Program Events
Friday, February 8, 2013: "Pratiquer l'écriture: John Cage et la théorie textuelle francophone," a talk by Charles Robert Simard. 5pm in Room 4202.
Friday, March 1, 2013: Idiosyncrasy / Idiosyncrasie, the 2013 iteration of the annual Graduate Conference by the Ph.D. Program in French. Martin E. Segal Theatre. 8am-5pm (including breakfast and reception) in Room 4202 and the Martin E. Segal Theatre. Visit the conference website here.
Friday, April 19, 2013: "Women in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men: Galleries, Books and Political Allegory in Seventeenth-Century France," a talk by Abby E. Zanger. 5pm in Room 4202.
Friday, April 26, 2013: "Le sexe de la littérature," une conférence par Martine Reid sur la nature des résistances rencontrées en France quand il est question des femmes auteurs. 5pm in Room 4202.
Friday, May 3, 2013: "Orientations: Female-female Eros in Renaissance Neoplatonism," a talk by Todd Reeser (University of Pittsburgh).
Wednesday, May 15, 2013: "The Empire of Fashion in 19th Century France," a talk by Professor Sima Godfrey of the University of British Columbia. 6:30pm in Room 4202.
Event Descriptions
Friday, February 8, 2013: "Pratiquer l'écriture: John Cage et la théorie textuelle francophone," a talk by Charles Robert Simard. 5pm in Room 4202.
L’approche théorique du texte littéraire souffre encore aujourd’hui dans la francophonie d’une sorte de vénération en trois temps : culte de l’auteur (approche « psychologiste » ou « génétique »), culte du texte (mort de l’auteur et poststructuralisme, déconstruction), culte du lecteur (théories de la lecture et de la réception, approches sociologiques). En travaillant avec l’aléatoire et l’indétermination, l’artiste transdisciplinaire John Cage (1912-1992) crée à partir des années 50 un univers à la fois philosophique et littéraire qui bouscule la conception traditionnelle de l’œuvre d’art littéraire. En plus de proposer une révision des figures habituelles, la nouvelle « textualité » de Cage nous invite à réintégrer la théorisation du texte dans un contexte de pratique de l’écriture.
Friday, March 1, 2013: Idiosyncrasy / Idiosyncrasie, the 2013 annual Graduate Conference by the Ph.D. Program in French. Martin E. Segal Theatre. 8am-5pm (including breakfast and reception) in Room 4202 and the Martin E. Segal Theatre.
The notion of idiosyncrasy is inextricable from the history of cultural production. In the humanities, this is attested by the twentieth-century obsession with deconstructions of the self, from the fragmented modern self to the empty self of existentialism, the constructed self of poststructuralism, the dissolved postmodern self, and the hybrid, creolized, and cosmopolitan selves of postcolonial theory. The social sciences have also investigated idiosyncrasy, from Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the epistemological rupture that breaks through common sense to Edwin Hollander’s idea of “idiosyncrasy credit,” Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of taste, and the “binding problem” in cognitive science. Yet the twentieth century was not novel: we may also cite Rabelais’s neologisms, the familiarization of strangeness in Montaigne, and the grotesque according to Victor Hugo. Nor does the question of the self exhaust the problem, for we may also consider the idiosyncratic work, the idiosyncratic medium or materiality, idiosyncratic hermeneutics, and the nexus of idiosyncrasy and technology, from print cultures to digital communities.
This conference invites graduate researchers and theorists to examine idiosyncrasy in French-language culture from a wide variety of philosophical and disciplinary perspectives. We welcome contributions not only in literary and media studies but from any and all neighboring disciplines where idiosyncrasy is an important subject, including but not limited to history, philosophy, linguistics, archeology, architecture, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and computer science. Visit the conference website here.
Friday, April 19, 2013: "Women in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men: Galleries, Books and Political Allegory in Seventeenth-Century France," a talk by Abby E. Zanger. 5pm in Room 4202.
Abby Zanger is author of Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford) as well as numerous essays on topics situated at the cusp of the fields of literature, history, visual studies, and gender theory. Most recently she has published articles and book chapters on topics such as women and iconography, witchcraft and placebos, the politics of the marriage plot, allegories of royal procreation, and the relations between print and theatre. She is currently working on two book projects, one on political allegory and the other on passages to print, both concerning early modern France. She has held academic appointments at Harvard University, Yale University, Tufts University, Boston University, Duke University, and the University of Iowa.
Click here to read the a review of Professor Zanger's book Scenes From the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of an Absolutist Power.
Friday, April 26, 2013: "Le sexe de la littérature," une conférence par Martine Reid sur la nature des résistances rencontrées en France quand il est question des femmes auteurs. 5pm in Room 4202.
Diplômée de l’université de Yale aux Etats-Unis où elle a enseigné plusieurs années, Martine Reid est professeur de littérature française à l’université de Lille-III et spécialiste de littérature du XIXe siècle. Elle est l’auteur de nombreux articles et de plusieurs livres, dont le dernier est consacré à George Sand (Signer Sand. L’œuvre et le nom, Belin, 2003). Elle a réédité une vingtaine de textes classiques au Livre de Poche, chez Actes Sud (Babel) et chez Gallimard (Quarto et Folio). En février 2013 Martine Reid a publié une biographie de George Sand chez Gallimard. Cette biographie n’a pas pour objectif de rendre compte des vies multiples et des publications foisonnantes qui font d’Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin (1804-1876), devenue George Sand en 1832, avec la publication d’Indiana, une femme de lettres hors du commun. Elle propose un ensemble d’aperçus qui permettent la mesure d’une personnalité et d’une créativité exceptionnelles, et la réfutation de quelques clichés tenaces. Son dernier ouvrage, Des Femmes en littérature (Belin), sur la place des femmes en tant qu'auteurs du XVIIIe au début du XXe siècle, paraîtra fin mai 2013.
Friday, May 3, 2013: "Orientations: Female-female Eros in Renaissance Neoplatonism," a talk by Todd Reeser (University of Pittsburgh). This talk historicizes queer theory’s insight that lesbianism is often linked to problems of representation by focusing on links between questions of reading and Platonically-inflected female-female erotic love in the Renaissance.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013: "The Empire of Fashion in 19th Century France," a talk by Professor Sima Godfrey of the University of British Columbia. Sima Godfrey teaches in the Dept. of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. From 1999- 2007 she changed hats to establish and direct the Institute for European Studies at that university, where her interests quickly shifted to questions of cultural identity. She has published widely on the usual suspects of 19th-century French literature, including Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gautier, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Nerval and others. For the past decade she has focused on aspects of modern French cultural history, most notably the concept of fashionability in 19th-century France -- the research for which has inspired her talk. Along the way, however, she has also published on Concrete Poetry (on poetry and architecture in France), Product Placement in French literature, the representation of North American First Nations in French cinema, and most recently, on the Crimean War in French Cultural Memory, a project she is calling “La Guerre de Crimée n’aura pas lieu.” Professor Godfrey's talk on May 15 is designed to accompany the exhibition "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.