Overview
Teddy Kellogg is a doctoral candidate whose research focuses on French and Francophone literature, political economy, and history. His dissertation, Economic Foreknowledge and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel, asserts the predictive quality of texts by Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola that portend the consequences of rapacious finance capital in the twenty-first century. It charts each author’s relationship to the rise of industrial “economies of scale” in the feuilleton press, showing how their confrontation with the commercial literary market led them to identify latent tendencies in modern capitalism toward financialization and financial crisis. This project reasserts the value of literature, unpacking the question of how long-form narrative prose fiction anticipated transformations in capitalism that many standard models of economic science still fail to acknowledge.
Before enrolling at Cornell, Teddy received a Master’s in Anglophone Studies and teaching English as a second language from ISFEC (France), and a Master’s in Comparative Literature from Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (France), writing a master’s thesis entitled Écrire la dualité de l’Aufklärung: L’ambivalence des Lumières dans la littérature du XXe siècle (Writing the Duality of Aufklärung: The Ambivalence of Enlightenment in Twentieth-Century Literature). This project examined the reception of Enlightenment discourse in works by Francophone Martinican writers Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant as well as by the English-speaking Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko.
Both of these research projects treat literature as a privileged form of epistemological critique—a concern that transfers to his work as a member of the Cornell Humanities Lab, where he pursues literature as a self-reflexive practice of knowledge production, figurative expression, and counterfactual thought that enables us to interrogate objects of knowledge without the methodological constraints of unified theoretical frameworks.
In addition to these academic pursuits, Teddy works as a translator of contemporary French literature and literary theory, having contributed to the recently published English translation of Emmanuel Bouju’s Epimodernism (Palgrave 2023). Other titles are currently under contract with Verso.
Classes Taught:
- FREN 1210: Elementary French
- FREN 1220: Continuing French
- FREN 2090: French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I
- FREN 2095: French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II
- ROMS 1113: Money in Nineteenth-Century French Realism