events

20th and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies
International Colloquium
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
March 6-8, 2008

Plenary Speakers
Special Guests and Events

Plenary Speakers

Alice Kaplan is the Lehrman Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature and History at Duke University and founder of Duke's Center for French and Francophone Studies. The author of numerous articles and essays on French literature and culture, she has been a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary since 1997. Her scholarship has focused on the history of France during WWII; she has also written on canon formation, on fascist ideology, and on the life and work of writers Céline, Guilloux, Camus and Némirovsky. Her books include French Lessons: a Memoir, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, and The Interpreter. The Collaborator won the L.A. Times Book Prize in History in 2000. An essay about American professors of French, "A Scholar's Paris," appeared in The Chronicle for Higher Education this September. Kaplan is also a translator, most notably of the French writer Roger Grenier. Her most recent translations include Louis Guilloux's WWII story OK, Joe and Evelyne Bloch-Dano's Madame Proust, a biography of Proust's mother.

Michèle Sarde, emerita professor of Georgetown University’s Department of French, is an award-winning essayist, literary critic, and novelist. Thrice decorated by the French government -- she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite in 2006, Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 2002, and Chevalier des Palmes Académiques in 1991 -- Professor Sarde is returning to Georgetown following the spring 2007 publication of her major new book, De l'alcove à l'arène, nouveau regard sur les Françaises. De l’alcove à l’arene is the long-awaited sequel to Regard sur les Françaises, which won the Prix Briguet de l'Academie Francaise and the Prix Marcelle-Blune de l'Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1984. Her novel Histoire d’Eurydice pendant la remontée was nominated for the 1991 Prix Goncourt. Other noteworthy volumes by Professor Sarde include Jacques le Français, pour mémoire du Goulag, Le Livre de l’amité: Parce que c’était lui (an anthology published in collaboration with Arnaud Blin), Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar: La Passion et ses masques, and a biography of Colette titled Colette, libre et entravée.
Dates and times of plenary speeches to be announced soon

Film Screening and Interview
Le Sexe des étoiles, written by Monique Proulx.
The screenwriter will be interviewed by Miléna Santoro.
For the evening of March 6th.

Romancière, nouvelliste et scénariste, Monique Proulx est une des auteures contemporaines les mieux connues au Québec. Son premier livre, Sans coeur et sans reproche, a été salué par les critiques et lui a valu le Prix Adrienne-Choquette, le Prix littéraire Desjardins, et le Grand Prix du Journal de Montréal en 1983 et 1984. Son prochain roman, Le Sexe des étoiles, a donné lieu à un film réalisé par Paule Baillargeon, dont Proulx a écrit le scénario elle-même. Le film a été dans la course pour représenter le Canada aux Oscars en 1994, et a été retenu comme la sélection canadienne pour les Golden Globe Awards de cette même année. Parmi la dizaine de scénarios rédigés par Proulx, notons aussi celui du film Le Cœur au poing (1998) qui a gagné le Rogers Award pour le meilleur scénario au Festival International de Vancouver. Deux autres textes littéraires, L’Homme invisible à la fenêtre (1993) et Les aurores montréales (1996), ont aussi reçu un accueil chaleureux, le premier gagnant le Prix Québec-Paris en 1993 et le deuxième démontrant la virtuosité de l’auteure qui a “cette façon […] de se mettre dans la peau de chacun, Blanc, Noir, anglophone, francophone, Haïtien, Amérindienne, homme, femme, ado, père, mère, amoureux, clochard” (Danielle Laurin, “Monique Proulx,” Le Devoir, 23-24 mars 1996). Proulx a aussi travaillé dans les domaines du théâtre, de la radio et de la télévision. Pour ce colloque, elle présentera un visionnement du film tiré de son roman Le Sexe des étoiles, et nous parlera de son expérience de la scénarisation, et des limites de cette forme d’écriture, surtout face à la transformation de ses propres textes littéraires en textes pour le cinéma.

Featured Writers

Amadou Koné is a professor of Francophone African literature and culture at Georgetown University. His field of research extends from modern written literature of Africa and the influence of its oral literary genres on the modern novel. A recipient of the Best African Novel Award from the Léopold Sédar Senghor Foundation, Amadou Koné’s works include Des textes oraux au roman moderne en Afrique de l’Ouest and a novel titled Les coupeurs de têtes.
Amadou Koné has also recently published a new play Sigui, Siguila, Siguiya, which will be the subject of his talk on Friday March 7th.

Linda Lê est née en 1963. Elle habite Paris. Depuis Dalat, sa ville natale du Viêt-nam, jusqu'à Paris, il y a eu de nombreuses étapes : Saïgon d'abord et ses études au lycée français, puis après la chute de Saïgon, son rapatriement en France avec sa mère française et ses trois soeurs. Après avoir publié très jeune trois livres, elle a publié Les Evangiles du crime dont une presse unanime a salué l'originalité exceptionnelle. En 1993, Christian Bourgois a édité son cinquième livre, le roman Calomnies (traduit et publié aux Etats-Unis, aux Pays-Bas et au Portugal) puis en 1995, Les dits d'un idiot. Son triptyque consacré à la mort du père, qui comprend Les Trois Parques (1997), Voix (1998) et Lettre morte (1999) a également été publié par Christian Bourgois Editeur, maison d’édition à laquelle elle est restée fidèle jusqu’à ce jour. Depuis le début du nouveau millénaire, Linda Lê a publié sept livres : Les Aubes (2000), Autres jeux avec le feu (2002), Personne (2003), Kriss suivi de L'homme de Porlock (2004), Le complexe de Caliban et Conte de l'amour Bifrons (2005). In Memoriam (2007) conte à la première personne la passion du narrateur pour une romancière, Sola, qui vient de se suicider. Ce dernier roman, comme les livres qui précèdent, enchante par la langue ciselée, la recherche constante du mot juste et le désir vital d'écrire qui le caractérisent.
Linda Lê will speak on a panel about her work on March 7th.

Christine Montalbetti is a creative writer and a Maître de conférence in French literature at the Université Paris-VIII. She is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories, all of which appeared at the Editions POL: Sa Fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine (2000), L'Origine de l'homme (2002), Expérience de la campagne (2005), Western (2005), and Nouvelles sur le sentiment amoureux (2007). Her critical and theoretical writings include: Images du lecteur dans les textes romanesques (1992), Gérard Genette: Une poétique ouverte (1998), La Fiction (2001), and Le Personnage (2003).
Christine Montalbetti will speak on a panel about her work on March 7th and will participate in a plenary round table on the contemporary French novel.

Esther Tellermann est née à Paris en 1947. Elle a publié son premier livre, Première apparition avec épaisseur, en 1986. Depuis, elle a publié presque l'ensemble de son oeuvre chez Flammarion, à part son récit Une Odeur humaine (Farrago, 2003). La poésie de Tellermann est elliptique, présentant des fragments du réel, des lieux entrevus. C'est une écriture minimaliste, sans images. Chacun de ses livres constitue "un nouveau chapitre du récit énigmatique qu'elle transcrit depuis son premier livre" (quatrième de couverture de Guerre extrême, 1999). Esther Tellermann est de plus en plus reconnue comme l'un des poètes français les plus importants de notre temps.
Esther Tellermann will speak on a panel about her work on March 7th.

Special Events

Plenary Round Table: The Contemporary French Novel
Participants: William Cloonan, Dominique Jullien, Christine Montalbetti, Warren Motte, Gerald Prince, and Gill Rye.
Moderator: Ari J. Blatt.
For the late afternoon of March 8th.

William Cloonan teaches in French and Humanities at Florida State University where he is the Richard Chapple Professor of Modern Languages. His primary scholarly interest is the contemporary French novel about which he publishes an annual essay in the French Review. His books include The Writing of War: French and German Fiction and World War II (1999), Michel Tournier (1985), and Racine's Theater: The Politics of Love (1978). His translation of Olivier Rolin’s Tigre en papier appeared as Paper Tiger: A Novel in 2007. He is currently working on a translation of Rolin’s Méroé.

Dominique Jullien is a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Agrégée de Lettres Modernes in 1982, she received her doctorate from the Université de Paris III in 1987. She has published widely on 20th-century French literature. Her publications include Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et une nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon (1989) and Récits du Nouveau Monde. Les voyageurs français en Amérique de Chateaubriand à nos jours (1992).

Warren Motte received an A.B. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, a Maîtrise in Anglo-American Literature from the Université de Bordeaux, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, he specializes in contemporary writing, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. He is the author of The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec (1984), Questioning Edmond Jabès (1990), Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (1995), Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature (1999), Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990 (2003), and the translator and editor of Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (1986; rev. ed. 1998). His new book, Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century, will be published by the Dalkey Archive Press in 2008.

Gerald Prince is Professor of Romance Languages and Graduate Chair of French at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Associate Faculty at the Annenberg School of Communication and a member of the graduate groups in Linguistics and in Comparative Literature. An officer of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature (President, 2007), Prince is the author of several books, including Métaphysique et technique dans l'œuvre romanesque de Sartre (1968), A Grammar of Stories (1973), Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (1982), Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction (1992), A Dictionary of Narratology (1987, rev. 2003), and Guide du roman de langue française: 1901-1950 (2002).

Gill Rye is a Reader at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, U.K., where she convenes the Contemporary Women's Writing in French Seminar and associated research network. She is author of Reading for Change (2001) and co-editor (with Michael Worton) of Women’s Writing in Contemporary France (2003). She has edited special issues of Paragraph on Cixous (with Julia Dobson, 2000), Journal of Romance Studies (2002), Dalhousie French Studies (2004) and L’Esprit Créateur (2005) on contemporary women’s writing, and Nottingham French Studies on the body in recent women's writing and filmmaking (with Carrie Tarr, 2006). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Narratives of Mothering: Women's Writing in Contemporary France.

Ari J. Blatt is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, film, and civilization. Recent publications include articles on Claude Simon and the expanded field of art history, remaking Mankiewicz in Tanguy Viel's Cinéma, and representations of the banlieue in Abdellatif Kechiche's L'esquive. He is co-editor (with Jan Baetens, KU Leuven) of a forthcoming issue of Yale French Studies on writing the image today, and is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on art, visual culture, and the politics of vision in contemporary French fiction.

Art Exhibit
March 6, Evening Reception

Bonnie Baxter is a visual artist (MFA from Norwich University, Vermont) who has lived and worked in Val-David, Quebec, since 1969. A six-time recipient of a Bourse de recherche et création of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Baxter has exhibited her work more than 70 times in both group and solo venues. She was also awarded the Prix à la création artistique en région, du Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, as part of the Grands Prix de la culture des Laurentides in 2005. Baxter's most recent exhibition, Bonnie Baxter: Rewind, is currently in preparation for an international tour, and is scheduled to stop in several US venues.
Sponsored by Georgetown's Americas Initiative, Bonnie Baxter will participate in a panel with Professor Paula Ruth Gilbert (George Mason University) to discuss her upcoming tour and her work as a visual artist.

Special Guests and Events • Conference Program
Registration • Hotel Information
Dining in D.C. • Travel Information
Sites: Call for Papers • Séismes 2009
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