Sanford Scribner Ames died on January 1, 2016 (according to the Harvard Necrology Report of April, 2016). Sanford was affiliated with Adams House, graduating from Harvard College cum laude in French in 1961. He went on to get an MA and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1970. After teaching at Ohio State University for seven years and, then, at Kenyon College, the University of Wyoming and the University of Southern California, Sanford joined the faculty of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Cincinnati in 1983. A course on New Criticism that Serge Doubrovsky taught while Sanford was at Harvard made him change his major to French. He began devouring Proust, Gide, Surrealist poetry, Artaud, Camus, theater of the Absurd, and colonial travel literature by Cendrars, Ségalen, Céline, Genet, Marguerite Duras, Michel Leiris, and Claude Lévi-Strauss among others.
Sanford Ames took great joy and pride in investigating and teaching the language that 20thcentury writers carved, sculpted, bent, interrogated, and deconstructed to shape human experience and existential questions in aesthetic and memorable creations. Significant publications include Remains to be Seen : Essays on Marguerite Duras (1988), the first collection of essays in English devoted to the Saigon-born French author and film director (1914- 96), L'impensable imaginaire : The Unthinkable Imaginary (1991) another collection of essays, and several incisive articles on postmodernist aesthetics, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Samuel Becket, and Thomas Pynchon.
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