February 8
3:30 Maison Française

Anne Garréta (Université de Rennes II)

Proust's perverse art of digression

Not only is it well known that Proust's masterpiece (Remembrance of Things Past) is too long, it is also commonly agreed that it is long in rather peculiar ways: that is, filled with digressions--on military strategy and flowers, airplanes and the art of dressmaking.

Digression is a narrative sin--or disease--of which many a critic and reader has tried to cure Proust, most often through surgery and amputation.

Progress, however, was inevitable: recent critical remedies range from the
narratological to the psychoanalytical. Or to put it concisely: prescriptions for amnesia.

But what exactly is to be forgotten with digressions?

- reception to follow -

March 1
3:30 Maison Française

Deborah McGrady (Tulane University)

Reading between the Lines:
Textual and Visual Responses to Lay Literacy in Late-Medieval Manuscripts

Uncertain as to whether their audience would access their texts through public performance or through private study, late-medieval authors and bookmakers responded with sweeping changes that catered to the individual reader: the creation of new literary genres (e.g., hybrid texts, epistolary romances, prose narratives), an overhaul in manuscript layout, and a revised definition of the roles and responsibilities attributed to readers.

- reception to follow -

March 15
11:00 am Minor Hall

Myriam Maître (CEREDI, Université de Rouen)

Les 'belles' et les Belles-Lettres:
femmes, instances du féminin et nouvelles configurations du savoir

Entre 1598 et 1715, le nombre croissant de femmes lisant, jugeant, écrivant et publiant contribue largement à transformer la scène culturelle. Mais le rôle des femmes va plus loin encore dans l'invention de la littérature (au sens actuel de ce terme) et dans sa légitimation comme pratique culturelle et comme valeur alternative à la res literaria.

Under the auspices of Le Savoir en France au XVIIe siècle (The North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature Conference)

Please register at the door--free admission to the UVA community.

March 25
3:30 Maison Française

Anne Garréta (Université de Rennes II)

How can you tell fictional discourse from referential? Autobiography from novel? Can you tell? One of the standard answers to that question has relied on the theorization of literary communication as framed by pacts or contracts.

The genre of autobiography thus received its most formal conceptualization from the highlighting and analysis of such devices, whether they be explicit or implied.

But could it be that the notion of pact or contract is itself of the order of a fiction? What does law, what does political theory have to do with the telling and the acts?

- reception to follow -

April 5
3:30 Maison Française

Paul Barrette (UT-Knoxville)

La première ville francophone des États-Unis il y a cent ans

Certaines communautés francophones américaines, peu connues aujourd'hui,
jouaient, il y a cent ans, un role très actif dans le monde culturel français. Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait pour le maintien de la culture française dans la plus importante de ces communautés aux États-Unis (et troisième de l'Amérique du Nord après Montréal et Québec)? Quels en étaient les résultats?

- reception to follow -

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