French Literature Beyond Borders
The workshop brings together faculty and graduate students from Indiana University- Bloomington (Department of French and Italian) and the University of Notre-Dame (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures) as part of a larger, inter-disciplinary-oriented and collaborative project whose goal is to produce teachable materials and scholarly leadership in the field of French-language studies.
French-language studies has undergone a precipitous decline in favor since its heyday in the 1970s, partly due to worldwide trends in language learning (a preference for Asian and Middle-Eastern over European languages) and partly due to a lack of leadership in our own field, which has allowed dissension to grow amongst us. Our project seeks to fill that leadership vacuum and lay out a third way to get beyond the Colonial / Postcolonial divide of recent years.
Workshop presentations will be in French and English, with discussions in English.