Heller-Roazen, Daniel

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Toronto, B.A.; Johns Hopkins University M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—NJ. Office—Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, 133 E. Pyne, Princeton, NJ, 08544. E-mail—dheller@princeton.edu.

CAREER:

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor of comparative literature, 2000—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

New Directions Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2002, for the study of medieval Arabic thought and Arabic and Persian languages.

WRITINGS:

(Translator) Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1999.

(Editor, translator, and author of introduction) Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1999.

Fortune's Faces: "The Roman de la Rose" and the Poetics of Contingency, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2003.

Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Zone Books (New York, NY), 2005.

The Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation, Zone Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to journals, including Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, Littérature, Modern Language Notes, October, Paragraph, Parallax, and Romania.

SIDELIGHTS:

Daniel Heller-Roazen is a professor of comparative literature whose primary areas of research interest include poetics, medieval studies, and the history of philosophy. Specifically, his focus has been on Greek and Roman letters, the way in which classical learning is spread to the Arab world and the Latin West, medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin philosophy, as well as modern-day philosophy. Among his scholarly texts is Fortune's Faces: "The Roman de la Rose" and the Poetics of Contingency, in which he examines the philosophical nature of the Roman de la Rose in an attempt to illustrate a form of coherence. Catherine Attwood, in a review for Medium Aevum, felt that the work "demonstrates an excellent command of the philosophical background to the Roman de la Rose." Another work, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, provides a very different look at language, analyzing the experiences of Pierre Durard, a boy who loses his tongue. "Heller-Roazen rigorously ransacks literature, history, linguistics, theology, and psychoanalytic theory for examples, or echoes as it were, of language: its birth, evolution, destruction, and eventual—and seemingly regenerative—forgetting," according to Alan Sondheim in the American Book Review.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, July-August, 2006, Alan Sondheim, "To Speak Is to Forget," review of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, p. 13.

Medium Aevum, spring, 2005, Catherine Attwood, review of Fortune's Faces: "The Roman de la Rose" and the Poetics of Contingency, p. 139.

Modern Language Review, July, 2005, Sylvia Huot, review of Fortune's Faces, p. 809.

ONLINE

Princeton University Comparative Literature Department Web site,http://complit.princeton.edu/ (November 28, 2006), faculty profile of Daniel Heller-Roazen.

Princeton University Web site,http://www.princeton.edu/ (November 28, 2006), "Mellon Foundation Fellowships Awarded to Daniel Heller-Roazen and Gideon Rosen."

Village Voice Online,http://www.villagevoice.com/ (July 5, 2005), Pete L'Official, "Tongue and Cheek," review of Echolalias. *