French & Italian

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Faculty News

In 1999, Guillaume Ansart's book, Réflexion utopique et pratique romanesque au siècle des lumières: Prévost, Rousseau, Sade, was published by Minard. He also published two articles: "'Ancien' et 'Moderne' dans Manon Lescaut et La Vie de Marianne" in the Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France and "Le concept de figure dans les Pensées de Pascal" in Poétique. He also presented two conference papers: "L'Utopie 'noire' du marquis de Sade," at the 10th International Congress on the Enlightenment, and "Le Triomphe de l'amour: Cross-dressing and Self-discovery in Marivaux," at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference.

Julie Auger is enjoying teaching her Topics course, Language and Gender, to first- and second-year undergraduates. She published two articles, the first of which, "Le redoublement des sujets en français informel québécois," appeared in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics. The second, co-authored with Albert Valdman, "Letting French Students Hear the Diverse Voices of Francophony," appeared in the Modern Language Journal. She presented three competitive conference papers and one invited paper: "Vowel Epenthesis in Picard: Phonological Variation and Optimality Theory." She also chaired a session on "Language Variation and Formal Theory" at the NWAVE conference in Toronto in October 1999.

Peter Bondanella published a long essay titled "Gli italoamericani e il cinema" in the second volume of a new encyclopedia on world cinema, Storia del cinema mondiale (Einaudi, 1999). This is a first step toward a book on Italian-Americans and Hollywood under contract with Continuum Publishers.

After directing the Florence summer study-abroad program, Andrea Ciccarelli became chair of the Department of French and Italian in 1999. He published four articles: one on the literature of emigration and exile, in Intersezioni; a second on the Classical-Romantic debate in Italy, in Italiana; a third on the modernist Italian poet Guido Gozzano, in Modern Language Notes; and a fourth on Manzoni's anthropological and political thought, in Studi e testi italiani. He is currently co-editing "The People's Voice: Essays on Romanticism" with John Isbell. With Peter Bondanella, he is also working on the Cambridge Companion to the Modern Italian Novel. He continues his book-length project on Italian literature of frontier and emigration. He was an invited speaker at the University of Notre Dame and presented a paper at the Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago.

Leonard Hinds published two articles this school year: "From Emblem to Portrait: Early Modern Notions of Selfhood in Novels by Honoré d'Urfé and Charles Sorel" in Glasgow Emblem Studies, and "The Critique of the 'philosophes de ruelles' in Ninon de Lenclos's La Coquette vengée" in Seventeenth-Century French Studies. He delivered two refereed conference papers, the second of which "'A table ronde il n'y a point de haut bout': Narration, Authorship, and Skepticism" represents the beginning of his second book-length project, a critical edition of l'abbé François La Mothe Le Vayer's Parasite Mormon. He also gave an invited presentation in the Preparing Future Faculty Conference session on "Teaching and Technology." At the beginning of 2000, he became the president of SE17: the Society of Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies, and as such he will be hosting the 19th annual conference of the society in Bloomington.

John Isbell published articles on Stendhal and the printer Ladvocat. With Andrea Ciccarelli, he co-edited the acts of the Romanticism conference held in Bloomington two years ago, and he hosted the sixth annual American Conference on Romanticism, with the title "Pleasure." There were more than 100 speakers and three plenary sessions. In January, he was the featured speaker for the 33rd annual Texas Tech Comparative Literature Symposium, where he presented on "Woman in the 18th Century." At the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, he will be giving a talk called "Field of Dreams: Condorcet's Tomorrow's Utopia." He celebrated the New Year by participating in a tableau vivant in Boston.

At the end of the spring semester 2000, after 39 years of teaching at the university level (29 of them at Indiana University), Edoardo A. Lèbano will retire as a full-time member of the Italian faculty. His Report on the Teaching of Italian in American Institutions of Higher Learning (1983-1996), which he wrote with Max Creech, was published by Soleil Publishing in Toronto. He was invited to deliver lectures on Italian Renaissance epic and the present status of Italian studies in North America at several institutions: the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Duke University, Arizona State University, and the University of Delaware. He also lectured at Loyola University in Chicago, and presented a lecture on Luigi Pulci's Morgante at Wayne State University in Detroit.

This has been a busy year for the Creole Institute, directed by Albert Valdman. After having completed the Dictionary of Louisiana Creole thanks to major external grants, the institute has launched two new lexicographic projects. An NEH grant will make possible the first serious large-scale lexical research on Louisiana French, generally known as Cajun. The project will include fieldwork in all Cajun-speaking parishes of Louisiana and will provide a picture of the current vocabulary used by the estimated 250,000 speakers of the language. Valdman and the Creole Institute have received another grant from the U.S. Department of Education to develop a bilingual Haitian Creole-English Dictionary. More than an updated version of the first major trilingual dictionary for the language published by the institute in 1981, this project aims to produce the first major database for Haitian Creole from which a variety of lexicographic products will be derived. Valdman attended an international conference at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, on "Le français de référence," where he delivered a plenary address treating the spread of that prestige variety of French in North America. He also lectured at the Universities of Montpellier and Paris-VII (Jussieu) before participating in a conference organized by the French West Indian writer Maryse Condé at Columbia University on the literary aspects of Caribbean French-based Creole languages. Still actively engaged in the basic French program as director of language instruction in French, Valdman will be collaborating with three alumnae, Cathy Pons, PhD'90, of the University of North Carolina, Asheville; Sarah Jourdain, PhD'96, of SUNY, Stony Brook; and Mary Ellen Scullen, PhD'93, of the University of Maryland in revising the first-year textbook Chez nous: introduction au Monde francophone.

At the beginning of the school year, Barbara Vance was on family leave; she is living with her husband, Richard Janda, in Columbus, Ohio. Barbara and Richard announced the birth of their daughter, Claire, on May 13, 1999. This semester, Barbara is on sabbatical leave to work on a book treating the history of word order in Occitan, the language of southern France.

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