His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media.
Books include Film Hieroglyphs (1991, 2nd edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996, 2nd edition 2010), L’Inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre à la Renaissance (2000), Cartographic Cinema (2007), and An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2010).
He has published Su realismo (Valencia, 1988), a critical study of Las Hurdes (Luis Buñuel, 1932).
His translations include Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1988 and 1992), and the same author's Capture of Speech (1997) and Culture in the Plural (1997); Jean-Louis Schefer, Paolo Uccello, The Deluge, the Plague (1995); Réda Bensmaia, The Year of Passages (1992); Marc Augé, In the Metro (2003) and Casablanca: Movies and Memory (2009); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map (2006).
Essays on early modern literature have appeared in A New History of French Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, The History of Cartography 3: The European Renaissance, La Satire dans tous ses états, French Global, and other books of essays.