Salons littéraires and student power!

It’s been great to get the blog up and running again this week, albeit not always with the most positive of news. To round the week off, a post from our co-Programme Director, Aedín ní Loingsigh, who, along with Mathilde Mazau, ensured that our students were actively involved in choosing one of the set texts they’ll be studying next semester…

“‘C’était une journée de novembre exceptionnelle’ —  to paraphrase the opening of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Belles Images — when students and staff members met for French at Stirling’s inaugural salon littéraire. Up for discussion was de Beauvoir’s novel: Les Belles Images. It has been a much-loved core text on the Stirling pre-honours curriculum for many years. But recent feedback prompted us to consider whether we might change it to gain some new perspectives on feminist movements. Annie Ernaux’s 2000 L’Événement was a suggestion that raised a lot of challenging questions. In the end, staff felt these questions were best answered by our students.

Our students rose to the task in a wonderfully engaging way. With the support of staff members, two teams composed of honours-level students presented compelling arguments to help our pre-honours students decide which novel they would prefer to read in Spring 2024. Embodying the spirit and elegance of Dominique, the vengeful but vulnerable mother of de Beauvoir’s main character, Alice, Daisy, Fiona and Heather recreated one of the novel’s iconic scenes to persuade students who had not yet read it that Les Belles Images was a more relevant, entertaining and linguistically rewarding choice for them. And the coup de grâce (we were sure): Ernaux describes the problems of women of her generation. But de Beauvoir diagnoses them and worked actively to solve them.

Team Ernaux responded with aplomb. Dispensing with the array of props used by team de Beauvoir, Marta and Robyn, with tutor Mathilde Mazau, reminded their audience that Ernaux was a Nobel-prize-winning author; that, being a young student, the character of L’Événement was more than relatable to them; and that Ernaux’s style of writing is closer to that of Edouard Louis, an author many of our pre-honours students had already studied and liked. Not shirking from the difficult issue at the heart of Ernaux’s memoir, the team explained that, while aspects of the novel’s engagement with the subject of illegal abortion were difficult, L’Événement deals with an important and topical issue. They reassured students that with the right preparation and guidance, the novel would give rise to informed, sensitive and balanced conversations in class.

In the end, the barnstorming speeches of team Ernaux won out. 80% of the students who were eligible to vote explained that they had been persuaded that Ernaux’s text was more relevant to their lives and that Ernaux’s Nobel-winning status was an important factor in assessing which author they wanted to read. Arguments that had persuaded students to vote for de Beauvoir were balanced towards the belief that it would be more effective for improving vocabulary and that learning more about de Beauvoir would be motivating. The invaluable advice on good taste provided by Les Belles Images was not a deciding factor…

Many thanks to the students who participated so enthusiastically in this event and to tutor Mathilde Mazau for her hugely effective preparation with them. Congratulations to team Ernaux and commiserations to Team de Beauvoir. All is not lost: next year Dominique plans to rise again and fight in the way only she knows how to!”

Thank you to everyone who was involved in organizing and running the salon littéraire and, in particular, to Aedín for sending through this update. We’ll be curious to see what next semester’s Year 2 students make of Ernaux now.

When ‘Who Killed My Father’ came to Glasgow

Teaching may be over for this academic year in French at Stirling but there’s still plenty going on, including, very recently, a trip to the theatre for some of our students with our colleagues Mathilde Mazau and Hannah Grayson. As Mathilde explains: “I read all of Édouard Louis last summer and I was excited when I found out that Who Killed My Father, the play version of Qui a tué mon père, was showing in Glasgow. It is Louis’s third book and a furious criticism of how the political elite vote laws that will literally cause people and workers to die younger. It is also a declaration of love to his ill father and a touching account of their troubled relationship.

Hannah and I met our students Jemima, Christie, Tom, and Jegan at the Platform theatre in Easterhouse. I had read Qui a tué mon père again that day, in preparation for the play, and to refresh my memory. We chatted about the book before getting into the theatre. The play is a dramatised, almost word-for-word rendition of Qui a tué mon père. The mise-en-scène is pared down to just a few objects, bits of furniture and photos of prominent French political figures of the last couple of decades. I was moved by the one-man performance of Michael Marcus who really succeeded in conveying both the urgency of Louis’s message, and the underlying tenderness in the text. Who Killed My Father as a play is as powerful as the book itself.”

As for the students who attended, over to Tom, who is just finishing his first year with us: “When we studied Édouard Louis’s excellent Qui a tué mon père (Who Killed My Father) in our first semester of first-year French at Stirling this year, I don’t think any of us expected to be watching an English-language version of a play based on the book a few months later; but that’s exactly what happened. 

Presented by the theatre company Surrogate, and performed in Platform, an arts centre in Easterhouse in Glasgow’s East End, the play was a very literal English translation of the book’s original French. It was a solo performance, using a monologue style to effectively reflect the use of first-person narrative in the book, with the sparse staging adding further to the feeling of intimacy this approach established with the audience. Simple lighting techniques and props heightened this further.

What those of us who were lucky enough to be there enjoyed, was an excellent adaptation of the book. Michael Marcus, performing as Louis on stage, conveyed the full range of emotions portrayed within the book, from anger to pathos, all underpinned by the themes of injustice that are so central to Louis’s story. The book ends with a damning inditement of French politics, and its impact on the life of Louis’s father, and the production did a fantastic job of conveying this, using nothing more complex than photographs of politicians as props to effectively support Michael Marcus’s powerful delivery.

While it was, at times, slightly surreal seeing a book that we’d studied in French class being performed in Glasgow, it was a fantastic production.  If you get the chance, I’d really recommend you go and see this.  If it then tempts you to read the book, even better.

I’d like to give a huge ‘merci beaucoup’ to Hannah Grayson of the university’s French department for organising and arranging the trip, and to the university for covering the cost of the tickets.”

Many thanks to Mathilde, Tom and Hannah for putting together this blog post (and to Hannah and Mathilde for organising the trip!) and we look forward to more tales of our students’ adventures in French at (and beyond!) Stirling over the coming weeks.

Erasmus+ Teaching Exchange in Limoges

As we mentioned in the previous blog post, this year’s French at Stirling Study Abroad cohort are just starting their semester at one of our many partner institutions across France and the wider Francophone world. Most of them will be doing so as part of an Erasmus+ exchange so, as they start that particular chapter, we wanted to post an article by Aedín ní Loingsigh who also benefitted from the Erasmus+ programme just before Christmas but, in her case, in order to undertake a teaching exchange with one of our partners:

“In December, I spent a week teaching at the Université de Limoges as part of the Erasmus + staff mobility programme. The location of Limoges in west-central France meant I was able to fly to Bordeaux and spend some time there before beginning my teaching. I had lived in Bordeaux as a student many years ago (I won’t say how many…). Although the city has changed a lot since my time there, it was wonderful to stroll around and recall the thrill of discovering the possibilities that France seemed to offer as I was coming to the end of my undergraduate studies.

I left Bordeaux early on the day that a large Gilets jaunes protest was planned. Driving inland to visit some friends in Agen, I encountered a small number of protesters at various roundabouts. These were all cheerful encounters and did nothing to prepare me for accounts I later heard of the violence that had broken out in Bordeaux after I had left. Chatting with people later, I noticed that the Gilets jaunes was an ‘event’ that people wanted to explain to me just as they wanted me to explain the story of Brexit dominating the news in the UK.

These topics of conversation did not disappear when I got to Limoges. If anything, Gilets jaunes/Brexit became the ‘must-be-acknowledged’ issue to broach, however briefly, each time I encountered somebody new. Some of the most interesting conversations were with the students I taught. They were particularly keen to learn how the Gilets jaunes movement was being interpreted in the UK and what I had understood was happening since my arrival in France. In my responses, I noticed how they ‘corrected’ what they thought was ‘inaccurate’ and how they sometimes disagreed amongst themselves as they tried to ‘explain’ the reasons behind the actions of the French protesters. In my own attempts to ‘explain’ Brexit, I became highly aware that my own views on the subject invariably coloured the version of events I was providing for my French listeners.

In the end, I saw that this was a really interesting way into some of the key principles of translation theory that I had been asked to teach during my visit. The key point I had prepared for discussion with the postgraduate Translation Studies students in Limoges was the question of ‘translator stance’, i.e. the idea that translators/interpreters are not neutral figures who simply transform the ‘same’ story into another language. As translators translate, they are also trying to explain. But it is inaccurate to imagine that as translators do this, they somehow remove themselves from the reality of the world they live in and become neutral figures. In other words, it is wrong to think that bias becomes lost in translation. Discussing this idea with the students in Limoges was really rewarding, especially once we had established how our own ‘stance’ can influence our explanation of events across different languages and cultures. As well as thinking about how we translate ourselves, we looked at different examples of translators/interpreters in the colonial era and tried to find evidence of their ‘stance’ in things like footnotes, prefaces, diaries and personal correspondence.

The seminars I taught were longer than I am used to in Stirling (two of the seminars I taught were 3 hours long) and the students weren’t quite as used to working in groups as students in Stirling are. But they were enthusiastic to work in new ways, they were well prepared, and they had lots of ideas they wanted to share. They were also happy to be active translators in the classroom and willingly helped me to find equivalents for any terms and concepts I couldn’t find in French. In the end, the length of seminars went unnoticed. Moreover, with my teaching largely timetabled for the morning (8.30am starts are quite common), I had plenty of time to go to the university restaurant for a delicious three-course CROUS lunch for less than 7€ — students pay even less. In some respects, the university buildings and teaching facilities in Limoges were less well maintained than in Stirling but the emphasis on healthy, affordable food and communal eating was really inspiring and made me wish it was done so effortlessly in our own university.

My time in Limoges was too brief. I only managed to see a little of the city centre and had no time to explore the beautiful countryside I had seen on my long train journey from Agen. But I saw enough to want to go back and make teaching in France something I try to do more often. Learning from the students in Limoges, translating at the same time as I was teaching about translation, and being confronted in real time with the complexity of communicating ideas back and forth between English and French was deeply enriching. I had many wonderful experiences in Limoges but what it reminded me above all else was the importance of exchange: of engaging with other ways of doing things, of learning about/from differences of culture and opinion, and of striving to be open at all times to new experiences.

Finally, two discoveries from my week in France might be useful to students in Stirling reading this blog as they prepare for discussion of topical matters related to France this Spring:

1. This podcast from France Culture called L’esprit public. It comes out every Sunday and is a really clear and accessible discussion of the big political events of the previous week.
2. This short text from Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père. It is a very moving, personal account of this young author’s relationship with his father crossed with a more detached, sociological attempt to understand the cultural and economic factors shaping working class life in North East France. Although it doesn’t directly address the ongoing political upheaval in France and the significance of the Gilets jaunes, it was the best ‘translation’ I came across of the deep frustration and anger that is underpinning this movement.”

Many thanks to Aedín for the great blog post and to our partners at Limoges for their hospitality!