Françoise Meltzer is a professor of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School

University of Chicago Divinity School

The University of Chicago Divinity School is a graduate institution at the University of Chicago dedicated to the training of academics and clergy across religious boundaries...

. She is also the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of the Humanities in French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 and in Comparative literature

Comparative literature

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...

.

Work

Meltzer's scholarship include work on contemporary critical theory and nineteenth-century French literature

French literature

French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...

. She marshals postmodern critical theories in order to explore literary representations of the subject.

In her book Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality, she examines the ideas of originality and authorship in a series of case studies from Descartes to Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...

. In her book on Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc

Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...

, she undertakes a study of that figure in relation to subjectivity as it is treated in philosophical and literary theoretical courses.

Meltzer recently co-edited a Symposium on [God] for the journal Critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press. It is considered a leading journal within literary studies, and particularly in the field of critical theory....

. She is presently co-editing a book on religion and postmodernist texts as well as working on a special issue of Critical Inquiry on saints in the three monotheistic religions. She is also working on two books; one about 1848 in France, and the concept of rupture from a philosophical, political, and literary point of view; the other about the gendering of subjectivity.

Education

• Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
  University of California, Berkeley
  The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
  
  , 1975
• M.A. Comparative Literature, University of California, San Luis Obispo, 1971
• B.A. Universität Freiburg in Breisgau, 1969

See also

• Deconstruction
  Deconstruction
  Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
  
  
• Deconstruction-and-religion
  Deconstruction-and-religion
  Those that take a deconstructive approach to religion identify closely with the work of Jacques Derrida, especially his work later in life. According to Slavoj Žižek, in the mid-to-late 1980s Derrida's work shifted from constituting a radical negative theology to being a form of Kantian idealism....
  
  
• List of deconstructionists
• Weak theology