Department of French & Italian Student-Faculty Forum Series presents
The Crocodiles of Caen and the Mollusks of the Museum: Rhetoric, Science, and Power in Nineteenth-Century France
by
Rosemary Lloyd
Friday, February
16, 2007
2;30-3:30pm
Ballantine Hall 217
This paper, to be given at the Société Dix-Neuf’s conference on Institutions and Power in March, explores how a presentation purportedly about mollusks unleashed an orgy of rhetoric, primarily between two great scientists of France’s Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Georges Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The historian of science Toby Appel argues that “The significance of the debate for the future of biology is that it laid bare the untenability of both Cuvier’s and Geoffroy’s views and challenged naturalists to come to a creative resolution of them. But the debate had far wider implications, touching not just the scientific community but art and literature as well.” While the scientific arguments are well known, what has been less explored is the way in which both spatial forms and rhetorical devices were called into play, and the result this display of verbal fireworks would have over a range of writers.
Rosemary Lloyd is Rudy Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University. Her recent publications include Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle (1999); Baudelaire’s World (2002); Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life (2004); The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (editor, 2006). Her research focuses on experiments with representation, verbal and visual, in poetry, prose, prose poetry and autobiography. She has received fellowships from the Leverhulme fund, the Camargo Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
This presentation will be in English. Discussion and refreshments to follow.
If you have a disability and need assistance, accommodations can be made to address most needs. Please call 855-5458.
