You have arrived a website whose purpose is to give you a brief overview of what I do professionally and who I am. It is designed primarily for students and colleagues who wish to know more about me and my work, or who want to use some recommended online resources. The site contains the following: 1) relevant parts of my CV, 2) passages from or about my published works and 3) links to other sites I have found useful. You are invited to contact me with any questions or comments you have about this information at smetz@wustl.edu. more...

One of my long-term research interests is in the connection between what a literary text means and how it shows meaning(s). I'm currently completing a manuscript in French on this subject titled Des lignes et des lettres. Because there are many ways to construe verbal/visual connections, few critics can pretend to examine them all. What has most intrigued me personally about this question, particularly in the context of French poetry, is the manner in which the words themselves, as what Saussure calls “signifiers,” reflect the meaning they otherwise express, via their usual denotations and connotations. This type of supplementary stylistic feature in a poem characterizes “visual” or “concrete” poetry. Such poetry highlights the actual shapes and patterns of words on the page in ways that reinforce the impact of their more conventional meanings. more...

A second current book project of mine is titled Recollecting French America: A Personal Chronology. Here is the Prologue to the manuscript, which has already been published in an essay called “The Missouri’s Miner’s Daughter Still Speaks French” reproduced elsewhere on this website. The copyright is mine:

Time talks in differing tongues. Its voices cry out in the wilderness as well as in the city. Faceless voices, headless voices, errant voices, all speak of what was. and of what could have been. Such voices alternate between the personal and collective, the serious and silly, the elitist and vulgar, the factual and imagined, the-lyrical and epic, the tragic and joyful, the mean-spirited and kind, the sensical and nonsensical. Disembodied, they strive to revive presences once alive and whole, now moribund or fragmented. Only full-bodied voices pretend to tell what already is, or what may yet be. more...