Stephen Werner

Stephen Werner, Professor, received his B.S. from Penn and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia. He has written articles for Diderot Studies, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, and Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, and has delivered lectures at the Sorbonne, Caen University, Oxford, University of Bristol, Münster, MIT, and Stanford. Werner is the author of three books on Diderot, one a study of narrative art in Jacques le fataliste (Diderot’s Great Scroll, 1975), another a reading of Le Neveu de Rameau (Socratic Satire, 1987), a third a study of Diderot’s comic vision (The Comic Diderot, 2000).  In addition, he has written a book on the plates of the Encyclopédie (Blueprint, 1993) and the comic philosophes (The Comic Philosophes:  Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Sade, 2002).  In 2006, he published The French Comic Tradition from Rabelais to Céline, followed in 2010 by Absolute Travel (a study of the French interest in subjective or inner travel as viewed through the writings of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Roussel, and Proust). He is currently finishing a work on Flaubert entitled The Lyrical Flaubert. His goal in teaching is to instill in students, graduate as well as undergraduate, a love of literature. After many years at UCLA, it has not lost its appeal.