Mary Ann Caws

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Resident Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Professor Caws was co-Director of the Henri Peyre French Institute from 1980 to 2002, and a former Trustee of the Alliance Francaise (Washington, D.C.). She is an Officier of the Palmes Académiques (awarded by the French Minister of Education), a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (awarded by the French Government), recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Getty fellowships, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. Professor Caws is the author of The Eye in the Text; Reading Frames in Modern Fiction; The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry; and The Modern Art Cookbook among others, and of critical biographies of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, among others. She is the editor of The Harper Collins World Reader; Textual Analysis; The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, Surrealism; The Surrealist Painters and Poets; and Surrealist Love Poetry. She has translated Tristan Tzara’s Approximate Man and Other Writings; André Breton’s Mad Love; Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin’s The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud; and Ostinato by Louis-René des Forêts. She is the co-translator and editor of Selected Poems and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé; Mallarmé in Prose; and The Essential Poems and Texts of Robert Desnos, among many others.