Hall Bjørnstad
Assistant
Professor of French
Office: Ballantine Hall
618
Office phone: 855-6596
Email: hallbjor @indiana.edu
Research areas:
17th-century literature and culture, emphasis on the relationship between literature and politics; early modern and contemporary philosophy; theories of modernity; translation studies
Education:
- Postdoctoral Fellow, the Research Council of Norway, 2007-2010; Visiting Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Princeton and Paris-4 Sorbonne
- PhD, French literature, University of Oslo, Norway, Spring 2006
Background:
My research focuses on shifting figurations of the human and its relationship to theories of modernity in early modern French literature. In my first monograph, Créature sans créateur: Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les “Pensées” de Pascal (forthcoming, PU Laval), I identify in Pascal an acute awareness of the darkest aspects of secular subjectivity at the threshold of modernity. Retracing in the Pensées a modern discourse on the creature radically different from the traditional understanding through theology, the book aims at adding a Pascalian voice to the recent return to the question of the human / beast in continental philosophy.
The focus of my present project shifts from anthropology to the politico-theological underpinnings of absolutism. The project has its origin in the work on the creaturely in Pascal, more precisely in the Pascalian insight that human creatureliness is the flipside of royal glory, a flipside which is at once revealed and concealed through a process of self-mirroring. The project studies this dialectic as it informs the construction of the image of Louis XIV in a corpus including explicitly political and encomiastic works (e.g. by Senault, Félibien, Bossuet, Pellisson, Préchac), tragedies by Corneille and Racine, moralist texts (e.g. Pascal, Nicole and La Rochefoucauld), visual and plastic arts of the period (portraiture, architecture), and also the King’s own surprisingly under-studied Mémoires pour l’instruction du Dauphin.
I am currently enjoying animated discussions of similar questions in my graduate seminar and in the undergraduate classroom.
Courses recently taught:
- F630: Expressions of Absolutism
- F305: Le poids de l’existence
Publication highlights:
Books:
Créature sans créateur: Pour une anthropologie baroque dans les “Pensées” de Pascal. Saint-Nicolas, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval (collections de la République des Lettres), forthcoming.
Borrowed Feathers: Plagiarism and the Limits of Imitation in Early Modern Europe. Editor and author of the critical introduction. Oslo: Unipub, 2008. (Contributions by Kathy Eden, Marie-Luce Demonet, Terence Cave and others.)
B. Pascal: Tanker [Pensées]. Translation, annotation (45 p.) and introductory essay (33 p.). Oslo: Pax, 2007; republished Oslo: De norske bokklubbene (Bokklubbens kulturbibliotek), 2007.
Articles:
“‘Vous m’avez fait voir des choses que j’ai ressenties’: Le roi, son peintre et la question des émotions publiques.” Littératures classiques, 2009 (forthcoming).
“Le savoir d’un conte moins conte que les autres: Le ‘Sans Parangon’ de Préchac et les limites de l’absolutisme.” Féerie 6 (2009), 163-178.
“‘Plus d’éclaircissement touchant la grande galerie de Versailles’: Du nouveau sur les premières inscriptions.” XVIIe siècle 61-2 (2009), 321-343.
“The Metaphors of Textual Transfer: From Indigestion to Early Modern Tennis.” [On Pascal and Montaigne] Borrowed Feathers: Plagiarism and the Limits of Imitation in Early Modern Europe. H. Bjørnstad, ed. Oslo: Unipub, 2008, 215-228.
“Désapprendre à mourir: Pascal and the Philosophers of Death.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 33 (2006), 419-28.
“Le rire de Beckett.” Romansk forum 20 (2005), 49-55.
