FRANCOISE GAILLARD
Professor of Philosophy, Université de Paris VII
Qui a tué Madame Bovary ? Petite enquête sur l’esthétique de Flaubert
Tuerun personnage de roman n’est pas un acte anodin, il y faut de sérieux mobiles. Quels sont donc ceux de Flaubert pour qu’il ait condamné son héroïne à une fin aussi cruelle que celle due à un empoisonnement à l’arsenic? De quoi Emma s’est-elle rendue coupable à son égard?
Pour répondre à ces questions une relecture du roman, en forme d’enquête, est nécessaire.
Thursday, October 14, 7:00 p.m.
ANN SMOCKAnn Smock taught twentieth-century fiction and poetry for many years in the French Department of the University of California, Berkeley. She is currrently a Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at Princeton. She is a translator of Maurice Blanchot and of Sarah Kofman, and the author of What Is There to Say? (on Blanchot, Melville, des Forêts, Beckett) as well as of Double Dealing (on Giraudoux, Nabokov, Klossowski, Kafka). Her most recent efforts bear on the work of Jacques Roubaud.
Improvisational Mallarmé
This lecture will begin with the anecdote ou poème by Mallarmé called "Déclaration foraine." A woman who knows all about occasions requiring only silence exempts the poet, her companion, from pronouncing a single word as they roll through the countryside together in a carriage. Then, unexpectedly, she drags him straight into a situation where he has to speak, off the cuff, immediately. Ann Smock suggests that the woman considers that occasions requiring silence only--occasions liable to be damaged if vouched for--are the matter of poetry. It's just that the déclaration they demand must, somehow or other, not confer their significance upon them so much as spare them all their meaning. This isn't anything that anyone-any poet, say-could mean to do. It doesn't call upon anybody's qualifications or skill. "There are days," Walter Benjamin notes, "when no one should rely unduly on his 'competence.' Strength lies in improvisation. All the best blows are struck left-handed."
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