Theresa Antes
I am currently on a research sabbatical, continuing my investigation into the acquisition of fixed expressions by second language learners. Since the last newsletter, I have published two articles, one in Foreign Language Annals entitled “French Interrogatives: A New Pedagogical Norm for the 21st Century” and the other in Language and Sociocultural Theory entitled “Audio Glosses as a Participant in L2 Dialogues: Evidence of Mediation and Microgenesis during Information-Gap Activities.” I also presented at the annual convention of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in Portland, Oregon in March 2017. I would like to congratulate graduate students Juliette Burger and Prisca Piccirilli on successful completions of their MA theses and degrees. Special congratulations to Prisca for winning the excellence in teaching award in Spring 2017, and to Juliette for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, where she is now enrolled in a doctoral program! If you are an undergraduate student reading this newsletter and are interested in pursuing a graduate degree in French and Francophone Studies, please contact our graduate advisor for information.
Hélène Blondeau
On the teaching front, I directed the UF in Paris: Culture and Language in Context study abroad program during Summer B 2017. On the research front, I am finalizing two projects funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. For the project “Le francais à la mesure d’un continent: un partrimoine en paratage” I have contributed to the development and exploitation of the FRAN corpus, a large transnational body of data documenting varieties of French in North America and Europe, available online for the research community. Based on this rich body of data, I have examined, in collaboration with two Canadian colleagues, the use of consequence markers in two -related varieties of Canadian French. The results will soon be published in the Journal of French Language Studies.
In addition, a special issue, co-edited with Wim Remysen, has been published in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociolinguistics under the title “Du local au global: pratiques et idéologies linguistiques en contexte montréalais.” For my other SSRHC research for the project ‘Variation and Diglossia in Quebec French’, I have collaborated with Mireille Tremblay (Université de Montréal) and Emmanuelle Labeau (Aston University, Birmingham, UK) on a research on language variation in French text messages from Belgium and Quebec. Thanks to the UF Humanities Scholarship Enhancement grant, since last summer I have also developed a research project on the role of French in the sociolinguistic making of Montreal and Brussels, two francophone metropolises affected by language contact. In collaboration with Emmanuelle Labeau from Aston University, we have received support from the Modern Humanities Research Association (UK) for a project titled “Back to the Future of the CFPB (Corpus de français parlé à Bruxelles).”
I have one article published in the Journal of Transnational America, as well as a chapter titled “Longitudinal Studies in Sociolinguistics and SLA: Bridging Two Parallel Routes” in the book Using panel data in the sociolinguistic study of variation and change, edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Suzanne Evans Wagner. In 2017, I delivered papers at conferences in my field in Baltimore MA and Madison WI as well as in, Bristol, UK, Limerick, Ireland and Toronto, Canada. Finally, I am also pleased to report that I am the recipient of a UF Term Professorship for 2016-2019.
Rori Bloom
In 2016-17 I continued working on my book manuscript about two seventeenth-century women writers, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and Henriette-Julie de Murat. As part of that project, I contributed an article about Murat’s novelized memoirs to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Eighteenth-century Novel and published an essay on miniature portraits in Aulnoy and Murat in a collection entitled Penser le petit (Lyon: Fage, 2017). Inspired by my work on Aulnoy and Murat, I have developed and taught an undergraduate course on French fairy tales for the first time in fall 2017 and hope to teach it again in the near future. I am also busily recruiting for the UF-in-Paris summer program for summer 2018 and finishing out my term as the coordinator of our graduate program in French and Francophone Studies.
Sylvie Blum-Reid
Currently teaching a film class Paris was/is a woman starting in les années folles in Paris and revamping a Writing and Translation class which will count toward the newly adopted Certificate in Translation for our department. In 2016-2017, I was on a sabbatical, and benefitted from the time to researching the topic of mannequins in cinema. I attended the Death of Fashion conference in Wellington (NZ). After a set of revisions, my essay “The Evolution of the mannequins in Jacques Becker’s Falbalas” appears in Film, Fashion & Consumption (London: Intellect). I’ve also done a translation of Linda Lê’s short story “Les pieds nus” slotted to appear in spring 2018 in Delos: A translation and World Literature Journal. In fall 2017, with colleague Richard Burt, I was busy organizing a one-day symposium on “Deaf Cinema” or Closed-Captioning in films. Three international speakers were able to attend, Jean-François Cornu, Peter Szendy and Michel Chion (the latter presenting on a Skype live feed). The subject is picked up again in Esther Heboyan’s talk: “La Traduction malaisée de l’américain vers le français dans America America d’Elia Kazan.” (see Conferences)
Bernadette Cailler, Professor Emerita
As part of the FFRI series “Confrontations and Aftermath”, Cailler helped to organize the visit and presentations of creative writer, script writer, professor and scholar Michaël Ferrier from Chuo University, Japan (February 27-29, 2017). In French: “Français de souche, Français de papier, Français de branche”. In English: “The World after Fukushima (2013)”. Presentation followed by the screening of Watanabe Kenichi’s film narrated by Michaël Ferrier.
Her own presentations include the following papers: 1. “Between Blindness and Clairvoyance: Malraux and Césaire revisited (Dakar 1966)”, at a conference on “The Performance of Pan-Africanism: from Colonial Exhibitions to Black and African Cultural Festivals”, Winthrop-King Institute, Florida State University, 20-22 October 2016. 2. “Promenoir(s) de la mort seule: quand Michaël Ferrier revient vers Glissant lecteur de Tristan L’Hermite”, Congrès CIEF, Université des Antilles, Martinique, 26 juin-2 juil., 2017. 3. “Figures du sujet poétique entre “Michaël”, “Ferrier” et un narrateur qui dit je”, at a conference on a) Michaël Ferrier: un écrivain du corail, and b) Post-Fukushima Art and Literature in Japan and the West, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, September 14-15, 2017, with Ferrier and Watanabe as guests of honor.
Recent publications
- “Nostalgie et conquête: mythes de la Barbarie dans Le Barbare enchanté (Raphaël Confiant, 2003)”. Francofonia, Bologna, 70. Primavera 2016. Francophonies barbares. Sous la direction de Nicolas Hossard, 35-50.
- “Entre culture et barbarie, enchantement et désenchantement: Les boucs de Driss Chraïbi (1955)”, Revue CMC Review, York University, Toronto. Vol 3, no.1, 2016 (PDF, 18 pages).
- “Techniques et poétique de la durée: comment Glissant en est-il venu à Mahagony ?”, Créativité-Critique des Littératures d’expression française. Colloque international organisé par Hédi Bouraoui, Université York, Toronto, Canada, 1988. Textes réunis sous la direction de Frédéric-Gaël Theuriau. Antibes: Éditions Nicole Vaillant. Toronto: Editions CMC, Université York, 2017, 108-112.
- “Quand les mythes de la filiation s’effondrent, ou comment lire Paris berbère ?”, in Réfléchir sur l’œuvre de Hédi Bouraoui. Sous la direction de Frédéric-Gaël Theuriau . Antibes: Éditions Nicole Vaillant, 2017, 139-148.
- “Aimé Césaire: Héritage et Hommage chez Abdourahman Waberi (Moisson de crânes: textes pour le Rwanda, 2000), Derek Walcott (“Elegy”- For Aimé Césaire, 2010), et Nancy Morejón (“Aimé Césaire”, 2010)” in Aimé Césaire. Œuvre et Héritage. Colloque du centenaire, Fort-de-France 2013. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 2017, 513-523.
- Book Review: John E. Drabinski & Marisa Parham (eds.). Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015. vii + 175 pp. New West Indian Guide. Volume 91, issue 1-2, 2017, 154-155.
Raymond Gay-Crosier
Raymond Gay-Crosier continues patiently to produce minor corrections for each reprint of the four volumes of Albert Camus’s Oeuvres complètes (Paris, Gallimard, 2006 and 2008 respectively). Most recently he added to his own special Collection on Alain Robbe-Grillet of the University Library a significant number of items donated by Ben Stolzfus (University of California Riverside) containing presentations, photographs, documents and correspondence concerning the English translation of La Belle Captive. View a detailed description of the full content of this special collection.
Carol Murphy
Since our last FFS Newsletter, I’ve been busy with research-related travel to Paris, London, and also in the U.S. Last summer, I was invited to a one-day conference at King’s College in London on the works of contemporary author Marie Nimier who was present at the event. Some of you may remember that Marie taught a seminar at UF in 2004 and also returned to Gainesville in 2005 for the 20th-21st Century International French and Francophone Studies Colloquium that I organized at the UF Hilton. My paper, “Marie-Marie: l’optique kaléidoscopique dans Photo-Photo,” was a study of the representation of perception and color in the 2010 novel. Subsequently, I presented a slightly different version of my analysis, in English, for a special one-day event held at the University of Pennsylvania in October to honor Professor Gerald Prince and his 50 years of teaching at Penn, “Private eyes (I’s) and the kaleidoscopic uncanny in Marie Nimier’s Photo-Photo.” Nine of Gerry’s former students were invited, and I was pleased to read on Nimier, since Gerry had introduced me to her work.
During July 2017, I spent a month in Paris doing preliminary research on the contemporary and somewhat controversial writer Michel Houellebecq. The results will be presented at the 2018 20th-21st Century International French and Francophone Studies Colloquium hosted by Brown University in Providence. My title derives from the conference theme, which focuses on the 50th anniversary of the events of May 1968 in France: “Sous les pavés … les pavés. Michel Houellebecq’s (post-) human comedy in La Carte et le Territoire,” where I examine his take on contemporary France through the lens of Balzacian realism and ideas about society which Houellebecq ironically rewrites and challenges.
At last year’s International FFS Colloquium held at Indiana University, I presented on “The Sounds of Silence in Language,” a study of several texts where characters confront either a foreign language (Enfance, for example) or the foreignness of their own language (Du Côté de Chez Swann, among others). This spring, I am enjoying teaching my seminar on the 20th- to 21st-century novel, where we are reading extraordinary works of Francophone women writers, Colette, Beauvoir, Duras, Yourcenar, Nimier and Nothomb. Finally, it was a pleasure to work with Associate Dean Mary Watt and the UF Foundation Office to help establish the Albert and Rita Smith Fund for the Advancement of Studies in French and Italian. Some of you will remember Dr. Smith who was a vibrant member of the French faculty until his retirement in 1996. He also taught Italian, inspired by his wife’s Italian heritage, so his family honors both of their parents with this scholarship. The first awards will go to two of our students this spring.
Brigitte Weltman-Aron
In June 2017, Brigitte Weltman-Aron and Peter Westmoreland (Philosophy) organized the 20th Biennial Meeting of the Rousseau Association on campus with the support of several sponsors (including the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, the France Florida Research Institute, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere). The theme was “Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau” and the conference was productive and will lead to a publication of select proceedings.
In addition to working on philosopher Rousseau and Francophone literature from the Maghreb, Brigitte Weltman-Aron has also presented talks at conferences on fashion merchants in the eighteenth century, and contemporary women writers (Hélène Cixous and Virginie Despentes). Her most recent publications include an article on Voltaire’s antisystematic philosophy and another on 1990s theatrical productions in Paris about Voltaire and Rousseau.
In the summer of 2017, she conducted research in Hélène Cixous’s archive at the Bibliothèque de France in Paris as part of her next book project thanks to a Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund. She was also awarded a University Term Professorship (2016-2019) in recognition of her scholarship. She is now a Full Professor and the Undergraduate Coordinator of French and Francophone Studies.