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CURRENT NEWS

April 28, 2009
Congratulations Timothy Hampton!

The French Department is pleased to announce that Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, is the 2008-2009 recipient of the Divisional Distinguished Teaching Award for Senate Faculty Members in the Arts and Humanities.

This award is intended to encourage and reward Senate faculty members who have been exceptionally generous and effective in both undergraduate and graduate teaching and in graduate mentoring. Only one award is made to an Arts and Humanities senate faculty member each year.

There will be a celebratory event in fall, 2009. Please check back for more details.

December 15, 2008
Congratulations to Matt Smith!

The French Department is proud to announce that Matt Smith, a second-year student in the French Ph.D. program, has had his translation of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Camera published by Dalkey Archive Press.

The New York Times, in its review, noted that Matt Smith's “version admirably renders the frankness that makes Toussaint so alluring.”

Matt will also be translating Toussaint's FUIR for Dalkey Archive Press.

October 20, 2008
Congratulations to Lowry Martin!

The Department of French congratulates Lowry Martin, PhD Candidate in French, for winning the Naomi Schor Memorial Award!


The Naomi Schor Memorial award recognizes the best essay by a graduate student making a presentation at the annual meeting of the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium. Lowry's award-winning paper is titled “Extra-territorial Threats and Colonial Fantasy: The Black Lesbian in Argis's Gomorrhe.”

Lowry's research interests include 19th and 20th Century literature; Gender, Sexuality, Feminist Theory; Legal Studies. He is particularly interested in Zola, Colette, Proust and the discursive production of gender, sexuality and race in the late 19th and early 20th Century novel. Of special interest to him is the influence of law, race, and space in the emergence of sexual ontologies as imagined and represented in literary works.

August 25, 2008
Vanishing (Portraits) Exhibition

Hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Opening reception on August 28, 2008 from 4-5:30pm in the Townsend Center (220 Stephens Hall).

November 16, 2006
Join the French Mailing List

The French Department hosts a variety of events throughout the year. These include lectures given by well renowned scholars and visiting faculty, conferences, seminars, and presentations of works-in-progress. If you would like to be notified of upcoming events related to the French Department, send an email to clfa_aa@berkeley.edu

CURRENT EVENTS

Jean-Michel Espitallier
French poet
October 14, 2008, 4:00PM in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle)

The French poet will talk about his work, his work processes, and how his work relates to that of other contemporary French poets.

Espitallier was born in 1957; he played drums in various rock bands while he was a student at Aix. In his writing he favors sampling and cut-up techniques, re-mixing other people's words in with his own--for example, words by the author of a 1902 manual on oil refining (Gasoil, 2000). In Théorème d'Espitallier (2003), he recycles and mixes in pieces of an arithmetic textbook.

He has energetically helped other poets via the review Java, and as the compiler of a wide-ranging anthology of contemporary French poetry, Pièces détachées (2000). He has become quite a widely recognized and lively spokesman for current poetry in France.

The following works of his are on reserve in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle):

Caisse à outils: un panorama de la poésie française aujourd'hui (2006), in which he writes about the current poetry landscape;

Le Théorème d'Espitallier (Doe Library has only the English translation of this work)

Christopher Prendergast
3 Lectures on \"Proust\'s Scepticism\"
November 3, 2008 - November 5, 2008 in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle)

Monday, November 3
4pm in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle)
"Knowledge and Error: Elstir's Metaphors"

Wednesday, November 5
4pm in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle)
"Walking on Stilts"

Thursday, November 6
4pm in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle)
"Ghosts and the Allegorical Body"


Professor Prendergast is Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and teaches as well at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of many books on modern French literature and culture, on literary theory, and is the editor of the recent English-Language edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Pierre Alferi, 2009 Regent’s Lecturer
French novelist, poet, and essayist
January 22, 2009 - January 30, 2009 in various locations (see below)

Screening of Alferi's “cinépoèmes”
Thursday, January 22, 2009
5pm in 142 Dwinelle (William Nestrick Auditorium)
Questions and Discussion afterward (in English and French)

Poetry Reading
with Alferi, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Hass, Lisa Robertson, Stacy Doris, Chet Wiener (in French and English)
Friday, January 23, 2009
7pm in 315 Wheeler (Maude Fife Room)

“The Tone of Truth”
Lecture on Henry James (in English)
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
5pm in 220 Stephens (Gabelle Room at the Townsend Center)

Informal Symposium on Translation
Thursday, January 29, 2009
12-2pm in 4226 Dwinelle (French Conference Room)

Poetry Reading in San Francisco
with Alferi, Norma Cole, Michael Palmer, Leslie Scalapino (in French and English)
Friday, January 30, 2009
7:30pm at the Koret Auditorium at the deYoung Museum


Alferi was born in 1963; he earned a degree in Philosophy at the University of Paris and published his thesis on William of Ockham in 1989. Two years later, in 1991, he published another philosophical essay, bearing primarily on questions of language and literature, Chercher une phrase. He did not pursue an academic career in philosophy, however, or in literature. His first volume of poems, Allures naturelles (translated by the American poet Cole Swensen as Natural Gaits) appeared in 1991, his first novel, Fmn, in 1994, and his first film pieces, Films parlants and Ciné-poèmes, in 2003. He earns his living as a teacher in art schools in Lyon and Paris (L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, L'Ecole des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, and L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris).

In 1996, with his friend and fellow-poet Olivier Cadiot, he founded the extraordinary Revue de littérature générale, each of whose two issues was a thick book: a "digest," as he and Cadiot diffidently put it, of poetic methods, mechanisms, ideas and techniques all aiming at a lively new conception of lyricism. With Cadiot, and Anne Portugal, and in a different manner Emmanuel Hocquard, or Jacques Roubaud, Pierre Alferi is leaving behind the divide that has characterized French poetry since around 1980 between "poetry that sings"--to an appreciable public--and on the other hand an austere, abstruse, negative poetic sensibility (represented, for example, by Denis Roche or Jean-Marie Gleize). Indifferent to polemics, Alferi and his friends are cheerfully unleashing new, funny, startling, stirring lyric energies-which a reader can easily feel in Alferi's nightingale poems, for example (in the collection La Voie de l'air, 2004), as well as in the "grunge ideas" active in his 1994 collection Kub Or (translated by Cole Swensen as Oxo).

Throughout his career Alferi has been an active translator: of John Donne, for example, and of the American objectivist poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky. He knows British and American literature intimately; his English is perfect. The following is a list of his works.

Les Allures naturelles, P.O.L., 1991
Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif, P.O.L, 1992
Fmn, P.O.L, 1993
Kub Or, P.O.L. 1994
Sentimentale Journée, P.O.L, 1997
Personal Pong, Villa Saint Clair, 1997
Le Cinéma des familles, P.O.L, 1999
Petit petit, rup & rud, 2001
La Voie des airs, P.O.L. 2004
Sonnet, Mix, 2004
L'estomac des poulpes est étonnant, Ed. de l'Attente, 2008.

ESSAYS
Guillaume d'Ockham-Le singulier, Ed. De Minuit, 1989
Chercher une phrase, Christian Bourgois, 1991
Des enfants et des monstres, P.O.L, 2004

TRANSLATIONS
Šof texts by Louis Zukofsky, John Taggart, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, John Donne, Lyn Hejinian, Julie Kalendek, George Oppen, Tom Raworth, Stephen Roderer, Lev Rubinstein, Cole Swenson, Giorgio Agamben, Meyer Shapiro.

Alferi participated in the preparation of Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet-Journoud's 49 + 1 nouveaux poètes américains (1991). He was among the collaborators in the new translation of the Bible published by Bayard in 2001.

FILM
Films parlants/ciné-poèmes (les laboratoires d'aubervilliers, 2003)
Intime (scenario, 2004)

Ross Chambers (2008-2009 Pajus Distinguished Visitor in French Studies) Seminar Series
“An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise”
February 4, 2009 - March 18, 2009 in 3401 Dwinelle (Level "C")

Ross Chambers, the 2008-2009 Pajus Distinguished Visitor in French Studies, will lead a 6-week seminar series in spring, 2009.

The seminar series will take place on Wednesdays, February 4, 11, 18 and March 4, 11, 18 from 1:30-3:30pm in 3401 Dwinelle (Level "C").

These seminars will be conducted in English but devoted to the reading of Baudelaire's poetry in the original French. These seminars are open to the campus community. Enrollment is not available, as these seminars are not being offered for credit.

Professor Chambers recently retired from the University of Michigan, where he was the Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of Comparative Literature and French. He is the author of books such as Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author (University of Michigan Press, 1998), Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 1984), and, most recently, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (University of Michigan Press, 2004).

Ross Chambers will also give a lecture, titled “Fetish Aesthetics and the Walking Poem (Concerning Metaphor, Digression, and Rhyme)” on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 4pm in 3335 Dwinelle (Level "C"). Reception to follow in the French Department Library (4229 Dwinelle, Level "D").

UC Language Consortium Colloquium
World Language Proficiency in the California Context
February 6, 2009 - February 7, 2009 in Pauley Ballroom (2nd floor of the MLK Student Union Building)

This colloquium will focus on the implications of the 2007 MLA Report on Language Study for the California context.

For more information, see the online program schedule.

Ross Chambers Lecture
“Fetish Aesthetics and the Walking Poem (Concerning Metaphor, Digression, and Rhyme)”
February 10, 2009, 4:00PM in 3335 Dwinelle (Level "C")

Reception to follow in the French Department Library (4229 Dwinelle, Level "D").

Ross Chambers is the 2008-2009 Pajus Distinguished Visitor in French Studies.

Professor Chambers recently retired from the University of Michigan, where he was the Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of Comparative Literature and French. He is the author of books such as Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author (University of Michigan Press, 1998), Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 1984), and, most recently, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (University of Michigan Press, 2004).

La Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Mode d’emploi
Presentation on How to Use the BNF
February 12, 2009, 3:00PM in 220 Stephens Hall (Gaballe Room of the Townsend Center)

A presentation by Antoine Coron, Directeur de la Réserve de Livres Rares. This presentation will be in French.

This presentation is cosponsored by the French Department, the History Department, and The Bancroft Library.

Barbara Vinken Lecture
“St. Julian the Hospitable. Killing Christ all over again”
February 27, 2009, 4:00PM in 3335 Dwinelle (level "C")

Prof. Vinken is visiting the French Department from the University of Munich. She has written widely on French and Romance literatures in both the early
modern and modern periods. Her lecture will be of interest to anyone who studies Flaubert and/or early Christianity.

Barbara Vinken Seminar
“Sainthood under the conditions of modernity: Un coeur simple”
February 27, 2009, 12:00PM in 5303 Dwinelle Hall (Level "E")

Prof. Vinken is visiting the French Department from the University of Munich. She has written widely on French and Romance literatures in both the early modern and modern periods. Her seminar will be of interest to anyone who studies Flaubert and/or early Christianity.

Early Modern/Post Modern Conference
The Intersections between Contemporary and Early-Modern Thought
March 6, 2009 - March 7, 2009 in 370 Dwinelle Hall (Level "G")

Sponsored by:
The Departments of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, Italian, French, the Dean of Humanities, the Center for British Studies, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities


FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2009
370 Dwinelle Hall (Level "G")

9:45am
Opening Remarks

10am to 12noon
Bruce Holsinger (Virginia): Medieval Modernity

Maura Nolan (Berkeley): Medieval and Renaissance Style

2pm to 4pm
Jane Newman (Irvine): Auerbach’s Pascal

Angela Capodivacca (Yale): Curiosity and Wonder

4pm
Public Reception


SATURDAY, MARCH 7, 2009
370 Dwinelle Hall (Level "G")

10am to 12noon
Victoria Kahn (Berkeley): Spinoza, Strauss, Schmitt

Nancy Levene (Indiana): Spinoza, Stevens, Scripture

2pm to 4pm
Jonathan Kramnick (Rutgers): Problems of Consciousness

David Bates (Berkeley): Cartesian Robotics

4:15pm to 5:15pm
Jonathan Sheehan (Berkeley): Closing Remarks & Wrap-Up Discussion

Pheng Cheah, Suzanne Guerlac, & Martin Jay Discuss New Derrida Book
Derrida and the Time of the Political
March 12, 2009, 6:00PM in University Press Books (2430 Bancroft Way between Telegraph and Dana).

University Press Books and Duke University Press invite you to an intellectual event, Derrida and the Time of the Political, marking the first time since Jacques Derrida’s death in 2004 that leading scholars have come together to critically assess the philosopher’s political and ethical writings. Skepticism about the import of deconstruction for political thought has been widespread among American critics since Derrida’s work became widely available in English in the late 1970s. While Derrida expounded political and ethical themes from the late 1980s on, there has been relatively little Anglo-American analysis of that later work or its relation to the philosopher’s entire corpus. Filling a critical gap, this volume provides multiple perspectives on the political turn in Derrida’s work, showing how deconstruction bears on political theory and real-world politics. The contributors include distinguished scholars of deconstruction whose thinking developed in close proximity to Derrida’s, as well as leading political theorists and philosophers who engage Derrida’s thought from further afield.

Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation and co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation.

Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson and Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton, co-winner of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his books are Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought and, as co-editor, The Weimar Sourcebook.

Jacqueline Lichtenstein Lecture
“La querelle contre ‘les gens de métier’: les mutations du discours sur l’art au XVIIIème siècle”
March 17, 2009, 4:00PM in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle)

Jacqueline Lichtenstein is Professor of Philosophy and holds the Chair of “Philosophy of Art” at the Sorbonne. She is the author of many writings on art and aesthetics, among them The Eloquence of Color.

Yves Citton Lecture
“Spiritual Machines in the Age of Illuminism (Bibiena, Tiphaigne, Potocki)”
April 8, 2009, 4:00PM in the French Library (4229 Dwinelle)

Yves Citton is Professor of French Literature at the Université de Grenoble. He is the author of, among other books, Lire, interpreter, actualiser. Pourquoi les etudes littéraires? and L’Envers de la liberté. L’invention d’un imaginaire spinoziste dans la France des Lumières. He has written widely on 18th century culture. He writes regular chronicles in the Revue Internationale des Livres et des Idées and hosts the weekly radio show Zazirocratie on Radio Campus Grenoble 90.8 FM.

Yves Citton Seminar
Quelle actualité pour les esprits élémentaires de Tiphaigne de la Roche?
April 9, 2009, 12:00PM in the French Conference Room (4226 Dwinelle)

Yves Citton is Professor of French Literature at the Université de Grenoble. He is the author of, among other books, Lire, interpreter, actualiser. Pourquoi les etudes littéraires? and L’Envers de la liberté. L’invention d’un imaginaire spinoziste dans la France des Lumières. He has written widely on 18th century culture. He writes regular chronicles in the Revue Internationale des Livres et des Idées and hosts the weekly radio show Zazirocratie on Radio Campus Grenoble 90.8 FM.

Timothy Hampton Book Release Party
Fictions of Embassy: Literature & Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe
April 23, 2009, 5:30PM in the Comp. Lit. Library (4337 Dwinelle)

The Comparative Literature Library Committee is hosting its first faculty book release party. You are invited to an informal celebratory gathering of faculty and graduate students across departments, where Professor Hampton will talk briefly about the process of writing and publishing his book.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature

Professor Hampton’s principal research interests revolve around the relationship between literature and politics, historiography, questions
of cultural transmission and cross-cultural encounters.

Praise for Professor Hampton’s new book
Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2009):

"Timothy Hampton is the most perceptive and erudite critic of early Modern European literature of our generation, and Fictions of Embassy is his career-defining achievement.”
— Seth Lerer, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University


"This book gives a highly original twist to the relation between literature and politics...This innovative and ground-breaking inquiry shows brilliantly how literature not only represents but also shapes, and helps us to understand, the new diplomacy."
—Michel Jeanneret, The Johns Hopkins University and University of Geneva.


"Timothy Hampton brilliantly opens [the] world of the cultural and political ‘in-between,’... This is one of those few books that substantially redefines the relationship between literature and
political history."
—John Lyons, University of Virginia

Commencement 2009
Graduates assemble in Dwinelle Plaza before 2 pm ceremony
May 15, 2009, 2:00PM in Zellerbach Hall

The Department of French has a joint commencement ceremony with the following Humanities departments: Celtic Studies; Comparative Literature; German; Italian Studies; Scandinavian; Slavic; and Spanish & Portuguese.

Undergraduate and Graduate Students completing their degree between Fall 2008 and Summer 2009 are invited to participate in the 2009 commencement ceremony. Please note that commencement is held once a year, in the spring only. In order to participate, you must register for the ceremony by the deadline. (see Commencement Registration and Other Information below)

COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY and RECEPTION DETAILS

FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2009

Ceremony: 2-4pm, Zellerbach Hall (no tickets required)
Seating is first come, first served. The ceremony will be approximately two and a half hours in length.

Reception: Immediately following the ceremony on the Mezzanine Level, Zellerbach Hall (no tickets required)

FACULTY
1:15pm
Assemble in 156 Dwinelle Hall

B.A. RECIPIENTS
1:15pm
Assemble at Dwinelle Plaza (in front of Dwinelle)
Look for the “French” banner

M.A. and Ph.D. RECIPIENTS
1:15pm
Assemble at Dwinelle Plaza (in front of Dwinelle)
Look for the “French” banner


Featured Speaker: Tyler Stovall, Dean of the Undergraduate Division of the College of Letters and Science, and Professor of History.


COMMENCEMENT REGISTRATION and OTHER INFORMATION

B.A. Recipients: If you would like to participate in the French commencement ceremony, you must register online at https://ls.berkeley.edu/commencement/french before Friday, March 20, so that your name and information can be included in the French commencement program.

M.A. and Ph.D. Recipients: Please contact Susan Dennehy to register for the commencement ceremony by Friday, March 20.

Degree List Information (for B.A. recipients only)
If you are receiving a B.A. and you are entering your final semester, you need to put your name on the degree list during TeleBears enrollment. If this is your final semester and you did not place yourself on the degree list through TeleBears, you may submit a petition to the College of Letters and Science.

M.A. and Ph.D. recipients do not need to put themselves on a Degree List.

Diplomas: Diplomas will be available for pick-up at 120 Sproul Hall approximately four months after your official graduation (i.e. four months after your degree is conferred). If you would like to have your diploma mailed to you, please sign up on TeleBears (you will have to pay a fee for this).

Regalia: Cap and gown rentals are available through the Special Services Department at the Cal Student Store (642-9000 x681) beginning late February, and continuing through May. The rental fee for B.A. regalia is approximately $40.00; for M.A. regalia it is $65; and for Ph.D. regalia it is $69. Ph.D. regalia is also available for purchase at the Cal Student Store.

Parking Information:
8am-5pm
Hourly parking is available at the MLK Student Union Garage (on Bancroft Way between Telegraph and Dana). The rates are $3 for the first hour; $1 for the second-fifth hours; and $2 afterward with a maximum of $20. The fee is paid to the attendant when exiting the garage. The City of Berkeley Sather Gate Garage (west of Telegraph between Channing and Durant) is also available.

After 5pm
The Parking & Transportation office will be selling parking spaces at the following locations:

• Dana/Durant Lot (on Dana between Bancroft and Durant) - $10


• RSF Grarage (on Bancroft between Telegraph and Dana) - $10


• MLK Student Union Garage (on Bancroft between Telegraph and Dana) - $15


• The City of Berkley Sather Gate Garage (west of Telegraph between Channing and Durant) is also available