Deborah Blocker’s CV

website

Déborah Blocker (ENS Ulm, Lettres 1990 ; Ph.D. in French Literature and Culture, University of Paris III, 2001 ; HDR in Comparative Literature, University of Paris IV, 2017) is associate professor of French and affiliated faculty in Italian Studies. She specializes in the social and political history of literary practices in early modern France and Italy, with a particular interest in theater, learned societies (academies), the history of philology and the development of aesthetics. Her research relies heavily on the history of the book, as well as on manuscript studies. She has been a member of the Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Histoire du Littéraire (or GRIHL :http://grihl.ehess.fr) since 1996.

Her first full-length study (Instituer un ‘art’: politiques du théâtre dans la France du premier XVII^e siècle, Paris, Champion, 2009) examined the social and political processes through which early modern French theater was instituted into an art (1630-1660). This project led her to develop a larger curiosity for the social and political constitution and circulation of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe (1500-1900).

Between 2008 and 2016, Déborah Blocker researched the social and political circumstances in which new conceptions of art emerged in the academic culture of late Renaissance Florence, through an in-depth archival study of the Accademia degli Alterati (1569-ca. 1625). Her second book, Le Principe de plaisir: savoirs, esthétique et politique dans la Florence des Médicis (XVI^e-XVII^e siècles) revolves around this micro-historical case study and is scheduled to appear with Les Belles Lettres in Paris in 2019. Le Principe de plaisir also constituted the central piece of Déborah Blocker’s Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches(HDR, Paris IV, 2017). The overarching title of her research project was: “Plaisirs, instrumentalisations, pouvoirs: pour une histoire sociale et politique des conceptions des discours et pratiques esthétiques dans l’Europe de la première modernité (1550-1850)”.

In 2010-2011, Déborah Blocker’s work was generously supported by a Florence J. Gould Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, located in Florence (http://www.itatti.it/). She has also received two major research fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities (in 2006 and 2016).

Déborah Blocker’s current research project is tentatively entitled Entre Retraite et ralliement: politiques du plaisir lettré dans la France moderne (1550-1750). The central purpose of this third book is to contextualize the aesthetics of literary and social pleasure that flourished in France, from the late 16th century to the second half of the 17th century, as well as the literary practices that developed in conjunction with these hedonistic representations. The book purports to situate these social practices and literary productions not only in context of the materialist intellectual tradition from which they clearly stem, but also within the framework of the social and political constraints which weighed on the French aristocracy of the time, and of which these practices and productions were a manifestation. The book’s central aim is to show that delimiting secluded literary and social spaces in which to focus on their literary and social “pleasures” was both a way for these aristocratic groups to reclaim a form of social and political autonomy vis-à-vis authoritarian power and part and parcel of their strategies of social and political (re)integration within the political economy of the monarchical régime. The book also hypothesizes that 17th century literature and aesthetics affirming “pleasure(s)” were, to a large extent, a by-product of these social and political tensions, rather than preexisting activities and/or “genres” of writing, in which these tensions could conveniently be expressed. The study will first consider how Italian conceptions of aesthetic and literary “pleasure” are transferred to the French context. It will then move on to studying the trajectories and productions of several major courtly and/or aristocratic authors in 16th and 17th century France, focusing particularly on Malherbe, Racan, Vincent Voiture, Molière, Paul Pellisson and Mlle de Scudéry.

 

Publications include:

 

Books:

• Le Principe de plaisir: savoirs, esthétique et politique dans la Florence des Médicis (XVI^e-XVII^esiècles), to appear with Les Belles Lettres.
• Instituer un “art”: politiques du théâtre dans la France du premier XVIIe siècle, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2009, 540 p.
• Premières leçons sur les Fables de La Fontaine, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996,120 p., prefaced by Gérard Ferreyrolles (2^ndedition: 1997).

 

Journal issues edited

• Forthcoming:Académies et universités en France et en Italie (1500-1800): coprésence, concurrence(s) et/ou complémentarité?, five papers edited plus an introduction written in collaboration with Dinah Ribard, and a conclusion by Maria Pia Donato, to be published in Les Dossiers du GRIHL in 2018.
• XVII^e siècle, n° 270, 2016/1, p. 3-132: “Auctorialité, voix et publics dans le Mercure galant. Lire et interpréter l’écriture de presse à l’époque moderne”, edited in collaboration with Anne Piéjus, eight articles published, plus a joint introduction (p. 3-8)

 

Selected journal articles and published conference papers (since 2008):

• “Territoires de savoirs et espaces de temporalités: le sublime de Boileau aux prises avec quelques ‘modernités’”, in Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 29, 2007, p. 113-123.
• With Elie Haddad, “Protections et statut d’auteur à l’époque moderne: formes et enjeux des pratiques de patronage dans la querelle du Cid (1637)”, French Historical Studies, 31, 3, 2008, p. 381-416.
• « Une ‘muse de province’ négocie sa centralité: Corneille et ses lieux», Les Dossiers du Grihl, 2008-1, Localités : localisation des écrits et production locale d’actions, July 2008.
• Co-authored a section entitled “Patronages, actions, écriture dans le parcours de Jean Mairet”, composed of a short presentation and two articles: Laurence Giavarini and Elie Haddad, “L’art de la dédicace selon Jean Mairet” and Déborah Blocker and Elie Haddad “De la scène à la diplomatie: usages de l’écriture lorsque Jean Mairet quitte le théâtre (1639-1643)“, Littératures classiques, 68, 2008, p. 35-63.
• “Publier les ‘arts’ à Florence sous Cosme I de Médicis: une Poétique d’Aristote au service du Prince”, in AISTHE, II, 2, 2008, p. 56-101 (a translation into Portuguese is appended).
• “Le lettré, ses pistole et l’académie: comment faire témoigner les lettres de Filippo Sassetti, accademico Alterato (Florence et Pise, 1570-1578)?”, Littératures classiques, 71, 2010, p. 31-66.
• “Theatrical identities and political devices: fashioning subjects through drama in the house of cardinal Richelieu (1635-1643)”, in David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska (ed.), Space and Self in Early Modern European cultures, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012, p. 112-133.
• “Corneille et l’art poétique: appropriations, déplacements, reconfigurations”, in Pratiques de Corneille: actes du colloque de Rouen (6-9 juin 2006), Rouen, Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2012, p. 213-228.
• “Servir le prince par la philologie: André Dacier (1651-1722), un érudit dans l’orbite du pouvoir royal”, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 35/1, 2013, p. 3-22.
• “S’affirmer par le secret: anonymat collectif, institutionnalisation et contre-culture au sein de l’académie des Alterati  (Florence, 1569 – ca. 1625)”, Littératures classiques, 80, 2013, p. 167-190.
• “The Accademia degli Alteratiand the invention of a new form of dramatic experience: myth, allegory and theory in Jacopo Peri’s and Ottavio Rinuccini’s Euridice(1600)”, in Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva and Kirill Ospovat (eds), Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s), Leiden, Brill, 2016, p. 77-117.
• “Pro or/and anti-Medici? Political ambivalence and social integration in the Accademia degli Alterati(Florence, 1569 — ca. 1625)”, in Jane E. Everson, Denis V. Reidyand Lisa Sampson(eds.), The Italian Academies 1525-1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent, London, Routledge, 2016, p. 38-52.
• “Tous pour un et un pour tous ou de l’activité de penser en commun mais non en rond(s)”, texte rédigé à l’occasion des vingt ans du G.R.I.H.L., in “À l’enseigne du GRIHL”,Les Dossiers du Grihl, 2017-02, 2017.
• “Deux professeurs en République: de la promotion sociale par les lettres à la redéfinition de leurs fonctions socio-politiques”, in Littéraire. Pour Alain Viala, edited by Marine Roussillon, Sylvaine Guyot, Dominic Glynn and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, Arras, Artois Presses Université, 2018, p. 159-170.

 

Forthcoming articles

• “La haine du plaisir et son envers: Molière, L’École des Femmes, ses querelles et le discours anti-théatral”, in La Haine du théâtre: débats et polémiques (Antiquité-XIX^esiècle), as a volume of the journal Littératures classiques edited by Clotilde Thouret and François Lecercle.
• “Commenter la Poétique d’Aristote dans les universités italiennes du milieu du Cinquecento: un travail intellectuel envisagé au miroir de ses pratiques d’écriture et de publication”, in Francesco Robortello: réception des Anciens et construction de la modernité, edited by Monique Bouquet et al.
• “From manuscript studies to the social and political history of aesthetics: shedding light on the readings of Aristotle’s Poeticsdeveloped within the Alterati of Florence (1569-ca. 1630)”, to be published in a volume entitled Beyond Aristotelian Poetics: New Directions in the Study of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, of which Bryan Brazeau is the volume editor. The book will be part of the Bloomsbury Studies in the Aristotelian Tradition series, currently being edited at Bloomsbury by Marco Sgarbi.