Please join us for two talks—one in French, one in English—by two highly recognized Proustian scholars: Virginie Greene from Harvard University and Shuangyi Li from the University of Bristol. They will be joining us as part of the FREN 511 Graduate Seminar on “Reading Proust”, but all are welcome!
You can attend either online or in person in Buchanan Tower, Room 726. Please register.
If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire (vincent.gelinas-lemaire@ubc.ca).
Presentation 1
Proust enlumineur: manuscrits, dessins et médiévaleries with Virginie Greene, Harvard University (in French)
Date: November 22, 2022 (Tuesday)
Time: 3:00 – 4:00 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726 (or Zoom)
This presentation will first touch on the “medieval” drawings of Proust, as way of introduction regarding research on the documents (letters and manuscripts) surrounding the Proustian text. We will touch on methods of archival research. We will then explore the medieval theme in the narrative and the poetics of La Recherche through chosen close readings. Genette’s notion of palimpsest writing will serve to explore the idea and practice of the manuscript.
Dr. Virginie Greene is Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, at Harvard University. She is a specialist of medieval literature, with strong interests in history and philosophy, and in Proust and his times. She has recently published a biography: Un petit rouage dans la grande machine: Thomas Rodman Plummer 1862-1918, the story of the encounter of an American and a French village during WWI.
She is the author of Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), a study of seminal classical, medieval and modern literary and philosophical texts leading to a broader reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy. She has also authored Le Sujet et la Mort dans La Mort Artu (Nizet, 2002). She is the editor of Towards the Author: Essays in French Medieval Literature (Palgrave, 2006 ), and the translator in modern French of Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose (Champion, 2006). She has contributed to the edition of an anthology of Proust's letters (Proust, Lettres, Plon: 2004). She is one of the five co-authors of Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes (D. S. Brewer, 2011). She has published a book of prose poems titled Cent vues de John Harvard (Editions de l’Attente, 2011).
She currently works on various book projects focusing on encounters.
Presentation 2
Proust in the Chinese Shadow: Ideology, Visuality, Transcultural Constellation with Shuangyi Li, University of Bristol (in English)
Date: November 29, 2022 (Tuesday)
Time: 3:00 – 4:00 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726 (or Zoom)
Proust neither visited China, nor did he write substantially on China. This talk is about the strictly literary journey of how Proust’s work made it to China and back by means of translation, reception, and creative engagement. We will start with the ideological aspects of the translation and reception of Proust’s works in 20th– and 21st-century China. Then, we will get a quick overview of the available translations, editions, and adaptations of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in China, highlighting a range of editorial and publication features, from various paratexts to visual exhibitions. Finally, we will schematically outline Chinese and Chinese diasporic writers’ and artists’ remarkably varied creative responses to, and engagements with, Proust, ranging from superficial citations to kitsch TV dramas, and from aesthetic inspirations to intellectual and artistic dialogues.
Dr. Shuangyi Li is Lecturer and the Programme Director of the MA in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol (UK). He received his MA in French and English Literature and his PhD in French at the University of Edinburgh, and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in French and Comparative Literature at Lund University, Sweden (2017-19). He was awarded a three-year research grant by the Swedish Research Council/Vetenskapsrådet (2019-2021) for his project on French-Chinese literature and visual arts.
His first monograph Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) won the International Comparative Literature Association Anna Balakian Book Prize (2019). His second monograph, titled Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature and Visual Arts in a Global Age (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), explores the literary and artistic works by four first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists in France.
