If we could today—without the burden or benefit of precedent, tradition, or institutional inertia—invent a field called ‘French and Francophone Studies,’ what would it look like?
– Laurent Dubois & Achille Mbembe
Anne Brancky, “La télévision est nécessaire”: Duras, Literature and Mass Media
Annabel Kim, Unbecoming Language: An Anti-Identitarian Poetics
Response: Hilary Handin, Ph.D. candidate, NYU (History/Institute of French Studies)
Chair: Katie LaPorta, NYU
Anne Brancky
Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Vassar College
Anne Brancky’s research resides at the intersection between contemporary French and Francophone literatures, feminist theory, and media studies. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Crimes of Marguerite Duras: Literature and the Media in 20th-Century France that explores Duras’s relationship to popular crime writing, tabloids, and the mass media.
Annabel Kim
Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
Annabel Kim specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French literature with a larger research focus on feminist writing and theory. Her first book, Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions, is forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press. A second book project, Cacaphonies: Toward an Excremental Poetics, investigates the presence of fecal matter in the canonical works that are deemed to matter in order to theorize an excremental poetics that shows how literature enables us to digest the world, absorbing and producing meaning.
In English
Future meetings will take place on February 1 and March 19.
Sponsored by the Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture and the Institute of French Studies