Thomas Pavel received an MA in Linguistics from the University of Bucharest in 1962 and a Doctorat 3e cycle from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, in 1971, after defecting to France in 1969.
From 1998 to 2021, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Departments of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature.
In Le Mirage linguistique (1988), translated and expanded as The Spell of Language (2001), he argued that several major French thinkers (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault) used linguistic notions in a metaphorical rather than rigorous fashion.
The book explores the multiple imaginary worlds put forth by French 17th-century literature, thus rejecting the idea of a homogeneous period-style, sometimes called Zeitgeist or episteme.
Later, in his Comment écouter la littérature (How to Listen to Literature), Pavel turned his attention to the direct, unproblematic appeal of literary works.
The exploration of what makes literary works appealing continued in The Lives of the Novel: A History (2013), a substantially revised version of La Pensée du Roman (2003).
Readers, he now argued, can just listen to literature, instead of studying and over-interpreting it, because literary works, independently of the region and historical period in which they were created, bring out ideals and norms that are accessible to all.
21st-century readers do not live in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the 18th-century, yet, because of this debate, the sublime story of Tristan, the comic one of Don Quixote, and the problematic one of Moll Flanders are still immediately accessible to them.