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French Lectures & Workshops

The Francophone Film Collaborative & Cine Club

 

 

 

Past Events

Minnesota Humanities Commission Teacher Institute Mini-Series
The Changing Face of the Republic: Immigrants/Citizens in France (Grades 6-12)
Friday and Saturday, February 2-3, 2007
Friday: 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m and Saturday: 8:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Convenor: Judith Preckshot (French and Italian Department, University of Minnesota)

Scholars from the University of Minnesota's Morris and Twin Cities campuses, as well as from Macalester College, will come together in this
seminar to discuss immigration and the cultural (ex)changes, ideological conflicts, and artistic and social revitalization that result from it. Representing the disciplines of history, sociology, literary, and cultural studies, seven scholars will present their research on the history of modern immigration in France, the social spaces of immigration, the idea of Islam in the French imaginary, African-Americans in France, representations of African immigrants in literature and film, and the ways in which North African citizen/immigrants are changing the face of France.

This seminar is cosponsored by the American Association of Teachers of French-MN and the Minnesota Council for the Teaching of Languages and Cultures

 

Public lecture: "The Time of the Writer in Exile"
Wednesday, November 15, 5:30pm
125 Nolte Hall, East Bank

Public lecture: "Immigration and the Novelist in France"
Thursday, November 16, 4:30pm
Humanities 401, Macalester College

Graduate workshop: "Le sens d'une vie"
Friday, November 17, 2:00-4:00pm
235 Nolte Hall, East Bank (Reading packet available in 255 Folwell Hall)

Public event: "Ahmed Zitouni at Mizna" Readings and discussion
Friday, November 17, 7:00pm
Mizna (2205 California St NE, #109A)

The purpose of these events is to present Ahmed Zitouni, his life and work to students, faculty, and broader constituencies in the Twin Cities, and to become acquainted on both intellectual and personal levels with a scholar who has dedicated more than 30 years of his life to analyzing and writing about the struggle of immigrants in Western societies and the politics of human dignity in a multicultural world.

Born in Saïda, Algeria, in 1949, Ahmed Zitouni has lived in France since 1973. He has published 8 novels and 1 essay with some of the most prestigious publishing companies in France, as will be 2 works scheduled for release, one in March 2007, the other in January 2008: Avec du sang déshonoré d’encre à leurs mains, [With Ink-Contaminated Blood on their Hands] Laffont, Paris, 1983. Aimez – vous Brahim ? [Do you like Brahim?] Belfond, Paris, 1986. Attilah Fakir (Les derniers jours d’un apostropheur) [the Last Days of a guest of Apostrophe (televised literary show)], Souffles, Paris, 1987 (recipient of the Evènement du Jeudi literary prize). Eloge de la Belle – Mère, Laffont, Paris, 1990. La veuve et le pendu [The Widow and the Hanged Man], Manya, Paris, 1993. Une difficile fin de moi [A Difficult Fast End], Le Cherche – Midi, Paris, 1998. Amour, sévices et morgue [Love, Torture and Morgue], Parc, Paris, 1998. Manosque, aller – retour, Autres Temps, Marseille, 1998. A mourir de rire, fiction française [To Die Laughing, French Fiction (selected writings intended for learning French as a second language)], Kaléïdoscope Publishers, Copenhaguen, 1997.

Ahmed Zitouni’s fictional writing delves into the unique experience of being a foreigner, dramatizing the personal, political and intellectual turmoil specific to the Maghrebi Arab experience in France. His work bears an indubitably French national signature that, although fictional, also develops autobiographical elements, building upon emotional experiences, documentary sources, and contemporary events. Each of his works is narrated in the first person, a token of Zitouni’s ethical commitment to honor the experience of individuals and to testify only for oneself especially when placed in a position to representing others. Concerned with both obvious and subtle prejudices that foreigners experience and that mark their psyches, Ahmed Zitouni’s novels offer a stark social criticism of contemporary France, but also a profound artistic and philosophical meditation on an astonishing range of social and political practices that transcend national borders.

Ahmed Zitouni’s writing has become especially urgent for us today, offering valuable insights into the social and cultural crisis that France is facing with immigration, a crisis which exploded in the fall of 2005 with rioting in the suburbs of Paris. His work also offers a timely comparative perspective on debates about immigration that are currently raging in the United States.

It can take decades for foreign writers to reach an American readership. These events will give students and faculty at the University of Minnesota the opportunity to discover a major writer and thinker whose work has not yet been translated into English, but which has wide-ranging political, artistic, and social relevance for across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. As such, the program will stimulate conversation and activity that may generate the first sustained analysis and interpretation of Mr. Zitouni’s work in the American academy.

Zitouni and his work will engage a large audience at the University and the Twin Cities. The Department of French and Italian, which is organizing his visit, is composed of a large contingent of faculty and students concerned with Francophone culture; the department currently has 20 doctoral candidates conducting research in this area, a percentage that reflects the centrality that questions of diversity and identity have come to occupy in Departments of French across the country.

 

Daniel Sherman
Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of History at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
"The Museum of Forgetting: Creating the Musée des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie, 1960-1975."
Friday, September 29, 2006
3:00 pm in Social Sciences 710. Sponsored by the Department of History.

A historian of 19th- and 20th-century France, Professor Sherman is the author of Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Harvard University Press, 1989) and The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (University of Chicago Press, 1999). Event sponsored by the Department of History. For further information on Professor Sherman, please visit http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/21st/Staff/sherman.htm

Shmuel Trigano
"A Future for French Jewry?"
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm in The President's Room, Coffman Memorial Union
Co-sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Shmuel Trigano teaches sociology of religion and of politics at the Université de Paris X-Nanterre. He is the director of the College of Jewish Studies of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the editor of the renowned journal of Jewish Studies Pardès, and the President of the Observatoire du monde juif, an institute that monitors and analyzes the conditions of Jewish communities in France and in the world.
An outstanding scholar in Jewish studies and anthropology of religions, Professor Trigano is the author of over fifteen books. More recently, he has founded Controverses, a new journal of intellectual and political debates published in Paris (Ed. L'Eclat).
Professor Trigano's intellectual concern, since the late 1970s, has been to explore both the need for and the risks of Jewish emancipation-be it self-emancipation (political Zionism), or the emancipation that occurs with the emergence of the modern nation state in the wake of the Enlightenment (especially the French Republic.) How can the Jews remain a people if Judaism is reduced to a private faith, like Christianity? Has the modern nation state "racialized" the Jewish people and condemned the Jews to define themselves solely in terms of ethnicity, a move that will lead to racist anti-Semitism? Now that the Jews have a "normal" State, how can they remain a people of witnesses and priests if this State draws its inspiration from the model of European secularism and Enlightenment? Trigano argues that these are the predicaments that modern Jewish consciousness has been confronted with since the Enlightenment and the development of the democratic ideal.
Besides exploring the difficulties faced by Judaism in modern and postmodern social, moral and political conditions, Shmuel Trigano has also written extensively on the vexed relations between Christianity and Judaism, as well as on Judaism, Islam and the French Republic. More recently, he has launched a compelling critique of French guilt expressed in the official politics of memorializing the Holocaust. He argues that such a politics, since the 1980s, has had perverse repercussions on French Jewry, the largest Jewish community in Europe.
His most recent work, What Future for French Jewry?, which he will present at the University of Minnesota, is concerned with the future of French Jewry in a context of increasing competition of victims, violent anti-Semitic attacks since September 11, 2001 and the second intifada, and allegedly biased reporting on the Middle East conflict in the French media.

 

William Boelhower
Professor of American Studies, University of Padua
"The Archaeological Turn among Continental Thinkers: From Warburg to Calvino"
Monday, 10 April, 4:00 p.m. Nicholson Hall 110

Professor William Boelhower teaches American Studies at the University of Padua and is currently the Robert Adams and Rita Wetta Adams Professor in Atlantic Studies at Louisiana State University. Professor Boelhower has translated the cultural writings of Antonio Gramsci, a book of essays on the sociology of literature by Lucien Goldmann, and also translated and edited a bilingual edition of the immigrant autobiography of Carmine Biagio Iannace, La scoperta dell' America / The Discovery of America, An Autobiography (West Lafayette, Indiana, Bordighera Press, 2000).  His essays have appeared in Early American Literature, American Literary History, Journal of American Studies, MELUS, American Studies / Amerika Studien, Contemporary Literature and Revue Française d'Etudes Americaines.  His books include a bilingual edition (with Afterword) of Frederick Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave (Italy: Supernova Press, 1999); Autobiographical Transactions in Modernist America (Udine, Italy: Del Bianco Editore, 1992); Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987,1992); Immigrant Autobiography in the United States (Italy: Essedue, 1982). He edited the volume Adjusting Sites, New Essays in Italian American Studies (Stony Brook: Filibrary of Forum Italicum, 1999) and The Future of American Modernism, Ethnic Writing Between the Wars (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990).

Robert Schwartzwald
"Cross/Hatchings: Counterintuitive Appropriations of Urban Topoi in Montreal Literature and Film"
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
4:00-5:30 pm in 148 Folwell

Reception to follow in 131 Folwell

Professor Robert Schwartzwald became chair of the English Department at the Université de Montréal in January, 2005. Before that, he was a Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he chaired the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and served as Director of the Five College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas. From 2000 to 2005 he served as Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Canadian Studies, and earlier as Editor of Quebec Studies. He is a past President of the American Council for Quebec Studies. Robert Schwarzwald has published widely on such topics as: Quebec identity; post-colonial criticism and Quebec; homosexuality in Quebec literature and film; modernity and cultural memory; and anti-Semitism in France.

Christophe Wall-Romana, Assistant Professor in French and Italian
"Benjamin's Cinema, Epstein's Cinepoetics, Isou's Messianism"
Friday, March 24th, 2006
2:30-4:00 pm in Folwell 152

This talk works back from Benjamin's cinematic concepts (the optical unconscious, “the sphere of images,” the aura, etc.) towards the cinepoetics of Epstein—an early post-medium theory crossing over from cinema and its photogénie moment into poetry—to try and frame inspirations and divergences. Works across poetry and cinema by French Jewish experimenters cannot be simply backshadowed—as Benjamin's concepts often are—by the rise of Fascism and the Shoah. The inventor of Lettrism, Isidore Isou (Jean-Isidore Goldstein), re-sutures the cinepoetic tradition launched by Mallarmé and Apollinaire, through a self-promoting messianism in Liberated Paris, violently dissolving cinema and poetry down to their units of meaning: the shot and the letter. That this latter is the constitutive element of Kabbalistic thought (per Scholem) was lost neither on Benjamin nor on Epstein who wrote La Lyrosophie in 1922.

William Bishop (University of California, Berkeley)
"Une manière de se présenter: Ce qui reste by Rachid O. "
Friday, February 10th, 2006
2:30 p.m., in 312 Folwell Hall

A reception will follow in 131 Folwell Hall. All interested parties are welcome to attend.

Hakim Abderrezak (Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University) 
"Des cris à l’écrit: Chroniques d’un enfant du hammam de Karim Nasseri"
Monday, February 13th, 2006
3:30 p.m., in 235 Folwell Hall.

A reception will follow in 131 Folwell Hall. All interested parties are welcome to attend.

Charles Stivale
"Outside In, Inside Out: Louisiana Cajun Otherness With(in) North America."
November 10, 2005
2:30- 4:00 pm in 128 Folwell Hall

Charles Stivale is Distinguished Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Wayne State University. His books include works on Maupassant, Stendhal, Jules Vallès, the two-fold thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and identity and authenticity in Cajun music and dance (Disenchanting Les Bons Temps, Duke 2002). He has guest-edited two issues of SubStance on Deleuze and Guattari, edited a volume with MLA Publications entitled Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom: Pegagogical Strategies (2004), and a volume entitled Gilles Deleuze, Key Concept (2005). His talk is based on research he undertook for his book on Cajun music and dance and his continuing interest in Cajun and zydeco cultures.

Henry Rousso
"Les racines politiques et culturelles du négationnisme en France (1945-2005)"
November 14, 2005
3:30 pm in 202 Armory Building

This lecture will focus on Holocaust denial in French universities. In 2002, Professor Rousso was asked by the French Ministry of National Education to investigate Holocaust denial at the Université de Lyon III. Henry Rousso has written an extensive report on Holocaust denial in the French university, and in this lecture he will return to the emergence of Holocaust denial in the immediate aftermath of the War and analyze the ideological, cultural and political determinations of Holocaust deniers. Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian.

"Comparative Afterlives : Vichy France and the Algerian War"
November 15, 2005
4:00 pm in 125 Nolte Hall

The second lecture will be Henry Rousso's keynote address in the lecture series organized by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies titled "Aftermaths: History, Memory, Amnesia." This lecture will deal with the issues of how the French national community comes to terms with its traumatic and at times shameful past in relation with collaboration with Nazi Germany and colonization of North Africa. The questions that he will address are the following: What is the status of official memory? What are the remains of this past in present collective consciousness?
Henry Rousso is research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris). An historian of WWII and post-WWII, his first works bear on the political and economic history of the Vichy regime. Subsequently he has worked on the history of the memory of the war, on collective memory, and on the social uses of the past. He is currently examining the relations between history and the law, and more broadly the epistemology of the history of the present.

Nicole Brossard
“D'une dérive à la limite du réel et du fictif”
October 28, 2005
3:30 pm in Nolte Hall 140

Fall speaker for a new lecture series: Quebec Pluralism in the Twenty-first Century.

Nicole Brossard, Quebec poet, novelist, essayist and filmmaker, co-founded the influential literary magazine La Barre du Jour, co-directed the film Some American Feminists, and wrote and produced, in collaboration with others, the play La Nef des sorcières.  Brossard’s many novels include Picture Theory, Le désert mauve, and Baroque d'aube. Among her books of poetry are: Mécanique jongleuse, Typhon dru,Installations, and Musée de l'os et de l'eau. In 1998 she published a bilingual edition of an autofiction essay titled She would be the first sentence of my new novel/Elle serait la première phrase de mon prochain roman (1998). Brossard’s highly acclaimed 2001 novel, Hier, has recently been translated as Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon. Nicole Brossard has won numerous prizes and her work has been widely translated and anthologized.

Frédéric Martel
“Supporting the Arts: A French-American Comparison”

Friday, April 8
12:30-2:00 in Folwell 104

Frédéric Martel, a writer and a book critic, holds graduate degrees in sociology (Paris I Sorbonne), philosophy (Paris I Sorbonne), political science (Paris II Pantheon) and law (Paris II Pantheon). After a position in the Ministry of Culture in France, then as advisor to former Prime Minister Michel Rocard (on cultural policy, intellectual life and civil-unions legislation), he served as a senior advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Martine Aubry, in the government of Lionel Jospin (as a head speech writer and senior adviser for ideas and new legislations such as “parity” for women in politics and civil-union legislation).
Frédéric Martel is the author of three books in sociology, including a best seller on the sixties and sexual liberation, The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968 (Le Seuil, 1996; trans. Stanford University Press, 1999). He has written articles for newspapers and journals such as Le Monde, Le Magazine Littéraire, L'Express, Politique Internationale, Dissent, The Nation, Haaret'z, Esprit, NRF, and Le Débat. He has given lectures at dozens of American universities. A writer, journalist and researcher in sociology at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, he worked until the end of 2004 for the French Cultural Services. He is currently writing a book for an important French publisher on a comparative analysis of French and American culture.

Frédéric Martel will also present a lecture on Wednesday April 6, from 12-1, on “The Gay Question in France: The Struggle for Domestic Partnership and the Debate on Gay Marriage.” The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Women’s Studies and the GLBT minor, and is co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian. The lecture will take place in 400 Ford Hall.

Call the Department for further information.