June 12 - 24, 2014
THE GENEVA SUMMER SCHOOL OF CRITICISM FRENCH LITERATURE IN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE for this course.
The Department of French language and literature holds a summer school entitled The Geneva Summer School of Criticism. Its objective is simple: to make the University of Geneva the site of an annual encounter around questions of literary criticism.
The summer school perpetuates the tradition of the École de Genève, in a constant effort to renew its heritage. In 2014, it will explore the highly debated question of globalizing French Literature.
The course (6 ECTS) will be taught in French and in English by academics from around the world.
TOPICS TO BE ADDRESSED INCLUDE:
- Close reading and global context
- Transnational literary history from the Middle Ages to the XXIst century
- New networks of significant texts
- Theories of World Literature
- Literary expressions of global consciousness
Course Program 2014
Students are required to take all modules.
Professor Jérôme David
Department of Modern French Language and Literature
University of Geneva
Professor Frédéric Tinguely
Department of Modern French Language and Literature
University of Geneva
Professor Margaret Cohen
Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Comparative Literature
Department of Comparative Literature
Stanford University
Professor Yves Citton
Université de Grenoble 3
Member of IMR LIRE (CNRS 5611)
Professor Effie Rentzou
Assistant Professor
Department of French and Italian
Princeton University
Opening Lecture
« Worlding Medieval French », by Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz)
June 12, 2014
“[P]orce que lengue franceise cort parmi le monde et est la plus delitable a lire et a oïr que nule autre, me sui je entremis de translater l’anciene estoire des Veneciens de latin en franceis, et le euvres et les proeces que il ont faites et que il font.” So wrote the Venetian chronicler Martin da Canal in his Estoires de Venise (1260s), one of several Italian civic histories composed in Old French. In this generation before Dante, French was the language of choice for western Europeans who wished to express themselves in the vernacular, as opposed to the Latin of the clerics. My talk will explore what recent scholars have sometimes called la francophonie médiévale: the use of ancien français as a non-territorial vernacular in sites like Anglo-Norman England, Lusignan Cyprus, Angevin Naples, and the Crusader States of Outremer. In a second moment, I will turn to one of the most famous texts of the French Middle Ages, Marco Polo’s generically composite Le Devisement du monde (originally composed in Franco-Italian) to suggest convergences between this extraordinary work (misleadingly translated as “The Travels”) and various genres from contemporary Mongol Asia.
Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of World Literature & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz (USA). A specialist in the French Middle Ages, she is the author of Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (2006) and co-author of books on Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France. She also co-directs The Mediterranean Seminar (mediterraneanseminar.org), a forum in the emerging field of Mediterranean Studies, with over 650 associates worldwide.
Closing Lecture
« World literature and beyond », by Franco Moretti (Stanford University)
June 23, 2014
Franco Moretti is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), The Bourgeois (2013), and Distant Reading (2013). Chief editor of The Novel (2006). Has founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. Writes often for New Left Review, and has been translated into over twenty languages.
Course Assistant
Mme Anne-Frédérique Schlaepfer
University of Geneva
Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
TARGET AUDIENCE
MA and PhD students. Upper year undergraduates may also be considered.
Course will be given in English and in French.
DEADLINE
Applications are now closed!
