Here are the handouts found at Bulldog Days and Academic Fair
Please take this Qualtrics Survey using this link or using the QR Code below if you wish to learn more about the French Clubs, the Advanced Language Certificate, the French Major, or Study Abroad at Yale.
L’Amuse-Bouche va bientôt sortir son nouveau numéro : Mémoire, une collaboration d’étudiants de Yale et d’intellectuels français et francophones. Venez fêter sa parution avec nous le jeudi 18 avril à 16h à HQ 131 !
Professor Anne Higonnet will present her new book
Liberty Equality Fashion
The Women Who Styled the French Revolution
During 1789’s other French Revolution, fashion underwent the most sudden, total, and brief change in history. This clothing revolution was led by three women: Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France, Terézia Tallien, reputed the most beautiful woman in Europe, and Juliette Récamier, iconic muse of intellectuals and equal rights advocates. What has writing a history organized around such personalities, for a trade press, entailed? What are the purposes and challenges of telling a story that reaches the pages of Vogue or Town & Country? At a time when the Humanities are said to be in crisis, what tactics might we experiment with?
3:00 - 5:00pm, Friday April 19, 2024 HQ #132
PLEASE USE THIS QUALTRICS SURVEY TO SIGN UP FOR THE EXAM.
Contact Lauren Pinzka, Exam Proctor, for questions concerning the exam.
Please email the French Registrar, Bethany Hayes, if you have questions on how to sign up for the exam.
Morgane Cadieu will discuss her new book, On Both sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature with Thangam Ravindranathan
On Both Sides of the Tracks, published by the University of Chicago Press, is an analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes.
Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them a touchstone for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu’s study looks at a certain kind of contemporary social climber in French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may reach the level of another social class, but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed ideas of social affiliation.
Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh, critical look at tales of upward mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, shedding fascinating light on social mobility today as a formal, literary problem.
Marlene Daut will discuss her new book, Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, with Kaiama L. Glover.
The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations and empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian writers and politicians successfully defended their independence while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood.
In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.
