Monday, March 28, 7:00 p.m.

MARIELLE MACE
CNRS-EHESS; author of Le Savoir des genres; Le Genre littéraire

Barthes: la vie en forme de phrase

En quoi la lecture est-elle une ressource pour la vie ? Il n’'y a en effet pas d'’autre problème esthétique, comme le disait Deleuze que «l’'insertion de l’art dans la vie quotidienne» – dans la vie, et que cette vie soit quotidienne. Nombreuses sont aujourd’'hui les pensées orientées vers une vision de la littérature comme instrument où ce qui compte, ce sont les propositions que chacun tire de ce qu’'il lit pour sa propre existence. Mais il est assez difficile de rendre compte de ce qui, dans une lecture, c'’est-à-dire dans un corps-à-corps avec des phrases singulières, se rend effectivement disponible à un individu, et libère en lui des possibilités d'’être. La façon dont Barthes s'’est battu avec la catégorie grammaticale de la « phrase », se heurtant aux phrases littéraires, mais aussi s’'y projetant, jusqu’'à formuler le désir d’'avoir « une vie en forme de Phrase », me servira de terrain pour observer la richesse de notre vie dans les formes, et de la vie des formes en nous.

In French.
 

                                                                                                                                                                           

Wednesday, March 30, 7:00 p.m.
Institute of French Studies Colloquium

RAPHAELLE BRANCHE
Associate Professor of History, University de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne; visiting professor, NYU; author of L'embuscade de Palestro: Algérie 1956 (2010), La guerre d'’Algérie: une histoire apaisée ? (2005), and La torture et l’'armée pendant la guerre d’'Algérie, 1954-1962 (2001).

Political Uses of the Past: The Memory of the War of Independence in Algeria

Since the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962, an official state narrative of the war, one whose fluctuations reflect internal social and political changes, has served both to control the population and to challenge French accounts of decolonization in Algeria. Focusing on some elements of this narrative, Raphaëlle Branche examines the ways in which the memory of the war has been both instrumentalized and overpoliticized.

                                                                                                                                                                         

Thursday, March 31, 7:00 p.m.

Book Launch

DARINA AL-JOUNDI
Actress, writer; author of The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing (The Feminist Press, 2011); translated by Marjolijn de Jager)
in conversation with
PHILIPPA WEHLE
Professor Emerita of French and Theater, SUNY-Purchase; translator; international theater producer

Raised on Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux in 1970s Lebanon, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. As the bombs fell, she lived an adolescence of excess and transgression, defying death in nightclubs. The more oppressive the country became, the more drugs and anonymous sex she had, fueling the resentment by day of the same men who would spend the night with her. As the war dies down, she begins to incur the consequences of her lifestyle. On his deathbed, her father’'s last wish is for his favorite song, Sinnerman, by Nina Simone, to be played at his funeral instead of the traditional suras of the Koran. When she does just that, the results are catastrophic.

Book available for sale on site.

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Friday, April 1, 6:00 p.m.

EDITH PIAF
Photographs by HUGUES VASSAL


Opening:    Friday, April 1, 6:00 p.m.
Gallery Talk:    Friday, April 1, 7:00 p.m.

The exhibition continues through May 13
Monday – Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.


The French photographer Hugues Vassal, one of the creators of the Gamma photo agency, became a close friend of the singer in the last seven years of her life, documenting her public and private moments.