Mole Gary David

Gary D. Mole is Full Professor in the Department of French Culture, and has taught at Bar-Ilan University since 1995. He was Chair of the Department for more than ten years. His teaching covers many subjects from the Middle Ages to contemporary French literature, including modern and contemporary French culture, society and politics, but his research concerns mainly representations of the Shoah in Francophone poetry and prose, as well as civil war and genocide in Sub-Saharan African fiction. He has published widely on the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot, the Franco-Egyptian Jewish poet Edmond Jabès, and the Franco-Polish Jewish poet Bruno Durocher, as well as numerous articles on Francophone poetry of the deportation and the Shoah.

Prof. Mole was awarded Chevalier dans l'ordre des palmes académiques.

Research Fields

I research mainly in French and Francophone literature, culture, and thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on the relations between literature, violence, and modern warfare, and the problematic relation between aesthetics and ethics. I have written extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Edmond Jabès, and Emmanuel Lévinas, on the representation of the deportation and the Holocaust in poetry, fiction, and eye-witness prose accounts, on various bodies of poetry composed during the Great War (combat poetry, prisoner-of-war poetry, women's poetry), and on contemporary French Jewish intellectuals. I have also published on poets and writers of the Middle Ages (Jean Bodel, François Villon), and on the eighteenth century (Choderlos de Laclos).