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French and Italian, Spring 1997
Newsletter of the Department of French and Italian	Supported in part by dues-paying members of the I.U. Alumni Association

Faculty News

Contents Translators converge on Indiana Alumni interviews authors and other news Letter from the chair Faculty News Student Update Alumni News New FRIT lounge

Julia and Peter Bondanella (editors-in-chief) and ABD graduate student Jody Shiffman (associate editor) have published the Dictionary of Italian Literature, Revised Expanded Version (Greenwood Press, 1996), which will be published in Great Britain as The Cassells Dictionary of Italian Literature. It is a greatly expanded version of the original 1979 first edition with some 400 entries and a number of contributors, all on Italian literature. It is the only reference work of its kind in English. Carlo Ridolfi's Life of Titian (Penn State University Press, 1996), a new translation and critical edition of a major document on Titian's life from the Venetian art historian Carlo Ridolfi, who wrote a large collection of artists' biographies to respond to Giorgio Vasari's more famous collection of artists' lives with a Tuscan bias, has appeared. This work was edited by Bruce Cole, Distinguished Professor of the History of Art and chair of that department, Julia and Peter Bondanella (who also did the translation), and Jody Shiffman. Peter Bondanella reports that the above two books "are examples of mentoring students, which is what I have been doing with publications for some time. (I also did a book with Manuela Gieri, PhD'89 and another with Cristina Degli-Esposti, PhD'91.)" In June, he was on the planning committee of the MYSTFEST Film Festival in Cattolica, Italy, an annual film festival devoted to mysteries in literature and film. Other members of the committee included Umberto Eco; Furio Colombo, the former director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York; Paolo Fabbri, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris; Dominique Paini, Director of the Paris Cinematheque française; Daniel Soutif, from the Centre Georges Pompidou; and Vassili Vassilikos, Greek author of the novel that became the film Z.

Gilbert Chaitin's Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan (Cambridge) appeared this past September. In this work, Chaitin discusses questions of identity as affected by language, gender, and social categories, from the perspective of the writings of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Chaitin also received a graduate school faculty summer fellowship and a department of French and Italian research grant to study magazines from the last two decades of the 19th century available at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He is looking at the interrelations of philosophy, literature, and politics in that period. While in France, he and his wife, Joy, were able to spend a few days in Strasbourg visiting Geneviève Gaudeul, assistant director of our study abroad program there, as well as other friends, and on the shores of Lake Neuchatel, Switzerland, as the guests of former IU graduate student Anne-Catherine Aubert-Smith, who is now writing her dissertation at Rutgers University. He gave a paper at the American Comparative Literature Association conference held at Notre Dame University, where he met Catherine Perry, MA'92, who is now assistant professor of French there. He also published Number 43 of the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, a special issue on African literatures, and was a panel member of the roundtable on Romanticism at the IUB conference on Romanticism organized by Andrea Ciccarelli and John Isbell last fall. He became director of graduate studies in the department of comparative literature and has been invited to give lectures at three universities in Morocco next spring -- Rabat, Meknès, and Ifrane -- before going to the University of Lisbon, where he will be giving a graduate course on narrative as part of a new faculty teaching exchange between IU and the Portuguese university. (He reports, "I never realized how easy French was until I started trying to learn Portuguese! It's as bad as American English.") Pompons, a one act play by Joy Chaitin, was produced by Bloomington Playwrights Project this fall. She also became Artist-in-Residence at University Elementary School for the 1996­97 school year.

Early last April, Edoardo Lebano delivered a public lecture at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., for the department of Romance languages; the topic was "Epic Poetry in Florence at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent." He spent part of the summer in Italy as co-director of the IU overseas study program in Florence. While in Florence, he also taught M234, Renaissance Florence, to 36 IU students. The first English edition of Luigi Pulci's epic Morgante, for which Lèbano has prepared the introduction with extensive notes and critical commentary, is scheduled for publication by the IU Press in late summer 1997. Three articles by him are soon to appear in American and Italian journals.

Over the past year, Rosemary Lloyd has given papers in Dublin, Ireland, and in Toronto. The IU Press published her selection and translation of 19th-century prose passages, Revolutions in French Prose, and Slatkine Press in Geneva published the second volume of the complete poetry of Banville, including the volume she edited, Le Sang de la coupe. This is the first scholarly edition of Banville's poetry, with prepublications, variants, and annotations as well as introductory material. The complete edition is being produced by a seven-person international team with members in France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Various articles she wrote based on manuscripts in the Lilly Library have also come out this year. One of these concerns the illustrated Latin vocabulary Baudelaire's father made to help him in his teaching of two young boys, while another explores a collection of poetry written by a French judge during his years in Noumea in the South Pacific. The Australian Broadcasting Commission interviewed her about her book on jealousy, Closer and Closer Apart (Cornell, 1995), on their live radio show, "Late Night Live," all across Australia.

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