French & Italian

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Two scholars of 17th-century French literature retire

The Department of French and Italian bids farewell this spring to two retiring professors: Mona Tobin Houston and Russell "Russ" Pfohl. We wish them well!

Mona Tobin Houston

Mona Tobin Houston was born and raised in New York City. She attended the High School of Music and Art, founded by La Guardia, where she majored in music with a specialization in voice. She also took music lessons in the Preparatory Department of Julliard from the ages of 8 to 16. She then earned her bachelor's degree in French and Italian from Barnard College in 1956 and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Thanks to a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, she majored in French and minored in Italian at Yale University, where she met her husband, John Porter Houston. After finishing course work at Yale, she spent a year in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1958-59. While Mona was teaching at Connecticut College and her husband was teaching at Yale, Indiana University hired them, and they came to Bloomington in 1962, the same year their dear friend, Professor Samuel Rosenberg, arrived. Mona is the mother of two academically gifted children: Natalie, who is an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston, and Jeremy, who is pursuing a graduate degree in political science at Georgetown University.

Despite a heavy teaching load of French and Italian courses, Mona finished her dissertation on 17th-century theatrical treatises in 1964. In her 37 years at IU, she has taught the most varied courses, such as French Phonetics, Advanced Conversation, the entire 300-level French literature curriculum, Thème et version, Advanced French Grammar and Composition, 19th-Century Theater, the History of Theater, and all graduate and undergraduate courses in French 17th-century literature. She has also taught French for Singers in the music school and coached text and diction for the opera Pelléas et Mélisandre in 1994. Native speakers in the audience were so astounded by the clarity of the cast's singing that they complimented Mona.

Houston has herself sung, acted, directed, and produced plays and operas, many with the Bloomington Town Theater between 1978 and 1992. She has played memorable roles in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and Tennessee Williams's Night of the Iguana. Just this past November, thanks to the Fran Snygg Grant for Artistic Collaboration, she, conductor Jan Harrington, and Gary Arvin organized an Evening of Melodramas, which consisted of a special genre of spoken dramatic compositions with music. Mastering three different languages, Mona recited Richard Strauss's setting of Ludwig Uhland's Das Schloss am Meere. This was followed by Stanley Hawley's composition for Poe's The Bells. She presented Debussy's recitation of Pierre Louys' Chansons de Bilitis. The program concluded with Kurtz's The Last Contrabass in Las Vegas and Walton's adaptation of Edith Sitwell in the Façade Suite.

For a decade, Houston has been active in the American Literary Translation Association, on whose board she now serves. She has authored several translations of French and Italian drama. She has rendered in English Molière's Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and Antonio Tabucchi's Dialoghi mancati for the stage. In November 1995, her commissioned translation into French of Richard Kalinoski's play La Bête sur la lune was performed in a semi-staged reading for an invited public of theater professionals at the Petit Odéon in Paris. In May 1996, her translations of Le Médecin volant [The Flying Doctor] and Le Sicilien [A Painter Called Love] were produced at the Waldron Arts Center in Bloomington as an "Evening of Molière One-Acts." Since Le Sicilien is particular in its genre, the comédie-ballet with music by Lully, Mona's translation was probably the U.S. premiere of this work.

With her husband, Houston has co-authored editions of Mauriac's Génitrix (1966) and French Symbolist Poetry: An Anthology (1980). With co-authors Rosenberg, Carr, and Najam, she was instrumental in the publication of the Harper's Grammar of French, a teaching and reference text used nationwide in colleges and universities. She wrote the section of Sigogne in David Lee Rubin's anthology La Poésie du premier 17e siècle: textes et contextes, and she has revised the section on Vincent Voiture for the long-awaited second edition. Mona is devoting much of her time to an anthology of her own Les Autres genres: Pièces non-classiques du 17e siècle which arose from her research of theatrical texts that have not been published since the 17th century and that promise to challenge received notions of esthetics of the period.

Russell Pfohl

Russell "Russ" Pfohl was born on Dec. 26, 1933, in Livingston, Mont., and lived his first 10 years on a small cattle-ranch high in the Rocky Mountains near Yellowstone National Park. He did his earliest grades, first through third, in a one-room schoolhouse, with all other grades in the same room. He rode to school regularly on horseback. In fact, he likes that mode of transportation so much that to this day he doesn't own a car and he doesn't drive.

In 1955, Russ received his bachelor's degree in French and history with high honors from the University of Montana on the Missoula campus. It is important to note that Russ was the first student in the history of that institution to have earned a 4.0 grade point average over four years! In 1956, he traveled to Strasbourg, France, on a Fulbright Scholarship to study contemporary French theater. That same year, he studied at the Università per Stranieri at Perugia, Italy, which accounts for his fine mastery of the Italian language. In the following year, he was a lecteur in American literature and history at the Université de Strasbourg, and the following summer, he was a lecteur at the summer institute in Pau.

After finishing graduate course work at Johns Hopkins University, he taught at the University of California-Davis from 1960 to 1964. He arrived at Indiana University at the same time as his dear friend Professor Charlotte Gerard. Russ received his PhD in French literature from Johns Hopkins University in 1967, and his dissertation committee passed him "with unanimous distinction." He was a classmate of professors Samuel Rosenberg and Mark Musa, and he studied with such luminaries as Leo Spitzer, Nathan Edelman, and Anna Granville Hatcher.

Pfohl has written two books on Jean Racine's theater, one on Iphigénie and another one, just completed, on Britannicus. He has also published several articles on Proust, Italo Svevo, Corneille, La Rochefoucauld, and a series of 19th-century figures. In the Department of French and Italian, he has been the editor of the Alumni Newsletter since 1977, when Samuel Rosenberg was chair. For the past 10 years, he has also served as the director of undergraduate French studies and as chair of the Committee of Undergraduate French Studies. He has been supervising the elementary and intermediate French reading track courses for some years now.

Pfohl has received a series of universitywide awards for distinguished teaching. Indiana University bestowed upon him the Ulysses G. Weatherly Award in 1974 and the Senior Class Teaching Award in 1975. Despite his retirement from regular teaching, Russ is still acting as the director of undergraduate studies, which is a role he enjoys immensely. He plans to continue to write, read voraciously, and travel. In fact, this summer he intends to visit London to see some plays. Russ sends his best wishes to all alumni!

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