Born in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon in 1966, William Marx studied at the Lycée Thiers in Marseille before entering the École normale supérieure in 1986. He passed the agrégation in classics in 1989, and went on to defend his doctoral thesis in 2000 at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and his habilitation to direct research in 2005 at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. He teaches in the United States and Japan, as well as at several French universities, before being elected Professor of Comparative Literatures at the Collège de France in 2019.
Member of the Academia Europaea, laureate of the Académie française (Prix Montyon in 2010), honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France, former fellow of the Institut d'études avancées de Berlin, holder of the International Francqui Professor chair, regularly invited to foreign universities, editor of the works of Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot, he works on the long-term evolution of aesthetic systems and the status of literature from Antiquity to the present day, and on how they vary according to culture, with research focusing on Greek tragedy, Japanese Noh and European modernism. His books, most of which have been published by Éditions de Minuit and translated into a dozen languages, include Naissance de la critique moderne (2002), Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle (2004), L'Adieu à la littérature (2005), Vie du lettré ( 2009), Le Tombeau d'Œdipe (2012), La Haine de la littérature (2015), Un savoir gai (2018), Vivre dans la bibliothèque du monde (2020) and Des étoiles nouvelles (2021).