Toma PAVEL (Romania – USA)

Toma PAVEL/ Thomas G. Pavel received his State Diploma in Linguistics from the University of Bucharest in 1962 and his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in 1971. He has taught in Canada, the United States, France, and Germany.

In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2004 he was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in France. In 2005–2006 he held the International Chair at the Collège de France in Paris. In 2011 he was decorated with the Romanian Cultural Merit, Commander rank.

Toma Pavel’s early works, which include La Syntaxe narrative des tragédies de Corneille (1976) and The Poetics of Plot (1985), belong to the structuralist movement. More interested in the content of literature than in its formal analysis, he proposed in Fictional Worlds (1986) a theory of fiction based on the logic of possible worlds. Later, he turned to literary history with volumes such as L’Art de l’éloignement (1996) and La Pensée du roman (2003). Toma Pavel has also written a literary essay on language, Fragmente despre cuvinte (1968), and two novels, Le Miroir persan (1977) and La sixième branche (2003).

His works have been published or translated into Romanian, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Russian, and Japanese.