| 1 | Name: | Dr. Peter Brooks | |
| Institution: | Yale University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2003 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 402b | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1938 | ||
Peter Brooks received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1965. That same year he joined the faculty of Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature until June, 2009. During his tenure, he has been director of the literature major, chairman of the department of French, and founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center. He is one of the most distinguished literary scholars of his generation, a generation dominated by theoretical discovery and debate. Peter Brooks has achieved an original and highly influential syntheses of his own. His contribution to the study of narrative has been particularly notable because of the connections he has established between the narrative impulse and form and sexuality and between narrative and legal argument. Several of his works have become classics of criticism, and many of his ideas have become common currency among literary scholars. Dr. Brooks is also known to a wider audience through articles in magazines and The New York Times. He is the author of The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (1969); The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James (1976, 1985, 1995); Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984, 1992); Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (1993); Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994); World Elsewhere (1999); Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000); and Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), which won the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa. He is the editor of (with A. Kernan, M. Holquist) Man and his Fictions: An Introduction to Fiction-Making, its Forms and Uses (1973); and (with A. Woloch) Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (2000). Dr. Brooks was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2003. He was given the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2008 and began teaching at Princeton University. | |||