Thomas Cousineau
Education
- B.A., Boston College, 1966
- M.A., University of California, Davis, 1968
- Ph.D., University of California, Davis, 1971
Teaching Areas
- Dante and Modernism
- Joyce and Beckett
- Modernist Literature
- Literary Theory
Major Publications
- The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing (in preparation)
- An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (under contract)
- Three Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard (2008)
- Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction (2004)
- After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (1999)
- Beckett in France (1994)
- Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement (1990)
Press Releases
- WC English Professor’s New Book Introduces Readers to the Novels of a Legendary Austrian Writer
- WC Professor’s New Book Examines Scapegoating in Modernist Fiction
Biographical Note
Professor Thomas Cousineau, who has taught at Washington College since 1978, began his teaching career at the University of Paris as well as at other French universities. Along with the contact with French culture that living in Paris for many years afforded him, French thinkers of the day, such as Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Ricoeur, strongly influenced the direction of his research. Along with publishing books on Samuel Beckett’s novels and his play, Waiting for Godot, Cousineau has for several years been the editor of the newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society.
More recently, Professor Cousineau’s teaching and research has been influenced by René Girard’s theories of mimetic desire and sacred violence, which he has incorporated into his latest books. Cousineau is also fascinated by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whose novels are the subject of his new book, Three Part Inventions. He is currently writing a book on the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s modernist masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet.
Office Hours
TTH 2:30-3:30
