Performance: "Dangerous Liaisons," 1/13-2/4

Torch Theater presents

Dangerous Liaisons, by Christopher Hampton.

Adapted from the 1782 epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and directed by Craig Johnson. At the Theater Garage in Minneapolis.

Lecture: Mary Franklin-Brown, "Reflections on Ekphrasis in Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie"

6 December 2011
4:00 PM - 6:30 PM
1210 Heller Hall

http://www.cmedst.umn.edu

Dépêche de Montréal: Kate Droske

From our own Kate Droske, on fellowship at Concordia University for the semester:

This semester I am in Montreal, researching the archives of French-Canadian author Gabrielle Roy. Though born and raised in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, Roy spent almost all of her literary career in Québec, and she wrote her best-known and first novel, Bonheur d’occasion, in Montreal. The professor who is overseeing my research on Roy teaches at Concordia University here, and I am fortunate to be able to participate in a couple of classes at Concordia this semester that complement my independent research. One of the courses I am taking focuses on Québécois literature before the 1960s, and the other on Québécois literature since the 1980s (leaving the gaping hole of the time of la Révolution Tranquille, though I have enough decades of reading to keep me plenty busy as is…). For the latter, all of the assigned novels are set, at least partially, in Montreal, and it has been a weekly adventure plotting the literary characters within the city’s streets.

I brought my bicycle with me from Minneapolis, and it has been a wonderful way to discover the city, though had I known that Bixi bikes were so prevalent (the company that brings Nice Ride to the Twin Cities originated in Montreal and is very well-established here), I might have left it at home. My commute to Concordia University brings me through downtown Montreal in its busyness and bilingualism. My return ride takes me up the Boulevard Saint-Laurent, the street that divides Montréal into East and West (and, historically, French-speaking and English-speaking). In “Les deux Saint-Laurent”, one of her early newspaper articles published in 1941, Gabrielle Roy traces different waves of immigrants as she heads north on the boulevard, beginning in the Old Port at Ville-Marie and traveling through Chinatown, Little Portugal and Little Italy. Turning East just as you reach Little Italy and continuing about half a kilometer will bring you to the apartment I am subletting.  Located in the charming cartier of Rosemont, I am living just a few blocks from the Marché Jean-Talon and surrounded by the multi-colored metal staircases leading up to second story apartments so characteristic of Montreal (though a Montrealer recently told me that it is now illegal to install the steep outdoor staircases as they are so treacherous in the icy winter months).

Thanks for writing, Kate!

Lecture: A. Curran, "The Natural History of Slavery" (9/23, 2:30pm) 112 Folwell

The Department of French & Italian

invites you to a lecture by

ANDREW CURRAN

Department of Romance Languages & Literatures,

Wesleyan University

“The Natural History of Slavery”

Friday, September 23rd,

2:30 - 4 p.m.,

112 Folwell Hall

A reception will follow in 317 Folwell Hall.

Andrew Curran is Professor of French and Dean of the Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University. He has published widely on the philosopher Denis Diderot, scientific academy debates, and the representation of Africa. He is the author of Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot's Universe (Voltaire Foundation: University of Oxford, 2001) and The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins Press, 2011). Curran was elected a fellow in the history of medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine in 2010 and won the James L. Clifford prize for the best article in eighteenth-century studies in 2011.

Co-sponsored by TEMS (Theorizing Early Modern Studies)

"Throwing out Postcards" Notes on teaching by Corbin Treacy

Corbin Treacy writes about his experience developing a class for and teaching a two-day workshop for middle- and high-school French teachers through the Institute for Global Studies

"Throwing out Postcards: Rethinking the place of culture in the French Language classroom with K-12 teachers: "

When Molly McCoy (the IGS Outreach Coordinator) first contacted me, she wanted to know if I would be interested in talking about the "Jasmine Revolution" in Tunisia. As I thought about this, it occurred to me that I was not an expert in this area and would probably do no great justice to the topic. That said, the broader questions of how and why we teach non-European "Francophone" topics in language courses do interest me, and I suggested approaching these in the workshop.

I spent many of the final weeks of the spring semester wrestling with the questions of which texts to assign and how to organize my two seven-hour days. In what now strikes me as something of a risky move, I put on the syllabus a chapter from Edward Said's Orientalism and two Paulo Freire readings (a chapter from Pedagogy of the Oppressed and another from Teachers as Cultural Workers). 

I did not know who exactly would choose to spend part of their summer talking about this or what their agenda would be.

There ended up being sixteen French teachers in the course: eleven high school teachers, two middle school teachers, one elementary school teacher, and an IGS staff member who returned from a year in France as an Assistante d'anglais and who hopes to get certified as a French teacher in the US. All but three of the participants work in public schools, and all but two have done graduate work in Education. All sixteen course participants were white and female. 



As my point de départ, I asked the teachers to discuss how they integrate non-European Francophone topics into their courses, what they think works particularly well, and what problems they encounter. Certain threads quickly emerged. Without exception, the instructors felt unprepared to speak with any authority about the broad range of Francophone topics that most text programs now include. For example, a chapter that includes a reading on Haitian voodoo might be followed by a chapter that talks about markets in Abidjan. Secondly, there was a consensus that most of these "cultural" readings were superficial and trafficked in a kind of factoid-driven approach to learning. One teacher remarked "Often, I feel like I'm playing a game of fetch with my students...I throw out information and ask them to bring it back to me. That's not teaching, that's a game I play with my dog." Many of us believe that in their current form, these cultural units are mere playgrounds for students to practice the grammar and vocabulary of the chapter, and exist in a vacuum stripped of any real context or connectivity to larger course themes or questions.



When we discussed Said, the question of how we (and textbooks) represent "la Francophonie" drove the conversation. My colleague Séverine Bates visited our workshop and presented her own thinking and research, and pointed out a moment in a textbook (one that we used to use in courses here) in which a beach is labeled "une plage sénégalaise" when it is in fact a "plage martiniquaise" and various other textual moments of either misrepresentation or clichéd representation. The carte postale exotique, it seems, lives on in many text programs that try hard to represent a plurality of voices from la Francophonie. Another colleague, Herman Koutouan, challenged the teachers to think about how they might integrate various topics (about which they might have little knowledge) into their courses, and offered a video on open-air markets in Martinique as an example. Our reading of Freire pointed to the need for instructors to include students' experiences with race, class, marginalization, immigration, etc., as the starting point for our curricular engagements with difficult and politically-charged topics.



For "next steps," there was a consensus that k-12 teachers, who are increasingly (and with good reason) asked to teach content and culture in their language courses need to have access to more professional development opportunities that focus on specific content areas, rather than pedagogical systems and strategies. The teachers also expressed a certain gratitude for the way this workshop was structured (primary foundational texts followed by small group and collective discussion, with guest speakers and curriculum development); many of them were frustrated by the way in which workshops on teaching frequently take the form of lengthy, acronym-rich PowerPoint presentations that convert commonsense teaching practices into diagrams and jargon systems. Why, many of us wondered, must conversations about teaching be so different than, say, our conversations about Zola? Finally, many of the participants in the workshop argued that to create meaningful engagements with Francophone topics, schools should encourage and enable collaboration among French teachers and across the curriculum (history, geography, English). Furthermore, at the teacher-training level, content courses (literature, politics, sociology, art history, philosophy, etc.) outside schools of education should be an integral part of language teacher preparation such that new instructors are adequately prepared to teach substantive content to their students.

I'm not sure we answered the very broad and ambitious questions that I put before the teachers at the beginning of the workshop, but the very process of reflecting on our teaching this way and discussing our profession collectively seemed to focus our thinking and renewed our commitment to keep the conversation going, in our classrooms, faculty lounges, and online.

Vous allez adorer cette ville!

Check the blog designed by 1004 students for the newest minneapolitains among us:

http://www.bienvenueaminneapolis.blogspot.com/

French Major/Minor Declaration Sessions

Do you know an undergraduate who is considered a French major or minor? Let them know about the information sessions scheduled for students interested in declaring either the Minor or the Major.

These are open meetings - no sign-up is necessary.

Friday, September 16, 12:15 p.m., Folwell 1

Wednesday, September 28, 2:30 p.m., Folwell 1
Thursday, October 13, 2:15 p.m., Folwell 1
Monday, October 31, 2:30 p.m., Folwell 113
Tuesday, November 15, 11:30 p.m., Folwell 1
Wednesday, December 7, 2:30 p.m., Folwell 1

Questions? Contact Prof. Betsy Kerr, 304F Folwell, bjkerr@umn.edu

Fall 2011 office hours, M &W, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.

To schedule an appointment, go to http://frit.umn.edu/ and click on "undergraduate programs", "French", "Advising"

Celebrate Folwell!

Join Us!

Folwell Hall Grand Opening

Date: 09/09/2011

Time: 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Location: South Lawn Folwell Hall

Celebrating the renovated home for foreign languages, literatures, and cultures.
Join us to mark the reopening of Folwell Hall after a year of renovation.


Events:
2:30 Ribbon Cutting with Regent Linda Cohen, President Eric Kaler, and Dean Parente.
3:00 Self-guided tours of classrooms and study spaces, refreshments, classroom technology demonstrations, and fun and games on the Folwell lawn.

We're Moving... Back to Folwell!

After a year in Klaeber Court, we're heading back to the newly renovated Folwell Hall. Find us in our new third-floor digs starting August 8th.


Department of French and Italian
314 Folwell Hall
9 Pleasant St. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

New Seminar: "Black Women Writers in the Diaspora" (AFRO 5625)

in HHHCtr 35

Instructor: Dr. Njeri Githire

This upper level undergraduate/graduate seminar explores the dynamics of black women's texts from Africa through Europe to the Americas and beyond. Selected writers will include Ama Ata Aidoo,Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Calixthe Beyala, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwartz-Bart,... just to mention but a few.

The course will:

• Examine the intersections of colonialism/slaveryand racism, classism, sexism ...;
  
• Understand the gendering of historical memory and cultural identity;
• Identify how acts of resistance inform women's writing;
• Explore the connections between gender, space, place, and power/empowerment;
• Study the role of language, myth, orality and other forms of folk culture in women's narratives;
• Examine representations of the body and self-image in women's narratives;

Note: half the texts studied in this seminar have originally been written in French. Students
of French who wish to read the texts in the original and write their course
papers in French may feel free to do so.

Dépêche de Northfield: Meeting Maryse Condé

Our own Déborah Ferrand shares glowing notes from her trip to Carleton College, with Sarah Boardman and Séverine Bates, to hear Maryse Condé last week:

Some of us had the extreme pleasure to attend the lecture given by Maryse Condé at Carleton University on April 20th. As graduate students and future specialists of francophone literature, it was really an honour to meet such an incredible woman and author.

Two French 1004 students decided to come along with us, they wanted to know more about her life. Before going to Carleton, I wondered how to make them understand the intensity and meaning of meeting Maryse Condé and listening to her. I ended up telling them that it was pretty much like meeting a rock star of literature. But she is much more than that for the people who got the opportunity and pleasure to read and analyze her novels. She not only wrote remarkable novels, but she is also very involved in the crafting of French schools curriculums, as she makes sure that slavery and colonialism be taught.

The talk was first entitled « Journey of a Carribean woman » but she later decided to change it to « Searching for one's voice. » She asked herself what it is to write Maryse Condé (to write in her own language)? Where do her voice, her style and themes come from? This conference falls directly in the line of her current work as she explained she is writing her autobiography. She talked about her life and influences and how she was raised in a climate of adoration for the French language and literature and repression of the Creole language. Only when she studied at the Lycée Fénélon (in the Classes préparatoires aux Grandes écoles) in Metropolitan France did she discover who Aimé Césaire and the négritude movement were, and above all what it really meant to be black and Caribbean. These discoveries and her desire to know her African origins, would explain her fascination for Africa, its people and culture as well as her decision to go live there with her first husband. Africa would soon become her source of inspiration for her first novel. She described this African adventure as the first part of her life as a woman and writer, the second part being, according to her, her return to Guadeloupe and the third, her life in America.

Besides being an amazing orator (she talked for one and a half hours without any notes), Maryse Condé is also a very approachable and generous woman. She came accompanied by her husband, Richard Philcox, who is also her translator for English, an interesting fact that I did not know.

In the end, it was the opportunity of a lifetime to meet an author we all read and worked on, and we are thrilled we attended this very special event.

Dossier: Pourquoi les études littéraires/Why literature matters

From the marvelous resource Fabula, a dossier on recent writings defending literary studies. References span the Atlantic Ocean, from Martha Nussbaum to Yves Citton.

Paranoid? You must be a graduate student!

From yesterday's Chronicle, by Don Troop:

Memo to grad students: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not about to give you a Ph.D.

Kudos: Dan Brewer awarded for his graduate advising

Our own Prof. Dan Brewer was among the faculty honored by the 2011 COGS Outstanding Faculty Award!

Come celebrate with us TOMORROW, Monday 25th, 4-6:30pm in the Campus Club (4th Floor Coffman).

Lecture: "Journey of a Caribbean Writer," Maryse Condé (4/20, 7:30pm, Carleton College)

From Cathy Yandell at Carleton College:

Nous sommes très heureux de vous inviter, vous et vos étudiants, à la conférence de Maryse Condé à Carleton, suivie d'une discussion avec l'auteure.

Maryse Condé, dont vous connaissez probablement l'oeuvre, a publié plus de 20 romans dont Ségou; Moi Tituba, Sorcière; Traversée de la mangrove; Windward Heights (une version cubaine/guadeloupéenne du roman célèbre de Brontë), ainsi que l'oeuvre autobiographique Le coeur à rire et à pleurer. Elle a reçu de nombreux prix littéraires -- le Grand Prix du roman métis (2010), le Prix Marguerite Yourcenar (1999), et le Prix de l'Académie française (1988), entre autres.
Maryse Condé, "Journey of a Caribbean Writer"
le mercredi 20 avril, 19h30
Carleton College, Boliou 104
Pour arriver à Carleton, prenez la 35W vers le sud jusqu'à la route 19 (sortie 69), et allez vers l'est (à gauche). Une fois arrivé à Northfield, continuez tout droit après le feu rouge; vous serez dans la 5e rue. Continuez jusqu'à la rue Winona où vous tournez à gauche jusqu'à ce que la rue devienne un parking (vous pouvez vous y garer). Si vous continuez à pied toujours vers le nord, vous verrez un grand bâtiment à colonnes (Laird). Boliou est juste à droite, un petit bâtiment moderne couleur de sable.

Lectures: "Alternative Narratives or Denial? " (Wed 4/13, 4pm, Humphrey Forum)

Featuring Two Lectures:

"Godard's Wars"
Philip Watts, Associate Professor of French, Department Chair, Columbia University

"Thoughts on Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive"
Jeffrey Mehlman, Professor of French, Department of Romance Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University

Godard's Wars
Philip Watts, Associate Professor of French, Department Chair, Columbia University
There has been much controversy about French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's relation to the Jews and the Holocaust. Godard was recently accused of anti-Semitism. Philip Watts will return to this recent affair by focusing on Godard's filmic representation of WWII, the Middle East conflict and the Holocaust.
Thoughts on Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
Jeffrey Mehlman, Professor of French, Department of Romance Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued in several books that the concentration camp has become the paradigm of our life in modern, liberal democracies. His work has a vast influence on many different fields and disciplines: legal scholarship, social sciences (especially political science), and literary studies in the US, Europe and beyond.
Jeffrey Mehlman will examine the perils engaged and not always avoided when Italy's pre-eminent philosopher, perched between Heidegger and Benjamin, Foucault and Arendt, hurls the pre-eminent discourses of European modernity at the pre-eminent catastrophe of the twentieth century in what never quite coheres as the pre-eminent epistemological encounter of modern times.
Sponsored by Sponsored by: Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Human Rights Program, German, Scandinavian & Dutch, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, French & Italian
For more information, please contact the Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies
* Name: Laura Lechner
* E-mail: lech0045@umn.edu
* Phone: 612-624-0256

"Humanities, For Sake of Humanity:" Inside Higher Ed

Dan Berrett's report on the Symposium on the Future of the Humanities is worth a read:

Beware that false idol, the broadly applied metric. Embrace the neglected power of ambiguity and individual human experience.

CSCL Colloquium featuring Greta Bliss: 3:30, 3/25 (Nicholson 325)

"Translation Routes"

Friday March 25th at 3:30pm

Nicholson Hall 325

Akshya Saxena, "In Other Words: Reading Dainik Jagran's Sangini"

Dan Dooghan, "Polytopic Texts and Incremental Apprehension: Republican China's Contribution to Translation Theory"

Michelle Baroody, "The Untimeliness of World Literature"

Greta Bliss, "Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Vital Antagonisms of Maghrebi Untranslation"

Please find below detailed descriptions of the four papers, which will be followed by a question and answer period. Light refreshments will be available. We will head over to the Kitty Cat Klub following the event in order to continue our discussion. We hope to see many of you there.

Greta Bliss, "Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Vital Antagonisms of Maghrebi Untranslation"

This paper introduces the history of French translations of the Maghreb
via the literary figure of Maghrebi woman through an analysis of how
Maïssa Bey's 2005 novel Surtout ne te retourne pas "untranslates"
Orientalist representations of the Maghreb. Bliss argues that the
notion of bilingual "antagonisms" (Abdelfattah Kilito) touching Bey's
work are integral to the project of untranslation as a whole. By
refusing to settle on a single sort of portrayal of the female
narrator(s) and by deferring her (their) history(ies), Bey theorizes
untranslation as a tactic of reading that must look forward and back in
antagonistic and contradictory ways that are distinct from the concept
of "hybridity." This paper challenges mainstream discourses in French
and Francophone Studies that have conditioned the emergence of Maghrebi
women's fiction and ratified it as an academic subfield in problematic
ways.

Akshya Saxena, "In Other Words: Reading Dainik Jagran's Sangini"

My paper attempts to read the Hindi-English bilingualism found in Jagran Sangini, the four-page color women's weekly supplement that accompanies the largest-circulating Hindi daily in India today, Dainik Jagran. I take my cue from The Translation Zone (2006) by Emily Apter, where she offers a provocative discussion of the significance of the theory and practice of translation to the discipline of Comparative Literature. As I grapple with the dynamics of the Vernacular Press Revolution of the nineties in India (of which I see Sangini to be a sign), I find both value and discomfort in her use of the category of the Creole, her stand-in for non-standard, non-vehicular, ungrammatical and plurilingually inventive language. My paper, in its study of Sangini, seeks to trouble her understanding that a new comparative literature founded in the Creole necessarily disrupts the "deep structural law that languages are named after nations", and so traffics in only "phantom inter-nations".

Dan Dooghan, "Polytopic Texts and Incremental Apprehension: Republican China's Contributions to Translation Theory"

Given China's lack of translators working in most languages, many European texts during the first half of the twentieth century entered Chinese through indirect translation from Japanese. The translated text thus appears as a product of multiple topoi: origin, intermediaries, and destination. As each topos produces translations that respond to the local literary polysystem, the skopoi of the intermediary translators accrete to the translated texts, thus complicating the usual binary translation relationship usually encountered in Euro-American translation studies. Furthermore, cognizant of the weaknesses of indirect translation, Chinese intellectuals of the Republican period (1911-1949) developed methods of translation criticism both to compensate for the intermediary accretions and guide translators when approaching polytopic texts.

Michelle Baroody, "The Untimeliness of World Literature"

How do we begin to think of world literature outside of the terms West and non-West? Is there a space for the "Third world" to enter into an exchange with other "world literatures" without always carrying the label "other"? The logic of contemporary, popular theories of world literature are founded upon the disavowal of Orientalism as both a discursive and political logic of the west and the critique of that logic initiated by such thinkers as Edward Said. This disavowal tends to homogenize the field of world literatures, covering up potential social contradictions and power relations, as well as the social complexities of literary exchange in the global market. As I will demonstrate, the disavowal of Orientalism also produces a temporal logic whereby literature is considered modern (a term which in many literary critical discourses assumes a distinct value) only insofar as it passes through and is canonized by the West. Rather than simply scrap the project of world literature, I contend that it may be more adequate to the situation of the global literary market to consider the possibility of untimely world literatures: that is, to consider the project of world literature as a critical task involving the exchange between often incommensurable spaces and temporalities, which nonetheless are articulated together in specific literary instances. In order to develop this idea, I investigate one such exchange that between the Syrian poet Adonis and the American poet Walt Whitman as Adonis reworks, reinvents, and goes beyond Whitman's

MSP International Film Festival (4/14 -5/5) The "Year of France" Highlights

The 2011 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival launches next month! is slated for April 14 through May 5 - presenting over 180 films from some 60 countries at the five-screen St. Anthony Main Theatre. For three weeks, the Twin Cities celebrates the arrival of the best of international and independent filmmaking in the region. We are thrilled to present 13 French films in conjunction with the Year of France in Minnesota!

Included in this year's programming is a great slate of French films marking the Year of France in Minnesota. Also noteworthy: an impressive group of music-themed films, and the ever-popular Minnesota-Made Showcase. In addition, the festival will host many visiting filmmakers from all corners of the globe participating in panel discussions and presentations, and attending a host of festival receptions and gala events.


Dumas (L'Autre Dumas)

Narrative Directed by Safy Nebbou
France/Belgium, 2010, in French with English Subtitles
Alexandre Dumas and his ghostwriter Auguste Maquet are at the height of their successful collaboration. Maquet decides to pass himself off for Dumas in order to seduce Charlotte, an admirer of the illustrious writer. A confrontation between the two men becomes inevitable. Starring Gerard Depardieu, Benoit Poelvoorde, and Dominque Blanc. -en.unifrance.org


The Hedgehog

Narrative Directed by Mona Achache
France, 2009, in French with English Subtitles

The story of an unexpected encounter: that of Paloma Josse, a little 11-year-old, highly intelligent and suicidal girl, Renée Michel, a discreet and solitary Parisian concierge, and the enigmatic Mr. Kakuro Ozu. - en.unifrance.org
The Hedgehog has taken the worldwide festival circuit by storm as a selection at thirteen different festivals, winning special awards at the Cairo International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival and the City of Lights, City of Angels (Col-Coa) in Los Angeles.



The Princess of Montpensier

Narrative Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
France/Germany, 2010, in French with English subtitles

France, 1562. The wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants rage against a backdrop of intrigue and shifting alliances.
Marie de Mézières, a beautiful young aristocrat, and Henri de Guise, one of the kingdom's most intrepid heroes, are in love, but Marie's father promises her hand in marriage to the Prince of Montpensier. The prince takes Marie back to his chateau, where she is tutored by Chabannes, the Protestant deserter he protects, who soon falls in love with the young woman. Then, on their way back from battle, Henri de Guise and the Duke d'Anjou, the heir to the throne, stop at the chateau. Henri and Marie realize their feelings for each other are as strong as ever. -en.unifrance.org


Other exciting French films booked for the festival:

Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film, directed by Pip Chodorov (documentary)
Gigola, directed by Laure Charpentier

A Cat in Paris, directed by Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol (childish, animated)

Eleanor's Secret, directed by Dominique Monféry (childish, animated)

The Names of Loves, directed by Michel Leclerc

Nostalgia for the Light, directed by Patricio Guzmán (documentary)

The Queen of Hearts (La Reine des Pommes), directed by Valérie Donzelli

The Sleeping Beauty, directed by Catherine Breillat

The Tree, directed by Julie Bertuccelli, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg

Queen to Play, directed by Caroline Bottaro


For more information about the 2011 International Film Festival and other Film Society Programming contact Ryan Oestreich, at 612 331-7563, or visit the 2011 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival website at www.mspfilmfest.org.

Performance: "Albertine en cinq temps" (4/15, 7pm, St. Kate's)

The Department of International Languages and Literatures at Saint Catherine University and its French colleagues from the ACTC institutions including Hamline, St Thomas, and Macalester would like to invite you to attend a single evening's performance of Albertine en cinq temps, an adaptation of the play by French Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay, by Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte on Friday April 15, Friday, 2011 at Saint Catherine University in the Recital Hall located in the Music Building on the Saint Paul campus.





Since 2004, Saint Catherine's French Department has welcomed Chandelle Verte for a yearly performance with great success, and many of you and your students have taken advantage of this event.
As in years past, the troupe will provide all schools attending a dossier that prepares faculty and students with prepared text excerpts and discussion questions about the play. Students who use these exercises ahead of time are better prepared before they see the show. Then they have an opportunity to ask questions in a talkback session afterwards.
These materials are designed for preparing students of all levels of French who plan on attending the performance.
For more information and to RSVP, contact Sally Sundberg at sjsundberg@stkate.edu or (651) 690-6548.

CFP: 16th/17th-century panels at MLA (3/15/11; Seattle 1/5-8/12)

The Division on Seventeenth-Century French Literature of the MLA announces its Calls for Papers for 3 sessions, including a joint round table with the Division on Sixteenth-Century French Literature:


The 2012 MLA will be in Seattle from January 5-8.
The Limits of the Human: Papers that address any of the following: the status of animals; relations between animals and humans; theriophilist philosophies; the ramifications of Descartes' bête-machine; humans and environment. 250-word abstracts by March 15, 2011 to Lewis Seifert (lewis_seifert@brown.edu)

Invisibility: Invisibility haunts this very visual period in France. A panel on invisibility and the invisible in any and all of its elusive manifestations: philosophical, social, aesthetic, literary, scientific, scholarly. 250-word abstracts by March 15, 2011 to Claire Goldstein (goldstc@muohio.edu)
What is the Early Modern?
(Collaborative roundtable with the Division on Sixteenth-Century French
Literature) Contributors will describe how the early modern is defined/redefined through current teaching and research practices. 100-word abstracts by March 15, 2011 to Virginia Krause (virginia_krause@brown.edu) or Ellen McClure (ellenmc@uic.edu)

CIEE: Encountering Contemporary French Theory

Interested in an intensive academic summer experience? Consider CIEE's program with the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Open to graduate students and undergraduates.

Encountering Contemporary French Theory, June 2011.pdf
For more information, contact Brent Keever at

Dépêche de Klaeber Court: Prof. Judith Preckshot

I asked Prof Judith Preckshot about what she's working on right now, and she told me about a fascinating and timely graduate seminar she's preparing for next semester:

Many of us struggle with balancing the competing demands of teaching and research, and in our attempts to do each to perfection on its own terms we sometimes lose sight of how they are so integrally related. For graduate students the stresses and strains are perhaps even greater because you are engaged in a dual apprenticeship, the one intellectual and academic, and the other pedagogical and practical. And your teaching is at the beginning and intermediate levels of language and culture, which doesn't often give you the opportunity to teach your research. With this on my mind, I am crafting a graduate course on francophone Caribbean and Sub-Saharan African literature (to be offered in Fall 2011) that will ask students to work at the intersection of scholarly research and teaching in ways that are hopefully both imaginative--in terms of imagining a future as a post-secondary instructor-- and very practical in that the material outcome would be a scholarly conference paper as well as a collaboratively compiled dossier of course materials and course syllabi. I see this as a kind of workshop in which we will all learn from each other, taking positions à tour de rôle as teachers and mentors, students and mentees, peer reviewers and reviewees.

Having learned so much from students I've mentored in past teaching projects, I'm very excited about the prospect of "teaching" a course in which everyone will also be a teacher, a mentor to someone and a producer of knowledge in the discipline. This format allows me to bring the mentoring process more visibly into the classroom and to conjoin the intellectual and the practical aspects of our discipline. I also want the experience to be immediately useful to students, hence the selection of texts from the MA reading list and the kinds of assignments that will enhance advanced students' professional development by preparing them for a job search or applications for teaching post-docs.

Discussion: Political Theory Colloquium: Jill Locke on Rousseau (3/11)

This Friday (3/11) UMN's political theory colloquium will host Jill Locke (Political Science and Women's Studies, Gustavus Adolphus College). Jill will briefly present her work "Rousseau, The Misfit's Hero," followed by a longer discussion. The colloquium will be in 1314 Social Sciences at 1:30; coffee will be served.

The paper is at http://www.polisci.umn.edu/centers/theory/schedule.html

Abstract: An extraordinarily pluralistic group of eighteenth-century men and women were drawn to Rousseau"s writings and Rousseau himself because of his sympathetic portrait of the person who did not fit into the artificial and inegalitarian culture of le monde. Some of these men, like Jean-Paul Marat, became revolutionaries; Jean-Marie-Bernard Clément, by contrast, found Rousseauean inspiration for his labors in the Counter-Enlightenment. Stranger still, Olympe de Gouges, whose life and work represented all that Rousseau feared, claimed an enormous debt to Rousseau as the person who helped her imagine an
unashamed and authentic life that was free from the shackles of social expectations.
In this paper, I explore "Three Rousseaus" (the Romantic, the Tutor, and the Legislator) with this reception history in mind, highlighting the ways in which Rousseau"s paeans to the authentic life and desire to protect the misfit from social shame radicalize his republican thought in exciting ways. Yet at the same time, perhaps because Rousseau was aware of the pluralism of his readers and his following by women in particular, I show how his texts forestall these romantic implications. By closing off the romantic republic from literary women and the men with whom they dwell, Rousseau strives to protect the misfit who animates his defense of the authentic life--the simple, provincial man. Against current trends in political theory, I affirm Rousseau"s concern with the psychological state of the misfit and his willingness to see it in political terms, but caution against the effort to guarantee the misfit or any other citizen a social or political life that is free from the injuries of shame. It is this move of seeking to guarantee the misfit a life free from anything that will mock or humiliate him that enables Rousseau to close off the public to others who were eager to take up his an invitation to live an authentic life.

Conference: Translating the Encyclopédie in the Global 18th Century

If you're in New York this weekend, catch up with our own Dan Brewer at ARTFL's annual conference on the Encyclopédie, this year at Fordham University.

Here's the program:
Fordham NYU Encyclopedie conference.pdf

Language Study in French for Graduate Students

Are you interested in perfecting your French? Consider Bryn Mawr's Avignon Institute, which is one of the few with a graduate component.

http://www.brynmawr.edu/avignon/
Scholarships are apparently available!
Deadline was Tuesday March 1 but they admit on a rolling basis. If not for this summer, perhaps next?

Dépêche de Paris: Lia Mitchell from the rue Oberkampf

Lia Mitchell, our Exchange Fellow in Paris, writes us about Canals on Mars, the invasion midwestern vowels of Paris, and the so-called original LouLou :

It's been a quiet six months on rue Oberkampf; not at street level, where there's traffic, street musicians, bars, and occasionally an enormous protest. But up in the chambre de bonne we refer to (affectionately) as the bat cave or (when taking refuge) Petit Minneapolis, things are generally quiet. When at home, I spend my time reading science fiction from around 1900; digging through the online maze of Gallica for references to the canals on Mars, hypothetical planetary collisions, and other things that might blow up the Earth at some point; staring at old photographs of the city; and watching French people argue about politics on television.
However, I try not to spend too much time in the apartment. I devote a few hours a week to chatting with my students and corrupting their accents with my long Midwestern vowels. This accomplished, my walking companion and I have set a mission to explore the city on foot: every major park and passage, every cool little neighborhood, all the traces of the city as it was before Haussmann got to work. I've also gotten to a couple of photography exhibits about the city: one that juxtaposed Charles Marville's photos from destruction and construction during the Second Empire with photos of present-day Paris, and another with photos of street violence from conflicts like World War II and May '68 coupled with digitally created images of Paris in a state of war. Other excitement has included a visit to Flaubert's childhood home in Rouen, with the divine vision of the original stuffed parrot Loulou; the vast and wonderful outdoor markets; the glories of raw milk cheese; and of course the massive caves of the BNF.

CFP: "Re-Visioning Terrorism" (3/20/11; 5/8-10/11)

RE-VISIONING TERRORISM
An Interdisciplinary and International Conference
SEPTEMBER 8-10, 2011 - Purdue University

Funded by the College of Liberal Arts Enhancing Research in the Humanities and the Arts Grant and by the Purdue University Office of the Vice President for Research
Papers and/ or panel proposals are invited for a three-day conference on re-visions and re-presentations of Terrorism from antiquity to the present, to coincide, roughly, with the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack directed at the World Trade Center in New York on September, 2001. Proposals for panels and individual papers (250-word abstract) are due by March 20, 2011. Refereed proceedings will be published.
The attack against the World Trade Center Towers was tragic for its victims and traumatic for our nation. We all watched those horrifying images time and time and time again. We now all know what terrorism is given, the clear images we have in our mind's eye of the airplanes crashing into New York's Twin Towers. And we all know what terrorists look like. Or at least we think we do. For the past decade we have seen the pictures of Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers on countless TV shows, newspapers, and magazines. Those are the visions we have. It has not always been thus. The fortunes of terrorism have waxed and waned over the centuries. While established governments have always railed against "terrorists," frequently at least significant portions of local populations have sympathized with them. With the attack on the Twin Towers on what has come to be known as 9/11, suddenly terrorism came to be considered the manifestation of evil incarnate. It was no longer a subject which could be studied objectively and dispassionately. Its destruction, whatever it was and is, became, as President Bush called it, a "crusade" and as such warranted the expenditure of limitless resources and the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, most of which were unquestionably innocent. After a decade of war against an enemy we are no closer to being able to identify today than we were in 2001 and having achieved none of our original stated objectives, with the exception of the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Bath party in Iraq, it is perhaps finally time to "re-vision" terrorism.
The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to look at terrorism to see how it has been perceived and represented over the centuries in literature, art, theater, and most recently, in the audio-visual media in the hope of arriving at a better understanding of this phenomenon. While we do not expect to find a unitary definition of and/or explanation for terrorism, we do hope to begin a discussion with scholars from across the humanities and social sciences which will encourage a more flexible response to one of the most serious problems confronting the world today.
For further information please contact Elena Coda and Ben Lawton (Conference Co-Directors) at lawton@purdue.edu or visit our website: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/fll/main/news/Terrorism/
Correspondence MUST include ReVisioning Terrorism in the subject line.

Fellowship: TASI 2011, "Violence Across the Mediterranean to Northern Europe: Theory and Practice" (4/8; 7/17-29)

"Violence Across the Mediterranean to Northern Europe: Theory and Practice"
Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in European Studies, July 17 - July 29, 2011
University of Minnesota

The DAAD Center for German & European Studies at
the University of Minnesota invites applications to the 11th
Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in European Studies (TASI). The
Institute will bring together 12 German or other European, and 12 North
American advanced graduate students for an intensive two-week seminar on
the campus of the University of Minnesota. The 2011 topic is "Violence
Across the Mediterranean to Northern Europe: Theory and Practice."

The
2011 multi-disciplinary faculty leaders are Patricia Lorcin (History;
University of Minnesota) and Aberrahmane Moussaoui (Anthropology;
University of Provence, France). They will be joined by guest speaker
Ruth Mandel (Anthropology; University College London, UK). The Institute
offers a diverse mix of seminar discussions of key readings, research
presentations by guest faculty and fellows, and informal discussions of
fellows' research projects. The international faculty team encourages
applications from young scholars in the social sciences and humanities
who are eager to situate their own projects at the intersection of the
four main strands in the scholarly literature on violence. All selected
students will receive fellowships. A reading knowledge of French is
required. Application deadline: April 8, 2011.

Full details and application materials at:

http://www.cges.umn.edu/fellowships/tasi.htm

CFP: Photography, Gender, Representation (3/1/11; 4/22-23/11)

**Call for Papers**

BEND! Photography, Gender, & the Politics of Representation

An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Princeton University, April 22-23, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Professor George Baker, Department of Art History, UCLA


The past decade has witnessed widespread institutional and scholarly efforts to historicize the relation between art and feminism, and between art and identity politics. These efforts unfold in a present that is often characterized as "post-gender" and/or "post-racial." Just as categories of identity seem to lose traction in cultural discourse, so boundaries between artistic media become unfixed. Yet photographic representation is increasingly pervasive, and increasingly bound to the performance of subjectivity.
This symposium aims to consider the interrelated production of gender and photography, along with their dissolution as stable categories of inquiry. An interrogation of photography today requires looking within as well as beyond the boundaries of traditional art-historical frameworks. It compels us to account for the political and social dimensions in which photography participates, and demands that we re-consider the mise-en-scène of photography's production as art.
How has the evolution of photography--from b/w to color, from analogue to digital, from mass media to social media--served to articulate or blur aesthetic and subjective differences? What politics of representation emerge when the individual can be both agent and object of photographic voyeurism, exhibitionism, and surveillance? Might photography's expanded field offer the potential for reshaping feminist politics today?
We invite participants to explore historical, existing and possible relationships between photography and the (re)production of gender, from the perspectives of visual culture, philosophy, (art) history, and art practice. Papers might consider photography in relation to:
gender bending - histories and politics of sexuality - performance and/or portraiture - the construction of masculinity - women artists - representations of gender, race, and class - advocacy, activism, and political practice - feminist politics, ethics, and aesthetics - medical and biological discourses - capitalism, terrorism, and war
We welcome submissions from graduate students and emerging scholars in all fields and disciplines. Please submit a CV and 300-word abstract for a 20-minute paper by March 1, 2011 to Frances Jacobus-Parker, Elena Peregrina-Salvador, and Mareike Stoll at princetonphotography2011@gmail.com.

Alliance Française: "La Nuit de la Pub!" (3/7, 7pm)

The Alliance Francaise of Minneapolis/St. Paul and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design will be featuring an evening of French advertisements "La nuit de la Pub" (The Night of the Ad) on Monday, March 7th at 7:00 p.m. Founder and Director of the "media think tank" La Maison de la Pub in Paris, Anne Saint Dreux will lead the evening with screenings of French and International commercials focused on women in advertisements.



This is great opportunity for students studying French language and culture.
*Please note: For student groups of 15+ who have registered by Feb. 25, tickets are only $7 a person.
Event: The Night of the Ad (La Nuit de la Pub): French Women in Advertising
Hosts: Alliance Française de Minneapolis/ St. Paul & MCAD
Location: Auditorium 150, MCAD Campus, 2501 Stevens Ave., Minneapolis
Date: Monday, March 7, 2011
Time: 7:00pm
Tickets: $15; $10 for Members of Alliance Française
Ticket Information: bonjour@afmsp.org or 612-332-0436
Directions: www.mcad.edu
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me at communications@afmsp.org or bonjour@afmsp.org .

Alliance Française: "Soirée à La Fontaine des Abeilles" (2/26, 7pm)

The Alliance Française de Minneapolis/St. Paul invites you to "Soirée à La Fontaine des Abeilles". Whether you are familiar with the famous French fabulist, Jean La Fontaine or not, this will be an evening you do not want to miss! Join us at the Alliance for an evening of singing, performances and a presentation by Professor Max Adrien, of Hamline University, on Saturday, February 26 from 7:00-10:00 p.m. Entrance is free and all presentations will be in French. The event is for all ages and we encourage families, students and all Francophiles to attend!




Event: Soirée à La Fontaine des Abeilles
Host: Alliance Francaise de Minneapolis/St. Paul
Where: Grande Salle of the Alliance, 113 North First Street, Minneapolis
When: Saturday Feb. 26th: 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Entry Fee: Free
Performers:
The Chorale of the French Academy of St. Louis Park
Mourad & Hassiba Ammi
Philippe Gallandat
Yvonne Peralta
Presentation: Max Adrien, Hamline University
More information: bonjour@afmsp.org or call (612) 332- 0436

Lecture: Sanyal, "Migrations of the Plague: Albert Camus, The Concentrationary, and Terror" (2/18,)

Join us for a lecture by

Debarati Sanyal, University of California, Berkeley

Friday, February 18th
4-6pm
Nicholson Hall 125



This talk offers a discussion of Albert Camus's competing canonizations as exemplary witness to the Holocaust, as apologist of French imperialism, and as critic of terror. Through a reading of his figure of the plague and its contemporary circulation on both sides of the Mediterranean, the paper explores points of overlap and tension between distinctive legacies of historical violence when these are brought together in allegorical form.

A ne pas oublier: fabula.org!

Quelle mine d'information!



For fellowship and job-seekers, see the appels & postes section.
For inspiration, curiosity, and other opportunities, see actualités, the agenda, or just the homepage!

Lecture: "Hollywood, Pirated Videos and Child Soldiers" Macalester, 2/16

The French and Francophone Studies Dept at Macalester invites you in the context of our lecture series to :

Hollywood, Pirated Videos and Child Soldiers, Dr. Emmanuel Dongala


Wednesday, February 16
4:45 PM
Humanities 401
Professor Dongala, winner of "best French novel of 2010," will discuss his personal experience with child soldiers in the Congo Republic during the civil war, which took place from 1997-2000. Starting from a fateful encounter he had with children at a roadblock they were controlling, he will discuss why and how these kids turned into child soldiers. He will explore the impact of Hollywood movies and satellite TV on child soldiers. He will also discuss the current state of ex-child soldiers.
Dongala received a BA in Chemistry from Oberlin College, an MA from Rutgers University and a PhD in Organic Chemistry in France. Dongala returned to Congo and worked as a teacher and dean of Academic Affairs until 1998, when he was forced to leave after a bitter civil war. Helped by his friend the writer Philip Roth, he now lives in the US. He teaches chemistry at Bard College at Simon's Rock where he holds the Richard B. Fisher Chair in Natural Sciences and leads a seminar in African Francophone literature.
Dongala, who writes in French, has published five novels, a collection of short stories and a play. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. His essays and articles have appeared in major newspapers and magazines including ' Liberation', 'Le Monde', 'The New York Times', and 'Transition'. His novel, Johnny Mad Dog, published in the USA in 2002, was selected by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. The film made from the book was released in 2006. His latest novel, (not yet translated) ''Photo de groupe au bord du fleuve'' published last April was named "best French novel of 2010" by the literary magazine LIRE.

Using the Google Books corpus effectively...

(or at least using it to procrastinate in an interesting fashion)... Try this experiment from Google Labs:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info

"French is too important to be left to middle-class Francophiles"

From today's Guardian, one academic's perspective on how French literature has created for him "a new mental landscape..."

The full story here...

"'"Oy Vey!"':" Houellebecq and BHL in conversation, reviewed

Ian Buruma reviews the translation of M Houellebecq and B-H Lévy's dialogic musings in Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World (Random House, 2010).

Prof. Bruno Chaouat interviewed on Palin's comments

Read the article by Maury Glover and see the interview on Fox 9 News, Palin's 'Blood Libel' Video Fans Flames:

MINNEAPOLIS - Since the Tucson shooting, pundits and politicians have been pointing fingers at everything from lax guns laws to political rhetoric . But the national war of words escalated Wednesday when Sarah Palin entered the fray with the term "blood libel."
The term blood libel isn't common in the United States - it was used mostly in Eastern Europe as a way of blaming Jews for the death of Jesus Christ. And Sarah Palin calling herself the victim of blood libel has upset some Jewish leaders.
In a nearly 8-minute video on her Facebook page, Palin said she is being persecuted by political commentators and the media in the wake of the Tucson shooting.
"Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that severs only to incite the very violence it claims to condemn," Palin said.
Bruno Chouat, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, says the term blood libel refers to the false belief that Jews use the blood of Christian children for religious rituals, and has been used as an excuse for anti-Semitism since the Middle Ages.
"I do not believe there is anything anti-Semitic in her statement or anything offensive," Chouat said. "But it can be offensive because she is using the term as if as she is in the position of being stigmatized like the Jews have been stigmatized for centuries."
While some Jewish leaders say the term brings back painful memories of Jewish persecution throughout the centuries, Chouat says Palin's poor choice of words may have fanned the flames of political debate instead of cooling them.
"It's an exploitive metaphor because no Jews are involved in this," he said. "This whole question doesn't revolve around anti-Semitism, so its a form of exploitation of the history of anti-Semitism."
An aide for Palin says she stands by her video.

Gonzo Theatre's "No Exit" at the Lowry Lab Feb 3-12

Dramaturged by our very own Sophie Kerman!


Limited engagement! Tickets on sale now!
More at http://www.gonzotheatre.org

Department Faculty receive annual Imagine Fund Awards

Congratulations to our faculty for these awards, which support for research in the arts, design, and the humanities:






Hakim Abderrezak, Literary and Cultural Representations of Western Mediterranean Migrations (Book)
Daniel Brewer, Partial Recall: Memory Spaces of the French Eighteenth Century (Book)
Bruno Chaouat, Response to Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust film Shoah (Presentation
Juliette Cherbuliez, The Medean Presence in Early Modern Literature (Book)
Mary Franklin-Brown, Discourses of Encyclopedism in the Scholastic Age / Aesthetics, Ideology, and the Invention of Romance (Book)
Betsy Kerr,A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Anglicisms in Contemporary Metropolitan French (Article)
Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinematic Affect in Literature and Philosophy (Book)