Member News Briefs

Congratulations are in order for Jeffrey Peters, whose new book The Written World has just been published with Northwestern UP. Further details are included below:

Jeffrey N. Peters, The Written World. Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France (Northwestern, 2018).

 

From the publisher:

In The Written World, Jeffrey N. Peters argues that geographic space may be understood as a foundational, originating principle of literary creation. By way of an innovative reading of chora, a concept developed by Plato in the Timaeus and often construed by philosophical tradition as “space,” Peters shows that canonical literary works of the French seventeenth century are guided by what he calls a “chorological” approach to artistic invention. In analyses of well-known authors such as Boileau, Corneille, Molière, Racine, d’Urfé, and Lafayette, he demonstrates that the apparent absence of physical space in seventeenth-century literary depiction indicates a subtle engagement with, rather than a rejection of, evolving principles of cosmological understanding. Space is not absent in these works so much as transformed in keeping with contemporaneous developments in early modern natural philosophy.

 

Full description and more:

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/written-world

Félicitations à Jennifer Tamas pour la parution de son nouveau livre, Le silence trahi, Racine ou la déclaration tragique:

Racine ou la déclaration tragique

L’éclatante beauté des vers raciniens a exercé une telle fascination sur les critiques, qu’ils ont longtemps négligé cette part de non-dit qu’elle laissait tapie dans l’ombre. La dramaturgie racinienne tire pourtant toute sa force du silence logé en son cœur. Qu’il résulte d’un calcul délibéré ou d’une impuissance à dire, le silence relève aussi bien des ambitions politiques, des codes de civilité, des bienséances théâtrales que des pratiques religieuses. Il représente ainsi la trahison d’une intention que les personnages cherchent à percer et qui maintient en suspens l’intérêt du spectateur. Cette étude se propose de montrer que les tragédies raciniennes s’articulent toutes autour de la profération d’un insupportable aveu. Longtemps caché, retenu, étouffé, il a des effets dévastateurs une fois qu’il est prononcé. En faisant du contrepoint entre silence et déclaration le fondement de sa dramaturgie, Racine sape le bel édifice de la poétique aristotélicienne et impose sa nouvelle vision du tragique. Ce n’est plus la parole qui gouverne l’avancée de l’action, mais les silences qui, loin de la suspendre, la ravivent et la compliquent. Nul besoin de pythie ou de dieux tout-puissants pour condamner l’homme, qui reste libre de se confesser ou de se taire.

https://www.droz.org/world/fr/6607-9782600058704.html

Please join me in congratulating Francis Assaf on two new critical editions and two recent articles - a very active retirement, indeed!

Critical editions:

Lesage, Alain-René. Lettres galantes d’Aristénète (1695). Œuvres complètes d’Alain-René Lesage, Vol. 12. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017 (Sources classiques 128). P. 15-80.

Lesage, Alain-René. La Valise trouvée (1740). Œuvres complètes d’Alain-René Lesage, Vol. 12. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017 (Sources classiques 128). P. 163-291.

Articles:

« L’entretien dans l’histoire comique. Moteur dialogique du discours libertin » L’Entretien au XVII e siècle, p. 239-253. Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2018.

« Errances, vagabondages, marginalisations picaresques au Grand Siècle : l’avatar français… car il y en a bien un. » Les Lettres Romanes, Tome 71 n°3-4 (2017) : 379-396.

Many congratulations to Faith Beasley, whose book

Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de la Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France

has just been published with the University of Toronto Press.

Félicitations !

Please find more details here and below: https://utorontopress.com/us/versailles-meets-the-taj-mahal-1

Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France’s "Great Century" and the early Enlightenment. Focusing on the salon of Marguerite de La Sablière and its encounter with the traveler and philosopher François Bernier, this book resurrects the conversations about India inspired by Bernier’s travels and inscribed in his influential texts produced in collaboration with La Sablière’s salon. The literary works, correspondences, and philosophical texts produced by the members of this eclectic salon bear the traces of this engagement with India.

Faith E. Beasley’s analysis of these conversations reveals France’s unique engagement with India during this period and challenges prevailing images derived from a nineteenth-century "orientalism" imbued with colonialism. The India encountered in La Sablière’s salon through Francois Bernier and others is not the colonized India that has come to dominate any image of the Orient. Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal adds a new chapter to literary and cultural history by adopting a new approach to the study of salon culture, exploring how texts, cultural artifacts, and patterns of thought were shaped by the collective reading and by the conversations emanating from these practices. Beasley’s analysis highlights the unique role of French salon culture in the evolution of western thought during the early modern period.

Please join me in congratulating Ronald Tobin for the publication of his article “Britannicus or The Secrets of Space” in the current issue of the Romanic Review (107.1–4 January–November 2016 A Tribute to Gita May (1929–2016).

You can access the article here.