The Department of French and Italian announces a lecture by Andrea Goulet, Associate Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages, University of Pennsylvania.
"Derrida Meets the Demon-Baboon: Leroux's Balaoo and the Paleontological Imaginary of Crime"
Tuesday, December 7
4pm, Nicholson 275
Light refreshments will be served.
In 1911, a year before the first Tarzan installment appeared in America, the popular French daily Le Matin published Gaston Leroux's Baloo, the lurid tale of a murderous ape-man brought to France from the Javanese jungle. My talk reads this story of civilization and savagery within three contexts: 1) the evolutionary debates that followed paleontological discoveries of prehistoric human skulls in Europe; 2) the underground imaginary of nineteenth-century crime fiction in France; and 3) today's field of animal studies, especially Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am.
