The French Pacific: Artificial Paradise
France and the New World
The Algerian War in Film and Literature
A Creative-Writing Approach to Advanced Composition
What Objects Have to Tell Us
Research Areas(s) & Interests
- 16th-Century French Literature
- Object Theory
- Post-Secular Theory
- Algeria
- Pacific Studies
- Institutional and Judicial History
- Anthropological Approaches to Literature
- Reformation Studies
- Religious History
- Theories of Consciousness
- Artificial Intelligence
- Repetition
