Member News Briefs

Please join me in congratulating Michèle Longino and Ellen Welch for the publication of selected essays from the 2014 NASSCFL Conference with Biblio 17.

Networks, Interconnection, Connectivity : Selected Essays from the 44th North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature Conference, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill & Duke University, edited by Ellen R. Welch and Michèle Longino. ISBN : 978-3-8233-6970-7

Table des matières

Ellen R. Welch & Michèle Longino, Introduction

Hélène Merlin-Kajman, “Corneille : ronge-maille ou nœud public”

Nina Ekstein, “With What Arms Do We Fight? Possible Worlds and the Network of Characters in Corneille’s Nicomède”

Denis Grélé, “Crispin rival de son maître (1707): vers un nouveau système des pratiques d’échange”

Christine McCall Probes, “Un réseau d’amitié, de plaisir et de nouvelles: quelques aspects de la correspondance volumineuse d’Élisabeth-Charlotte de Bavière, princesse Palantine, duchesse d’Orléans”

Malina Stefanovska, “La circulation des mots d’esprit dans la société du XVIIe siècle”

Ullrich Langer & Anne Theobald, “Moral Admonishment, Amorous Conflict: How to Avoid Severing the Connection”

Micah True, “From Quebec to Paris and Back: The Jesuit Relations and a Decentered Reading of France”

Catherine Broué, “L’exploration de la Louisiane au XVIIe siècle: un réseau d’influence”

Ashley Williard, “Islands of Enclosure and Exclusion: Representations of Débauchées in the French Caribbean, c. 1660-1700”

Faith E. Beasley, “Creative Conversations: Salon Culture and François Bernier”

Stephanie O’Hara, “Failures of Transmission in the Translation of Early Modern French Obstetrical Knowledge”

Agnès Cousson, “Deux réseaux du Grand Siècle: Port-Royal et la Compagnie de Jésus”

Katherine Dauge-Roth, “Shooting the Moon: Women Astronomers in Early Modern France”

Sara E. Melzer, “The Roman Universalism of French Schools : Re-Thinking France’s Connection to Classical Antiquity”

Benjamin Balak & Charlotte Trinquet du Lys, “A Twenty-First-Century Gamified Pedagogy to Teach the Social Networks of the Seventeenth Century at the Intersection of Intellectual Culture and Political Economics”

Congratulations to Russell Ganim for the publication of a recent piece in Dalhousie French Studies :

“Criminality, Performance, and the Search for Paradise: The Appropriation of Othello in Les Enfants du Paradis.” Dalhousie French Studies 102 (Summer 2014). pp. 9-24.

Luke Arnason wishes to announce a new endeavor to which he welcomes feedback and/or questions from our community. Luke has recently launched a YouTube channel devoted to harpsichord music. The channel, currently in the early stages of development, features two pieces by François Couperin along with a channel trailer. The long-term goal is to make the channel a platform for "vulgarising" the harpsichord that will include the following : harpsichord appreciation tutorials (how does the instrument, and the music written for it, work? What makes great harpsichord pieces great? What should you listen for?); recordings with running visual commentary on elements of interpretation, and discussion on interpretation of the pieces ; recordings of modern harpsichord music designed to attract viewers that have no knowledge of harpsichord repertoire, and to use their curiosity about modern pieces to introduce them to "proper" harpsichord repertoire (first on the list: the Tower of Karazhan from World of Warcraft).

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHi5k0IukyRnYlyC56QF25g

Bravo to Michèle Longino for the publication of her most recent book, French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseille-Constantinople (1650-1700), which came out with Routledge Press in March 2015. A description of the book is copied below:                      

French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseille - Constantinople (1650-1700)

Examining the history of the French experience of the Ottoman world and Turkey, this comparative study visits the accounts of early modern travelers for the insights they bring to the field of travel writing. The journals of contemporaries Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Jean Thévenot, Laurent D’Arvieux, Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, Jean Chardin, and Antoine Galland reveal a rich corpus of political, social, and cultural elements relating to the Ottoman Empire at the time, enabling an appreciation of the diverse shapes that travel narratives can take at a distinct historical juncture. Longino examines how these writers construct themselves as authors, characters, and individuals in keeping with the central human project of individuation in the early modern era, also marking the differences that define each of these travelers – the shopper, the envoy, the voyeur, the arriviste, the ethnographer, the merchant. She shows how these narratives complicate and alter political and cultural paradigms in the fields of Mediterranean studies, 17th-century French studies, and cultural studies, arguing for their importance in the canon of early modern narrative forms, and specifically travel writing. The first study to examine these travel journals and writers together, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars covering travel writing, French literature, and history.

Routledge – 2015 – 180 pages

Series: Routledge Research in Travel Writing 

With thanks to Leanna Bridge Rezvani for reminding me of her pedagogical website on teaching La Princesse de Clèves, to which she has made additions since speaking about the resource at last year's SE-17 conference.

You can access the site via the following URL:

http://teachinglaprincessedecleves.com