DORVAL Patricia

Position: Lecturer-Researcher
Title: Associate Professor
CNU (National Council of Universities) section: English studies
Department: UFR 2
Organisational affiliation: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

Email : patricia.dorval (at) univ-montp3.fr


Patricia Dorval is Lecturer and a member of the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age, and the Enlightenment (IRCL), University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France.

Her research encompasses English Renaissance, Rhetoric and Cinema. Her PhD dissertation (Rhétorique et représentation: Les figures de l’absence et l’imaginaire shakespearien (1994)) focuses on a semiotic analysis of Shakespeare film adaptations, centering on the issue of vision in its negativity. It examines tropes — metaphor, simile, metonymy, metalepsis, synecdoche, synesthesia, shading-off, etc. — and develops a rhetoric of absence calling for a hermeneutical deciphering of signs.

She has contributed scholarly papers both in France and internationally, and published articles on Shakespeare films. She is currently co-chairing with Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin the research programme ‘Shakespeare on Screen in Francophonia’.

Research subject areas :
  • Arts, performance, and literature from the English Renaissance
  • Semiotic analysis of dramatic text and representation (16th-17th century); modeling using classical rhetorical figures
  • Shakespeare and multimedia
  • Collaborative text editing

Research activities:

  • Shakespeare and cinema