French & Italian

CONTENTS

Faculty news

Guillaume Ansart announces that his book Réflexion utopique et pratique romanesque au siècle des Lumières: Prévost, Rousseau, Sade will be published by Minard, Lettres Modernes in Paris this year. He also has an article appearing in the Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, titled "'Ancien' et 'Moderne' dans Manon Lescaut et La Vie de Marianne."

Julie Auger returned from a summer of research in France, where she interviewed people who speak and write Picard. She co-authored a paper on the subject with Jeff Steele from McGill University and presented it at the NWAV conference in Athens, Ga., in October 1998. She presented another paper, "The Evolution of a Minority Language in the Age of the Internet: The Case of Picard in Vimeu, France," at the conference on "When Languages Collide" in Columbus, Ohio, the following November. She also has a forthcoming article in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, titled "Le redoublement des sujets en français informel québécois: une approche variationiste." Auger and Albert Valdman have co-authored "Letting French Students Hear the Diverse Voices of Francophony," which will appear in the Modern Language Journal.

Michael Berkvam received a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, sponsored by the IU Board of Trustees in April 1998.

Professors Julia and Peter Bondanella have published an annotated translation of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy in the Oxford World Classics series. They are currently preparing a translation of Benvenuto Cellini's Life, whose publication may coincide next year with the 500th anniversary of the artist's birth. The second edition of their Dictionary of Italian Literature was named an Outstanding Academic Reference Book for 1997 in the January 1998 issue of Choice magazine. In February 1999, Peter Bondanella organized an interdisciplinary conference on "Cold War Culture: Film, Fact, and Fiction," which drew such significant plenary speakers as David Halberstam, Michael Shelden, John Cawelti, Michael Ledeen, and Patten Foundation Lecturer Tony R. Judt. Focusing on the cultural manifestations of the Cold War in Europe and America from 1945 through the fall of the Berlin Wall, presenters discussed literature, cinema, politics, art, propaganda, music, architecture, cultural studies, and history. This conference will be followed by another one, to be held in Seattle, Wash., during the 1999-2000 school year. Speakers there will treat the subject of NATO and the political fallout of the Cold War.

Julia Bondanella also received a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, sponsored by the IU Board of Trustees, and she was promoted to the rank of full professor in fall 1998. Congratulations, Julia!

Andrea Ciccarelli has been elected chair of the Department of French and Italian and will begin his tenure in fall 1999. With Paolo Girodano, PhD'79, as co-editor, he has published a special issue of Italiana, titled L'esilio come certezza, which concerns the development of the concept of exile in modern Italian culture. He has had five articles, on subjects ranging from Italian romanticism to contemporary poetry, accepted by different refereed journals. He was invited to speak about contemporary Italian poetry at Yale University. He also gave talks at the University of Rome and the University of Connecticut. In addition, he organized a session and gave a paper at the 1998 AAIS conference. Ciccarelli is currently preparing two book projects: The first concerns Italian literature treating themes of frontier, emigration, and the new Italophone world, and the second one focuses on 20th-century Italian poetry. Andrea enjoys teaching a new seminar on 20th-century Italian poetry built on the themes of journey and stasis, and he plans to teach a seminar on the early 20th-century Italian novel in the fall.

Laurent Dekydtspotter continues his investigation of the interpretive interface in second language acquisition. He aims to develop a body of evidence that will take significant steps towards answering the question of the nature of second language acquisition. Having received funding from the National Science Foundation, he and his research group published their findings in Language Acquisition, "The Interpretive Interface in L2 Acquisition: The Process-Result Distinction in English-French Interlanguage Grammars," and in Second Language Research, "Interlanguage A-bar Dependencies: Binding Construals, Null Prepositions and Universal Grammar." He also presented his research results at nationally recognized conferences, such as the Linguistic Society of America in Los Angeles, Calif., and two at the University of Pittsburgh and Boston University.

Margaret "Margot" Gray and Oscar Kenshur are the happy parents of a baby boy, Nathan, who arrived right at the end of the fall 1998 semester. Margot also enjoyed participating in the annual 20th-Century French Studies Conference at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and she took the opportunity to visit her alma mater, Smith College. In spring 1998, Margot received a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, sponsored by the IU Board of Trustees. This spring, following her husband's having taught six weeks in Portugal, Margot and her family will spend the summer in Paris, where she will teach a class on French literature and cinema in the IU-IES Study Abroad Program.

Leonard Hinds has an article titled "The Critique of the 'philosophes de ruelles' in Ninon de Lenclos's Coquette vengée" appearing in Seventeenth-Century French Studies in England. He delivered a paper on Charles Sorel's Science universelle before the Society for Interdisciplinary French 17th-Century Studies in Orange, Calif. At the Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco, Calif., he gave a paper on the trial of the libertine poet Théophile de Viau and organized a session on the figure of the monster in 17th-century French literature, philosophy, and science. He just completed a book manuscript, Narrative Transformations: The Death and Birth of Literature in Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée and Charles Sorel's Le Berger extravagant, the last chapter of which he presented at the Interdisciplinary Baroque Studies Symposium in Miami, Fla. He is currently working on a critical edition of La Mothe le Vayer's Parasite Mormon, an experimental novel, and is preparing a history of the anti-novel in 17th-century France. Last spring, he received a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award from the IU Board of Trustees.

John Isbell introduced a translation of Madame de Stael's Corinne in the Oxford World Classics series. He also published a handful of articles this year. In November, he will be hosting the American Conference on Romanticism on the topic of "Pleasure," which encompasses pleasures of the intellect, religion, politics, science, and economics. Andrea Ciccarelli is helping John select papers for this conference.

During summer 1998, Professor Edoardo Lèbano co-directed, with Professor Barry Gealt of the School of Fine Arts, the IU Summer Program in Florence, Italy. Lèbano also taught a course on Renaissance Florence and organized four guided one-day visits to Siena­San Gimignano, Arezzo, Gubbio and Pisa­Lucca. During their stay at the Pensione Bandini in Florence, IU students witnessed the making of a new film by director Zeffirelli, titled Te' col Duce, some of whose scenes were shot in the Pensione Bandini itself. Two Italian AIs, Amelia Tundo and Amaryllis Rodriguez-Moijca, taught Italian language and conversation courses. Their dedicated participation in the program greatly contributed to its success. On the occasion of the publication of the first English translation of Luigi Pulci's Morgante (IU Press, April 1998), Lèbano was invited to lecture on Pulci at Middlebury College and to present this annotated edition at the University of Chicago. He also was a panelist in the section "Byron's Dream Come True: Morgante's First English Translation" held in Chicago last April during the annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies. Before Christmas, Lèbano traveled to Italy to take part as a section chair and panelist in the 74th annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, held in the ancient city of Crotone in the southern region of Calabria. Lèbano, who continues to be active working on several projects, was the only American Italianist selected as a recipient by the University of Toronto of their Distinguished Career Award for the Teaching of Italian in the United States.

Professor Rosemary Lloyd has been busy attending several conferences and exhibitions commemorating the centennial of Mallarmé's death. In addition to the 10-day symposium on Mallarmé at the château of Cerisy-la-Salle in France, she participated in celebrations at Strathclyde University, Glasgow; the University of Iowa; and the University of Melbourne. With Gil Chaitin, she visited the beautiful and moving Mallarmé exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Last year, Lloyd was invited as a plenary speaker at an international conference hosted by Sweden's Institute for Children's Literature, and she also took that opportunity to give some lectures in Scotland and England. Thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Lloyd was on leave in 1998 to complete her book on Mallarmé, which will be published by Cornell University Press this fall. She also completed a translation of the latest collection of prose poems by Mylène Catel, PhD'96. Lloyd also traveled to Nashville, Tenn., to take part in a conference in honor of the great Baudelaire scholar Claude Pichois, who is retiring. While there, she met Holly Tucker, BA'89, and Juliana Starr, PhD'95. In March 1998, Rosemary and her husband, Paul Lloyd, spent a wonderful 10-day vacation in Costa Rica, where they brought their bird watching list to more than 900! They stayed two nights just one mile from the Arenal, one of the five most active volcanoes in the world, which erupted just one month later!

In 1998, Jacques Merceron published a book, titled Le Message et sa fiction, La communication par messager dans la littérature française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, with the University of California Press. He also has authored three articles: The first, on Chrétien de Troyes, appears in Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale; the second, in Romania, concerns cooks and stereotypical violence; and the third, in Mythologie française, treats facetious hagiography. He also contributed a chapter on obscenity and hagiography in the Sermons joyeux for Jan Ziolkowski's Obscenity, Social Control, and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1998). In November 1998, Jacques was invited by the University of Cincinnati to give a talk, titled "De l'hagiographie à la chanson d'aventures: l'image de Sainte Bathilde reine de France." He is currently finishing a Dictionnaire des Saintes burlesques et imaginaires (du moyen âge aux temps modernes) and is working on a book-length study, Parodie, sainteté et hagiographie (Moyen Age et Renaissance). In the fall semester, Merceron will be teaching M200 The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest for the Medieval Studies Institute and the Honors Division.

Professor Emanuel Mickel read papers on the epic poem Enfances Godefroi at the Medieval Academy meeting in April 1998 and at the International Congress of Medievalists in May of the same year. By invitation of the president of the International Marie de France Society, he gave five lectures concerning medieval studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in October. He has completed the third volume of The "Enfances Godefroi" and the "Retour de Cornumarant" in the Old French Crusade Cycle, which was scheduled for publication in March. He has also published two articles, of a series of four, in Romania, concerning the manuscripts, cyclification, and making of the popular history in the "Enfances Godefroi."

Professor Samuel N. Rosenberg read papers this past year at conferences in Lexington, Ky., in Vancouver, and at Purdue, all of them concerned with one or another aspect of Old French lyric poetry. In Bloomington, he had the pleasure of hearing his translation of six trouvère songs performed in public by the tenor Pablo Corá, an experience that has inspired him to do more versions for singing. Among publications, he was particularly glad to see his edition and translation of the Folies Tristan appear in the two-volume Early French Tristan Poems, along with texts prepared by Karen Fresco, PhD'83, and Norris Lacy, PhD'67, who has also edited the book. He has just completed a broad bibliographical survey of Old French song with the able help of PhD candidate Erik Haakenstad and is engaged in both new lyric projects and a modern retelling of the Lancelot-Galehaut story.

Albert Valdman, Rudy Professor of French and Italian and Linguistics, received the prestigious 1998 American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages Florence Steiner Award for leadership in foreign language teaching at the post-secondary level. In her nomination letter, Jayne Abrate, executive director of the American Association of Teachers of French, stated: "Both directly and indirectly, as a foreign language educator, he has probably influenced more French students in the United States than any other individual alive today . From a personal perspective, I began my study of French linguistics with Dr. Valdman's French Phonology and Morphology, my son is currently studying French in high school with one of Dr. Valdman's textbooks, and I used one of his college texts in my own teaching." Valdman's honors also include promotion to commandeur in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques of the French Ministry of Education and receipt of the Indiana University John Ryan Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Programs and Studies. Valdman was invited to speak at the International Symposium on Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages in Regensberg, Germany. He discussed lexical restructuring in French-based Creoles, concentrating on Haitian and Louisiana Creole and Louisiana (Cajun) French. At the 71st meeting of the AATF, Valdman spoke at a special session on "Comment gérer la variation dans l'enseignement du français langue étrangère dans une perspective francophone." He was also a plenary speaker at a conference at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, sponsored by the Francophone University Agency. The Indiana University Press has just published A Dictionary of Louisiana Creole, by Valdman and several collaborators, two of whom are alumni in French and general linguistics: Tom Klingler, PhD'92, associate professor at Tulane, and Kevin Rottet, PhD'95, assistant professor at Wisconsin­Whitewater. In a brief characterization of this 655-page work, Glenn Gilbert, editor of The Journal of Pidgin and Creole Studies, declared: "Remarkable! A unique record of Louisiana French Creole. The introduction itself is an important contribution to creolistics. This valuable dictionary should be of wide interest to Creole scholars, French and U.S. cultural historians, and students of the French language. There is nothing else like it."

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