Profs. Hélène Bilis and Ellen McClure invite proposals for a volume entitled Teaching French Neoclassical Tragedy to appear in the Options for Teaching Series published by the Modern Languages Association. A guiding question for our volume will be: why teach French neoclassical tragedy, and why now?
The purpose of this volume is to allow faculty teaching across the academic spectrum, in a wide variety of disciplines, to introduce French neoclassical tragedies to students in a manner that emphasizes both the corpus’s irreducible strangeness and its piercing relevance to our own troubled and transitional times. The volume will be keen to showcase essays that seek to move past, or at least rethink, categories that in large part were imposed on this corpus during the past three hundred years. Essays that place the theatrical texts in productive dialogue with salon culture, the rise of the novel, developments in philosophy and science will be of particular interest, as will contributions that restore women to their status as full participants- as spectators, critics, and playwrights- in the theatrical conversation. In addition, we will also welcome submissions by scholars attentive to the newly emergent global history who draw attention to French neoclassical theater’s engagement with ideas and works from other national traditions, including European colonial expansion and Francophone spaces beyond metropolitan France. In short, we hope to establish a bidirectional conversation between specialists and non-specialists that will open this compellingly complex corpus to new perspectives and audiences.
Although all the essays will have primarily pedagogical aims, the volume will dedicate a section devoted to nuts and bolts issues in the classroom, with essays that outline successful assignments and practices. We will be careful to address a range of challenges and concerns that would be pertinent to a diversity of institutional settings and a variety of pedagogical formats: early modern courses, survey courses, first-year writing courses, comparative approaches to tragedy, seminars on politics and literature, and courses in translation. Finally, we hope to present innovative work on neoclassical tragedy in a variety of Digital Humanities approaches.
Please send 2-page CV and 500-word proposals for essays of 3,000–3,500 words by August 1, 2016 to hbilis@wellesley.eduand ellenmc@uic.edu. Proposals should include the name(s) of the writer(s) proposed for discussion and the argumentative thrust of the proposed article as well as clear pedagogic implications.