Born in Brussels in 1950, Antoine Compagnon grew up in England, Tunisia, the United States and France. An alumnus of the École Polytechnique, which he entered in 1970, and a Ponts et Chaussées engineer, a spell at the Fondation Thiers enabled him to prepare a post-graduate thesis in literature at the University of Paris VII (1977), published under the title La Seconde Main ou le Travail de la citation (1979). He then turned for good to literary teaching and research, holding positions at the humanities and social sciences department of the École Polytechnique (1978), the French Institute of the United Kingdom in London (1980), then the University of Rouen (1981). In 1985, he defended his doctoral thesis at the Université Paris VII. In 1985, he became Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, where he headed the Department of French and Romance Philology from 1992. Appointed Professor of French Literature at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne in 1994, he returned to France, while continuing to teach regularly at Columbia University.
His initial work focused on literary theory and the Renaissance(Nous, Michel de Montaigne, 1980), before he turned to the history of literary studies(La Troisième République des lettres, de Flaubert à Proust, 1983) and published several critical editions of Proust's works in the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade" and "Folio". As a literary historian, he has since devoted most of his work to the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, and has published works on Baudelaire, Proust and modernity. At the Sorbonne, his annual lecture on the theory of literature led to the publication of La Démon de la théorie: littérature et sens commun (1998), translated into many languages. He has never ceased to be interested in the history of criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Sainte-Beuve and Brunetière to Lanson and Thibaudet.
The theory of literature, the history of modern and contemporary French literature, the history and theory of literary criticism: these are the three main thrusts of Antoine Compagnon's research over the last thirty years. They continue to govern his latest book, Les Antimodernes, de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (2005), an investigation of resistance to modernity within modernity.
Antoine Compagnon is the author of numerous articles in French and international journals on literary theory, history and criticism, as well as on the teaching of the humanities and the place of culture in the modern world. He has been invited to many universities in Europe and the rest of the world, from Brazil to Israel, and from Egypt to Japan and China. He has directed numerous theses in France and the United States.
His work has been rewarded with several prizes and distinctions. He was a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation (1988) and visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1994). He was awarded the Prix Pierre-Georges Castex by the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques (2005) and the Prix de la Critique by the Académie française (2006). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) and the Academia Europaea (2006).
General Secretary of the Association internationale des études françaises (AIEF), President of the Association pour la qualité de la science française (QSF), he was appointed in 2006 by the French President to the Haut Conseil de l'éducation and the Haut Conseil de la science et de la technologie.
