Michael Leigh Hoyer received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2012. She specializes in 19th- and 20th century French literature, the history of the novel, and narrative theory.

Her dissertation, “Project Fiction, A User's Manual: Readings in a Subgenre,” offers a new historically-informed philosophical aesthetics for analyzing novels that exhibit a projective impulse, model modalities of critical thinking and interpersonal connection, and offer conceptual and practical strategies that the reader can elect to integrate into his or her life.

In her dissertation, she analyzes works by Marcel Proust, Georges Perec, and David Foster Wallace, as well as works by James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marilynne Robinson.

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