Month: March 2015

Tom Conley on the American Western as a French Invention

Very much looking forward to this afternoon’s Literature and Languages Research Seminar by the inaugural Society for French Studies Visiting International Fellow Tom Conley entitled ‘The American Western: A French Invention.’ The paper hypothesizes that much of the heritage of the Western genre and what, both aesthetically and politically, we can “do with” the Western today, cues on the taxonomy of already fifty years ago that is today of critical purchase.

Tom Conley is Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media.  His most recent books include Cartographic Cinema (2007);  An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2011) and À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (2014).

Cartographic Cinema

Research Seminar on Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema

Great research seminar coming up this week as we kick off the second half of our Spring semester. Guy Austin (Newcastle University) will be giving a paper as part of the regular Literature and Languages series entitled ‘Trauma in Recent Algerian Documentary Cinema: Telling Stories of Civil Conflict’, examining the representation in recent Algerian documentary cinema of trauma generated by the so-called civil war or “black decade” that Algeria experienced in the 1990s. Taking as case studies the films Algérie la vie quand même (Sahraoui, 1998), Aliénations (Bensmaïl 2004) and Lettre à ma soeur (Djahnine, 2008), the analysis will address the means whereby the themes of loss, depression and trauma are represented.

More French and Francophone seminars in the weeks ahead.