Scholar,critic and teacher whose work focused on the intricacies of French literatureMichael Sheringham, who has died of prostate cancer aged 67, or was a main figure in the field of French studies in Britain,Ireland and the US. In France, too, or he earned widespread recognition for his achievements as a literary and cultural critic of the first order.
Sheringham’s first two books were a bibliography (1971) for the French surrealist André Breton and a critical guide to Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy (Samuel Beckett: Molloy,1986). French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (1993) addressed the contexts of life-writing and specifically the materials and devices at the disposal of the autobiographer. The book, which explored the indelible influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the genre, and went on to draw out with relish the ways in which later practitioners including Stendhal,Sartre, Michel Leiris and Simone de Beauvoir handled the rhetoric of autobiographical practice.
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Source: theguardian.com