|
- 5 new doctoral degrees awarded in 2007 in early Modern studies, Modern Studies, and Francophone Studies
|
- New books by our Faculty: Fogu on Memory in Postwar Europe, Greene on the French New Wave, Maleuvre on the Religion of Reality, Maurseth on Diderot, Nesci on the Flâneuse, Snyder on the Aesthetics of the Baroque, Sturm on René Wellek's critical essays
|
- Alumni news: -
Deborah McGrady joins the University of Virginia one year after publishing her book on Guillaume de Machaut.
-Catherine Reinhardt-Zacair's book, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean, published by Berghahn Books in 2006, receives the "2007 Frantz Fanon Prize for an Outstanding Work in Caribbean Thought."
|
|
- Curricular Innovation: -
Global French: New course on Intermediate French for Global Studies increases students' cultural competency and historical knowledge. -New General Education course on Memory bridges the Humanities and the Sciences
|
New Doctoral Degrees Awarded in 2007:
-Dr. Francis Mathieu's dissertation was entitled: "Alchimie rhétorique et morale: l'exemplarité et les oeuvres romanesques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles". He started his new career as Assistant Professor at Southwestern University, Texas, in fall 2007.
-Dr. Jimmy Fujitani's dissertation was entitled "Simple Hearts: Animals and the Crisis of Reformation Thought." He was our representative to the Darmouth Institute of French Cultural Studies in Summer 2007. and started his professional career as Assistant Professor at Azusa Pacific University in fall 2007. More!
-Dr. Lachelle Hannickel's dissertation was entitled "From Cultural Transgressions to Literary Transformations: Recasting Feminine Archetypes in French Caribbean Women’s Autobiography." She started her UC President Postdoctoral Fellowship on September 1, 2007.
-Dr. Louis Bousquet's dissertation focused on the works of Michel Houellebecq, in order to draw the contours of the acute "crise de foi" that plagues modern European culture. He is currently teaching as a lecturer in our Department of French and Italian.
-Dr. Olivier Tonnerre's dissertation was entitled "Invisible Signs: Representations of the Nobility in Nineteenth Century French Literature." He has been a lecturer in our Department in since winter 2007 and serves as co-supervisor of the French language program (Fall 2007).
|
|
|
With Richard Ned Lebow and Wulf Kansteiner, Professor Claudio Fogu edited The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Duke University Press, 2006). The essays from a variety of disciplines explores how the memory of World War Two continues to be revised within several European national contexts, including France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and Russia. The authors examine the different economies of complicity with and resistance to the Nazi project that animate and burden each national context. The anthology focuses on inter-generational conflict as a key force in the politics of memory, explaining the ways in which the contestation of World War Two memory and the Holocaust figures in the process of European integration and identity-building. The authors examine these questions at the level of what is termed "institutional memory" — how the past is continuously transformed and revised in elite contexts, rather than popular or individual ones. (Adapated from Christine Lavrence, University of Western Ontario). |
|
In The French New Wave: A New Look, Emerita Professor Naomi Greene focuses on the work of such directors as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, filmmakers who came to be seen as outstanding artists rather than mere studio technicians, paving the way for contemporary cinematic auteurs such as Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodovar, and Luc Besson. The books begins by tracing the social and cultural changes of post-war France that gave birth to the New Wave, then examines in detail the careers of artists like Alain Renais and Jean-Luc Godard.is a concise and accessible account of a crucial movement in film history. The French New Wave, published in the Short Cuts film series by Wallflower Press in New York and London, promises to be a must-read for classes on French cinema, similar to Professor Greene's earlier book, Landscapes of Loss: the National Past in Postwar French Cinema (1999). Naomi Greene has also written books on Antonin Artaud, René Clair, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Back to Top |
|
In The Religion of Reality, Professor Didier Maleuvre takes to task the assumption according to which the modern intellect is devoid of the transcendental. The book first argues that religious feeling persists in the secular western mind; that it has taken refuge in the unlikeliest of camps, with the supposed debunker of religious creed: the rationalist existential ego. The autonomous, individual self is the pillar of modern times - a deity that anchors our morals, politics, and society, and defines what is crucial about human existence. On this score, The Religion of Reality makes two points: first that the philosophic primacy of the self rests on a leap of faith; and second that its religious centrality cannot ultimately satisfy the transcendental thirst that it kindles.
The book was published in July 2006 by the Catholic University of America Press. ISBN-13: 9780813214542
|
|
Professor Anne Maurseth just published L’Analogie et le probable: pensée et écriture chez Denis Diderot. SVEC 2007: 09. Voltaire Foundation, Oxford: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2007. Here are a few words of presentation in French: "L'analogie et le probable ont été au dix-huitième siècle des concepts dont on a beaucoup débattu. A travers une analyse de quatre des oeuvres de Diderot – la Lettre sur les aveugles, les Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, Le Rêve de d'Alembert et Jacques le fataliste – l'auteur montre comment ces idées d'analogie et de probable sont à la fois inhérentes à un mode de pensée et génératrices d'une forme d'expression, et comment la fiction chez Diderot devient un outil d'enquête philosophique."
|
|
Professor Catherine Nesci just published Le Flâneur et les flâneuses. Les femmes et la ville à l'époque romantique. Grenoble: ELLUG, 2007. Preface by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. "Peut-on concevoir un équivalent féminin du flâneur, cet observateur mobile et esthète de la rue que Walter Benjamin présentait jadis comme un outil conceptuel pour penser la ville moderne ? Si l'hégémonie du flâneur reste indéniable dans les documents et la réalité des pratiques urbaines, le rôle que les femmes jouent dans la culture romantique de la flânerie et le journalisme littéraire reste encore à interroger. Peut-on cerner les contours de la flâneuse, comme on a fait du flâneur un type aux incarnations diverses dans la culture parisienne du XIXe siècle? Les flâneuses sont-elles des flâneurs incomplets, voire épisodiques ? Autant de questions auxquelles cet essai apporte des réponses nuancées, à partir d'une étude renouvelée de la figure du flâneur dans le Paris romantique. Parcourant d'abord la scène mouvante de la flânerie populaire, puis son incarnation dans le roman balzacien, l'interrogation se porte ensuite vers les pratiques de marche dans la ville, d'écriture de la ville et de construction de soi chez Delphine de Girardin, George Sand et Flora Tristan. Exprimant un imaginaire tout à la fois citadin et féminin, ces écrivaines traduisent une soif de nouveaux cadres d'expérience et de représentation pour les femmes dans la ville." |
|
Published by the leading Italian Press, Il Mulino, in December 20056, Professor Jon Snyder's L'estetica del Barroco focuses on writings of early modern artists and thinkers on role of art in the High Baroque, especially in Italy and Spain. Snyder sees the Baroque as tied to a new understanding of art that arose in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Through the use of terms such as “taste,” “genius,” “surprise,” “novelty,” “imagination,” and wit," the Baroque set the defining features of later European aesthetics. The Baroque was in particular a concerted effort to distance contemporary aesthetic thought from the influence of antiquity. Snyder considers this distancing as the “first attempt to think through, and from up close, the extraordinary phenomenon of modern art.” (15) The body of the book consists of a series of readings of some immensely large—and rarely read together—Baroque treatises on the conceit and on wit.
Back to Top |
|
Professor Ernest Sturm has just published the French edition and translation of key essays by René Wellek entitled De la critique : quatorze essais sur la crise des idées littéraires. Texte présenté, établi et traduit de l'américain par Ernest Sturm. (Paris: Klincksieck, 2007, pp. 342). “Wellek's contribution to literary studies stands alone”, writes Professor Sturm. “Hailed in his lifetime as 'the critic of critics', Wellek left no stone unturned in his indefatigable battle against excentric, mystifying and fly-by-night literary practices.”
Professor Sturm's many publications include the French edition of Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism : French, Italian and Spanish (1900-1950) (Paris: José Corti, 1996). “This French edition of an American masterwork,” noted James McNab in the French Review, “is a masterwork in itself.”
|
|
|
A graduate from our department, Deborah McGrady was Associate Professor at Tulane University until Spring 2007. Well-known for her work on Medieval Studies and reader-response theory, McGrady is the author of Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience, that was published by Toronto University Press in 2006; she co-edited a volume on medieval woman writer (and feminist) Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, with Barbara Altmann (Routledge, 2003). She joined the faculty of the French Department at the University of Virginia in fall 2007.
Back to Top
|
|
A graduate from our Department, now teaching at Chapman University,
Catherine Reinhardt, was one of three winners of the 2007 Frantz Fanon Prize for her book: Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribberan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). The Frantz Fanon Prize is awarded annually in recognition of up to three works in or of special interest to Caribbean thought. The nominations are made during the fall of each year, and the winners are chosen and announced by February of the succeeding year. The plaque of acknowledgment is given at a ceremony and book session at the annual conference of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Each winning author automatically becomes a member of the committee for the prize. |
|
Pierre Bras will speak at the Simone de Beauvoir Centennial Colloquium that will take place in Paris, on January 9-11, 2008. The Centennial Colloquium is organized by Julia Kristeva, and is sponsored by the Université PAris7-Denis Diderot, the Florence Gould Foundation, the Mairie de Paris, the Simone de Beauvoir Society and France culture.
Pierre Bras earned his Ph.D. in Private Law and Criminal Science from the University of Montpellier I, France. http://ledroitcriminel.free.fr/utilitaires/bibliographie/theses/bras_pierre.htm
He has started a second dissertation, this time in French studies, tentatively entitled: "Le Détournement du droit dans le roman moderne" [Law and Its Diversions in the Modern and Contemporary Novel).
Back to Top
|
|
Global French: Last year, Professor Jean Schultz launched the creation of a new French 6 course designed to address the interests of Global Studies students. This is a French 6 language course covering the standard grammar and vocabulary. However, the readings, film, music, and activities aim to enhance students's cross-cultural competency. The reader for the course was prepared by Pierre Bras and Maryam Emani. The two sections of French 6 for Global Studies to be offered yearly received the support of Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, Dr. David Marshall. Click here to go to the web page describing the course.
|
|
Bridging Sciences and the Humanities:
Literary and humanist scholar Dominique Jullien, along with biologist Kenneth Kosik, created an innovative lower-division course cross-listed with Comparative Literature and MCDB (Molecular, Cellular, and Development Biology), French 40X. The course is entitled: "Memory: Bridging the Humanities and Neuroscience." Here is the description: "Neuroscientists now ask some of the same profound questions posed by writers, artists and philosophers for centuries, thus opening surprising perspectives on memory and morality, dreams and perception, identity and agency. This course explores this emerging concordance." This innovative course is now part of UCSB's General Education Program, and will satisfy areas C (Sciences) and/or E (History of Thought).
Back to Top |
|
|
