Hugo Frey, "Designing Modiano: French, Italian, English and US American Frameworks"

This paper offers a 'work in progress' discussion of the visual and material publishing frames used throughout the career of Patrick Modiano. It will explore the visual and material formats used to publish his work in France, from the Gallimard first editions to the multiple paper back reprints. It will also consider and compare book design work when Modiano is translated into Italian and English (UK and USA). Research reveals significant different approaches to paratextual design of his work and will offer for the first time preliminary original discussion of how different comparative international book design paratexts have been applied to the author. The strong association between Modiano and Pierre Le Tan's cover designs  in France in the 1980s and 1990s is underlined, but will also be rethought in light of a very different range of global book design approaches.  

The event will take place in person and is open to the public. A virtual room can be set up on request for valid reasons (physical distance, study commitments abroad, health issues, etc.) by emailing ficlit.textl@unibo.it to receive a personal invitation link.

Professor Hugo Frey is Chair in Visual and Cultural History at the University of Chichester, UK, and has been a visiting Professor at the University of Gent. He is the author of the only English language study of the cinema of Louis Malle (Manchester University Press, 2004) and has written extensively on film and graphic narrative in France and the USA. His new work is co-authored with Professor Jan Baetens, The Look of the 1960s: Barbarella and the Pulp Pop Comics (University of Texas Press, 2026).