CHRISTIAN BIET
Professor of performing arts, theater history, and French studies at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and the Institut Universitaire de France. He is a visiting professor in the French Department of NewYork University. He has published several books and articles on French and English seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theater and on law and literature, including OEdipe en monarchie and Droit et litérature sous l’ancien régime. His latest books are Moi, Pierre Corneille and Qu’est-ce que le théâtre? (with Christophe Triau), and he edited Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France: XVIe–XVIIe siècle.
In French.
Les Luttes raciales dans le théâtre de la cruauté français:
Début XVIIe siècle / Mises en scène du XXIe siècle
Le More Cruel (Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants)
Wednesday, October 6, 7:00 p.m.
Institute of French Studies Colloquium
GISELE SAPIROResearch director at the CNRS (Centre de sociologie européenne-Paris) and director of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (Paris). She teaches at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She has published La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (1999), and many articles on literature and politics in France, public
intellectuals, translation. Among the books she has edited are: Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (2008); Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (2009); L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (2009). Forthcoming: La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature et morale en France (19e-20e siècles)
(Seuil, 2011).
Authorship and Responsibility: Literary Trials in France from
the Restauration to the Liberation
As Foucault suggested, censorship has shaped in large part the relation between the author and his work. Authors' legal responsibilities were redefined after the liberalization of French publishing in 1819. Parliament’s debates of the laws on the press, literary trials (including the cases of Béranger, Courier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the naturalists, and the purge trials after World War II), and public discussions on the writer’s social role and duties provide a rich material to examine the different conceptions of the author’s responsibility in France and the beliefs in the power of writing that underlie them. Writers developed their own code of ethics in reaction to
these conceptions, which contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and to the construction of the figure of the public intellectual, embodied by Zola and by Sartre.
Thursday, October 7, 7:00 p.m
JOANNA STALNAKERAssociate Professor of French, Columbia University; author of The Unfinished Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 2010)
The Disorder of Things:
Description, Enlightenment, and the Problem of Form
Joanna Stalnaker will discuss her new book, The Unfinished Enlightenment, which offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the theory and practice of description in Enlightenment France. She will focus on the experimental literary forms invented by eighteenth-century describers and the challenges these pose to a taxonomic view of Enlightenment encyclopedism. Books will be available for purchase.
La Maison Française is open Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The building re-opens a half-hour before eveningprograms. All events are open to the public and free of chargeunless otherwise indicated.
16 Washington Mews, NY NY 10003
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