Pascal Durand was trained as a Romance scholar. He worked beginning in 1982 as an assistant in the area of Romance philology and communication to Jacques Dubois, now emeritus professor at the University of Liège. Durand prepared his doctoral dissertation concerning the poet Stéphane Mallarmé under the direction of Prof. Dubois. That dissertation was finished under the direction of the anthropologist Yves Winkin, who at present is a professor at the ENS-LSH in Lyon, and Durand defended it in 1993 before a jury including Pierre Bourdieu and the founder of socio-critique, Claude Duchet. The work stood at the intersection of the sociology of literature, the sociology of symbolic fields, and textual rhetoric.

In adopting this original approach to the matter, Durand succeeded in importing into media analysis the sense of rhetorical significance that comes from reading the greatest literary texts, as well as the sense of relationship with the world belonging properly to informational discourse, applied in this work to poetic texts commonly supposed to be “closed in upon themselves.” The work’s double motto could be, in its own words, “The literary text says something about the world and the journalistic text says something about its own formal construction.”

Pascal Durand has been a full professor since 1998 in the department of communication arts and sciences, teaching courses concerning cultural institutions, the process of edition, and critical theories of information. He has written more than a dozen books on these topics. Two of his works won a literary prize: the Alfred de Vigny prize for 2006 went to La Modernité romantique. De Lamartine à Nerval; the prize for pamphlet-length works in 2007 went to _Les Nouveaux mots du pouvoir. Abécédaire critique_.

Publications

DURAND P., Entre presse et littérature. Le Mousquetaire, journal d'Alexandre Dumas (with S. Mombert), Liège, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, 2009.

DURAND P., Mallarmé. Du sens des formes au sens des formalités, Paris, Seuil, coll. « Liber », 2008

DURAND P., La Censure invisible, Arles, Actes Sud, coll. « Un endroit où aller », 2006.

DURAND P. and BERTRAND J-P., Les Poètes de la modernité. De Baudelaire à Apollinaire, Paris, Seuil, coll. «Points Lettres», 2006.

DURAND P. and BERTRAND J-P., La Modernité romantique. De Lamartine à Nerval, Paris/Bruxelles, Les Impressions Nouvelles, coll. «Réflexions faites», 2006.

DURAND P., La Censure de l'imprimé. Belgique, France, Québec et Suisse romande. XIXe et XXe siècles, Québec, Éditions Nota Bene, 2006.

DURAND P., L’Art d’être Hugo. Lecture d’une poésie siècle, Arles, Actes Sud, coll. «Un endroit où aller», 2005.

DUBOIS J., DURAND P.and WINKIN y. (dir.), Le Symbolique et le Social. La réception internationale de la pensée de Pierre Bourdieu, Liège, Éditions de l’ULg, coll. «Sociopolis», 2005.

DURAND P.and GLINOER A., Naissance de l’Éditeur. L’Édition à l’âge romantique, Bruxelles, Les Impressions nouvelles, coll. «Réflexions faites», 2005.