ABSTRACT
SARAH N. LAWALL (B. 1934) IS PROFESSOR EMERITA of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests combine literary phenomenology, poetry and poetics, surrealism, and the work of Yves Bonnefoy. She is credited with having introduced the so-called Geneva School of Criticism to the US audience with Critics of Consciousness: The Existential Structures of Literature (1968), in which she chronologically discussed the major works of phenomenologically inclined European literary critics such as Albert Béguin, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Poulet, Marcel Raymond, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Rousset and Jean Starobinski, as well as the fi rst three critical works of the American J. Hillis Miller. She also contributed to the translation of works by a number of classical authors (a.o. Euripides). The phenomelogical approach to literature as an act, and not as an object, proved infl uential in the way Lawall later dealt with the concept and practice of world literature.
