Texts ~ Knowledge ~ Culture:
A Vision for French and Francophone Graduate Studies: What is a text?
In these days of “theory first” and of various intellectual fads, one thing has not changed even though, as a group of colleagues, we are constantly adapting it to an ever-changing world: the textual artifact itself. What Cynthia Brown, Jody Enders, Claudio Fogu, Dominique Jullien, Sydney Lévy, Didier Maleuvre, Anne Maurseth, Catherine Nesci, Eric Prieto, Jean-Marie Schultz, Cynthia Skenazi, Jon Snyder, Ernest Sturm, and Ronald Tobin all have in common, in pedagogy as in research, is a passionate commitment to the integrity of that artifact. A "text" may take many different forms: its now-standard mode of dissemination in the book, article, or newspaper; its present ontology, unimaginable in the distant past, as an internet file or document; its materiality as exemplified upon scroll, parchment, or vellum; its enactment in the fascinating ephemera of performance (music, theater, dance, film, political action)—or, for that matter, in the ephemera of everyday conversation. And, of course, a "text" may be absent, yet sometimes leave traces of things, persons, races, classes, places, and politics absent.
Naturally, as a scholarly community comprised of individuals, we choose to approach a veritable cornucopia of evidence in different and distinct ways: through the insights of aesthetics, anthropology, the beaux arts, cultural studies, law, linguistics, music, performance studies, philosophy, poetry, politics, rhetoric, science, semantics, and women's studies. And yet, a common vision unites us and provides coherency to our Department of French and Italian. We share an abiding collective respect both for the text and for our individual, creative, and interrelated ways of stimulating original thinking about the very nature of knowledge. We are all inspired by the ways in which literature helps us to come to know ourselves, the world in which we live, and our worlds past and future. What brings us together is our own repeated exhortation that we renew periodically our understanding of the literary critical project itself through communication, collaboration, and dialogue—with our texts, with ourselves, and with others.
In that pursuit, we are a truly interdisciplinary department, ever mindful of the simultaneous refraction and diffusion of focus which seem endemic to interdisciplinarity. Our solution to that problem lies with the integrity of the text, which permits a sustained focus to any inquiry as it guides us simultaneously inward and outward. Each member of our Graduate Program is a vigorously—and rigorously—inductive thinker who believes that it is the text which enables us to access a historical and cultural moment in all its richness. This is not "New Criticism," not "New Historicism" or even "post-Historicism." In fact it is a conscious rejection of some of the more entrenched contemporary tendencies to reduce the kaleidoscopic nature of human thought to a single "ism." We prefer to approach the literary world as a rich tapestry of interrelated issues, concerns, recommendations, and, above all, questions about the place of language and literature in general and of French literature in particular in the global community.
Two years ago, various pockets of Americans began boycotting French fries—at least until some clever soul fathomed that changing the name to Freedom Fries would sustain both bellicose values and the American love-affair with junk food. If "French fries" are texts, then even this example from popular culture spotlights the need to understand Frenchness, from within and without France . Indeed, one of the most exciting new waves of French Studies concerns a body of texts written outside of France proper, known collectively as “Francophonie.” In that sense, and with a special urgency in the modern fractured and fractious world, French and Francophone Studies embody both interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism; and French literature has its own unique message for understanding that world.
“From Text to Context" might properly be called the motto of this Department; for we seek in all we do to demonstrate, through scholarly care, close analysis, and unrelenting focus on original-language documents, the continued relevance of French literature and its complex past to the modern world. A constellation of approaches to the literary culture of France and all French-speaking countries, the Graduate Program of the Department of French and Italian has consistently represented—and will represent in the future—a holistic and collaborative project that stimulates the love for and knowledge of literary and cultural texts, nurtures student learning, trains young colleagues, and enhances cultural life. We look forward to an inspired future characterized by all that a graduate program in French and Francophone Studies can be: a place of intellectual excitement, cross-disciplinary exchange, pedagogy, and interaction with a global community.
