PIERRE CINTAS, Ph.D. (Indiana University)
Associate Professor of French: Penn State — Abington
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CHRISTINE CLARK-EVANS, Ph.D. (Bryn Mawr University)
Associate Professor of French, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies
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KATHRYN M. GROSSMAN, Ph.D. (Yale University)
Professor of French
Personal Web Page | Selected Publications

Fields: Nineteenth-century French novel; Victor Hugo studies; utopian studies; popularized versions of literary classics.

I am a nineteenth-century literary scholar, with particular interests in Victor Hugo's novels and other utopian, visionary, and/or poetic prose fiction. My work has explored politics and poetics in Hugo and other post-Revolutionary writers, including George Sand, George Orwell, and Eugene Zamiatin; the appropriation of literary classics by other media; approaches to teaching language and literature; and Hugo's dialogues with other writers from William Shakespeare to Charles Dickens. My first book (Droz, 1986) focused on Hugo's elaboration of the romantic novel, in early works like Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné and Notre-Dame de Paris, as a fertile mélange des genres that reflects a poetics of harmony. My second book (SIUP, 1994) considered his prose masterwork, Les Misérables, as a completely integrated metaphorical system that demonstrates a radical new poetics of transcendence. A third book (Twayne,1996), also on Les Misérables, is aimed at a more popular audience. I am currently completing a monograph on the intricate fractal patterns in the last three novels of Hugo's maturity - Les Travailleurs de la mer, L'Homme qui rit, and Quatre-vingt-treize. In addition, I have begun a book-length study of the novelist's relations with such literary interlocutors as Sir Walter Scott, Claire de Duras, George Sand, Charles Dickens, and Émile Zola in order to show how these exchanges helped to establish popular new modes of fiction for an ever-expanding readership in the nineteenth century.

THOMAS A. HALE, Ph.D. (University of Rochester)
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature

I came to Penn State in 1973 to teach African literature. As a co-founder of the African Literature Association in 1974, I co-edited, with Richard K. Priebe (Virginia Commonwealth), two volumes of selected papers, The Teaching of African Literature (1977, 1989), and Artist and Audience: African Literature as a Shared Experience (1979). While a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Niamey, Niger, in 1980-81, I recorded The Epic of Askia Mohammed (1996) which first appeared in a bilingual Songhay-English format in Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire (1990). Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent, an anthology of excerpts from 25 African epics, came out in 1997, co-edited with John Johnson (Indiana) and Stephen Belcher (Penn State). An NEH Fellowship in 1991-92 enabled me to interview 100 bards in Gambia, Senegal, and Mali for Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (1998, 2007).

I am currently working on five books: with Kora Véron (Paris III-La Sorbonne Nouvelle), a completely new version of my first book, Les Ecrits d'Aimé Césaire (1978), tentatively titled "Les Ecrits d'Aimé Césaire: nouvelle bio-bibliographie commentée"; with Aissata Sidikou (Princeton), two volumes on women's songs from West Africa, an anthology of 200 songs and a set of conference papers; with Wendy Belcher (UCLA), an edition of African literary texts written in African languages from 3,000 BCE to 1900; and a critical analysis of francophonie titled "France, Francophonie, and Africa: From the Politics of Culture to the Culture of Politics."

NORRIS J. LACY, Ph.D. (Indiana University)
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of French and Medieval Studies
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My major interests include medieval narrative (especially romance and fabliau), though I have also worked extensively on Villon's poetry and other subjects. Primarily, however, I specialize in the Arthurian legend, across periods-from the beginnings to the present-and across disciplines, from literature to painting, film, and popular culture. My first single-authored book was The Craft of Chrétien de Troyes, and I co-authored The Arthurian Handbook with Geoffrey Ashe. I served as editor of The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, of the first full translation of the Lancelot-Grail (i.e., Vulgate Cycle) and the Post-Vulgate, and of a number of other volumes, including the recent A History of Arthurian Scholarship and, with Joan Tasker Grimbert, A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes. In my studies and teaching of Arthuriana, I began by examining the structure or "architecture" of romances, and my focus gradually shifted to a consideration of the narrator's method and voice and, more recently, to the function of the numerous and nearly systematic inconsistencies and contradictions that make Arthurian subjects the fascinating creations they are. The appeal of shorter narrative (fabliaux in particular) led me to publish Reading Fabliaux and a number of related articles; my interest in these works extends from a close examination of the language and composition of texts to a study of their cultural and historical context.

Recent Courses and Seminars: Paris in the Middle Ages; Medieval Comedy, Parody, and Irony; Chrétien de Troyes and Medieval Romance

BÉNÉDICTE MONICAT, Ph.D. (University of Maryland)
Professor of French and Women's Studies
Head, Department of French and Francophone Studies
Selected Publications

Fields: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, Travel Narratives, Children's Literature, Feminist Theory

My research focuses on women's writings in Nineteenth-Century France, with an emphasis on the questions that arise when examining gender through the lens of literary genres. My readings of travel narratives, children's literature, and instructional books combine literary history and genre analysis to think through patterns of gender constraints and disruptions in women's writings. Through extensive bibliographical work, I also aim to illuminate the rich creative and intellectual areas women legitimately did make theirs. This wide-ranging exploration of women's active participation in the literary and intellectual life of the nation wants to account for and provide an analysis of women's relation to creativity and knowledge production in contexts that prove critical not only to our understanding of women's writings throughout the period, but also to contemporary theoretical reflections (feminist theories more particularly).

Emblematic Courses
In Women's Studies: Introduction to Women in the Arts and Humanities, International     Perspectives on Women's Writings, Feminist Theory.
In French: Figures of Exoticism in 19th-century France, Genre and Gender Issues in
    19th-century Women's writings, Histoire(s) de(s) femmes.

ALLAN STOEKL, Ph.D. (SUNY at Buffalo)
Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Fields: Twentieth Century continental French literature and intellectual history; comparative literature with an emphasis on politics and economics in the twentieth century; French film, especially in its relations with contemporaneous critical and philosophical theory; energy and social space from a global economic and political perspective.

My recent work has focused on Georges Bataille's theories of energy and religion; I read Bataille not only as a major figure in intellectual history but as a map-no doubt questionable and incomplete-for understanding the vicissitudes of energy and religious "experience" in the coming years (Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability [University of Minnesota Press, 2007]). Future work will focus on the figure of the gleaner, both as an economic and cultural figure in an era of depletion, and as a "subject" in the context of a philosophy oriented around the primacy-and entropy-of energy inputs. I'm also writing a book on French film that situates certain major French film makers (most notably Epstein, Bunuel, Renoir, Bresson, Truffaut, Godard and Varda) in relation to the film criticism and philosophy of their eras.

Other books I've written: Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992). I also edited an anthology of writings on Georges Bataille, titled, logically enough, On Bataille (Yale French Studies 78, 1990).

Over the years I have translated a number of works, by Georges Bataille (Visions of Excess: Writings, 1927-39 [University of Minnesota Press, 1985]); Maurice Blanchot (The Most High [University of Nebraska Press, 1996]); and Paul Fournel (Need for the Bike [University of Nebraska Press, 2003]).

Courses taught: Modern and contemporary French literature and film on the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels (French 460, 570, 572); French film history and criticism (French 487 and 488); Oil politics and economics from an international perspective (International Studies 493).

JEAN-CLAUDE VUILLEMIN, Ph.D. (Michigan State University)
Professor of French

Fields: 17th-Century French Literature and Philosophy; Post-structuralism and Reception theories; Baroque Aesthetics; Semiotics of Drama and Theater Theory; Intellectual History

Associated to several research institutes in France (Paris-8; CNRS; CELLF 17e-18e /Sorbonne), I lecture on both sides of the Atlantic. Inspired by the Foucaldian notion of épistémè, I challenge the ideological perception of a baroqueless France and restore the pertinence of the baroque notion as a heuristic concept to be applied not only to architecture and visual arts, but also to literature, philosophy, and intellectual history. Although it may be argued that a major methodological interest of the baroque hypothesis lies in its very imprecision, my next book, Pertinence épistémologique d'un concept esthétique, will provide a new theory for a notion which explains best the epistemological breakdown Europe experienced in the last quarter of the 16th century. As a conceptual framework in which poetics, politics, and epistemology interact, my baroque is much less aesthetic than deeply philosophical.

While collaborating to the first critical edition of Jean Rotrou's complete theater (Belles-Lettres / Sorbonne-Paris-4) and to the first Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century French Philosopher s (Thoemmes Press / CNRS), I pursue research on pragmatics of theatrical communication, play reception, and metatheatricality. In addition to a book on Rotrou (Baroquisme et théâtralité) and three critical editions of his plays (L'Hypocondriaque ; L'Innocente Infidélité ; La Belle Alphrède), I have authored many articles and reviews, and I serve on the editorial board for one monograph series, Biblio 17, and two journals: Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature and Revue d'Histoire du Théâtre.

I very much enjoy the Sea, the Sun, the Festival d'Avignon, selected Parisian cafés, le Champagne, le Luxembourg (jardin du), fine restaurants (which make playing squash mandatory), the "Rolling Stones", and, last but certainly not least, le Théâtre. Believe it or not, I also concur with Pascal in claiming the hatefulness of the Moi. Moi ?

Graduate Seminars: FR 571. Literary Theory and Criticism; FR 535. Texts and Performances: Theories of Drama; FR 534. 17th -Century French Drama: Theories and Practices; FR 533. Baroque Aesthetics. 17th -Century French Literature and Intellectual History; FR 545-A: Analysis of French Civilization