Faculty Kudos

Lidia HwaSoon Anchisi, Associate Professor of Italian, presented “Transracial Adoption and the Politics of Identity” at the Canadian Society for Italian Studies in Vancouver, Canada, May 3 – June 2, 2008. The paper looked at how her personal struggles as a transracial adoptee are symptomatic of an internal conflict regarding racial identity that has been noted in a number of transracial adoptees. In her presentation, Hopkins focused on the disjunction between the identity of the transracial adoptee and the outsider’s interpretation of the racial
codes embodied by the adoptee.

Anchisi contributed two essays to French Feminists: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, edited by Ann J. Cahill and Jennifer L. Hansen, Associate Professor of Philosophy (Routledge, 2008). “Introduction: Helene Cixous” (Vol. 2, pp. 1-4) introduces the work of Helene Cixous to a broad audience and frames the importance of the collected essays. “Introduction: Simone de Beauvoir” (Vol. 1, pp. 1-4), co-authored with Hansen, is an introductory essay to the work of Simone de Beauvoir.

Anchisi published “Delineating a Lesbian ‘Elsewhere’ in Margherita Giacobino’s ‘Sirene e altri animali marini’” in NEMLA Italian Studies, Vol. XXX (2005-2006): 27-51. Anchisi’s analysis demonstrates how Giacobino’s short story is embedded with narrative and textual strategies that subvert patriarchal and heterosexist discourses.

Marie-Jo M. Binet, Associate Professor of French, published a book entitled L’Autre emoi. Ecrits entre les terres: 1979-2003 (L’Harmattan, Paris, France, 2005). This work is an anthology of francophone texts which presents many different aspects of exile and deals with related concepts: Identity, roots, transplantation, cultural multiplicity and the necessary transformations of human communities. Authors are from African and Caribbean origins.

Stefano Boselli, Assistant Professor of Italian, participated in the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference in Cleveland, OH, on November 8-11, 2007. His paper, titled “Planes of Reality: Modernist One-Act Plays by Verga, D’Annunzio, and Pirandello,” adopts a spatial metaphor to analyze the specific ways in which the three dramatists challenged the assumptions of modernity through their one-act plays.

Laurence A. Gregorio, Professor of French, published “A Quarrel in La Princesse de Clèves: Ancient Princess and Modern Nemours” in Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 29 (2007): 81-87. The article is a study of the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns acted out between the novel’s two main characters, influenced by the philosophical differences between Augustine and Aquinas, and ultimately those between Plato and Aristotle. 

Florence Ramond Jurney, Associate Professor of French and Co-Chair of the Department of French and Italian, published Representation of the Island in Caribbean Literature: Caribbean Women Redefine Their Homelands. Published by Edwin Mellen Press, 2009, the book examines representations of the island in Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbean literature. It also looks at characters’ expressions of identity through their personal stories, their relationship to history, and their sense of their adopted homeland and island of origin.

Jurney reviewed Daines et autres chroniques de la mort in The French Review, Vol. 81 (2008): 1042-1043. Daines et autres chroniques de la mort (Daines and Other Tales of Death) is the latest book of short stories by Vinod Rughoonundun, a Mauritian author of Indian origin.

Jurney presented at the Conseil International d’Etudes Francophones, held in Limoges, France, June 29-July 6, 2008. Her paper, titled “Voix mouvantes de la diaspora chez Gisle Pineau et Marie-Clie Agnant (Moving Voices of the Diaspora in Works by Gisèle Pineau and Marie-Célie Agnant)” described Caribbean characters in two very recent novels who experience a shift in identity from a local one (identifying with their island of origin) to a global one (identifying themselves as a part of the diaspora).

Jurney chaired and organized a panel at the Conseil International d’Etudes Francophones held June 29-July 6, 2008, in Limoges, France. Titled “Voix migrantes” the session discussed how different migrant voices in contemporary Francophone literature describe a new image of France, the complexity of the diaspora, and
the danger of losing one’s identity.

Jurney reviewed Rene Larrier’s Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean in Caribbean Studies¸ Vol. 36 (2008): 170-172. Larrier’s book proposes that danmy, a combat dance tradition in Martinique, serves as a framework for reading Francophone Caribbean texts.

Alan R. Perry, Associate Professor of Italian and Co-Chair of the Department of French and Italian, published The Don Camillo Stories of Giovannino Guareschi: A Humorist Portrays the Sacred (University of Toronto Press, 2008). The book explores the Don Camillo stories from the perspective of Christian hermeneutics, showing how Guareschi used the exploits of Don Camillo, a cantankerous but beloved priest, and his sidekick, Communist mayor Peppone, to convey the Christian message of faith, hope, and love. The first full-length scholarly examination of the Don Camillo stories to appear, Perry’s book discusses the ways in which Italian cultural values were contested in the first decades of the Cold War. 

Perry presented a paper titled “Sacraments and Sacramentals in Guareschi’s Mondo piccolo” at the American Association of Teachers of Italian conference held in Washington, DC, October 13, 2007.

Perry received a $4,700 grant from the Central Pennsylvania Consortium’s Mellon Fellowship. The grant was awarded for research to be conducted at the Giovannino Guareschi Archives in Roncole Verdi, Italy, over the 2007-2008 academic year. With the funding, Perry will research, compile and write both critical articles and a proposed biography on Guareschi.

Elizabeth Richardson Viti, Professor of French, presented, in French, “Annie Ernaux et la maison du Bonheur (Annie Ernaux and the House of Happiness)” at the International Colloquium on Annie Ernaux held at York University in Toronto, Canada, May 22-24, 2008. The paper demonstrated how the act of waiting plays a
crucial role in all of Annie Ernaux’s work and forms an overarching leitmotif that exposes waiting as a fundamentally female preoccupation.

Richardson Viti presented “The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir: Le Ras-le-bol des Superwomen? (Are Superwomen Fed Up?)” at the 16th International Simone de Beauvoir Society Conference held at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, June 13-15, 2008. The paper examined the criticism that Beauvoir is largely responsible for the dilemma of contemporary women who are trying to do it all – and to perfection – and argued that only those who have never read The Second Sex hold the celebrated feminist responsible for this
phenomenon.

Richardson Viti published “Ernaux’s Ce qu’ils disent ou rien: Anne Makes a Spectacle(s) of Herself” in Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 78 (2007): 75-82. The article examines the way in which eyeglasses, worn or abandoned by the fifteen-year-old protagonist, schematize the ups and downs that the teenager experiences in her effort to be noticed and found attractive by boys. Anne quickly learns that she must take off her spectacles in order to make a spectacle of herself.

Richardson Viti published “La Femme sur la Femme: Making Simone de Beauvoir Relevant in Today’s Classroom” in Simone de Beauvoir Studies, Vol. 23 (2007): 125-131. The article demonstrates how the celebrated feminist, so essential to the women’s studies classroom, can be appropriately inserted into a French literature classroom as well, most notably one devoted to women writers.

Robert M. Viti, Professor of French, published “Son, parole et silence dans Le Ventre de Paris?” in Les Cahiers Naturalistes, Vol. 83 (2009): 65-71. Critics have repeatedly spoken of Emile Zola’s attempts to incorporate the style of the Impressionist painters in his novels. It is by now commonplace to speak of Le Ventre de Paris as his most impressionistic work, a feast for the eyes, a novel in which the play of light and color dominates. Viti studies another sense, the auditory, in the alternation of sound, speech and silence
and the crucial role they play in the fate of the protagonist, Florent.

Viti presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference held at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, KY, on April 19, 2008. Titled “Sound, Speech and Silence in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris,” Viti’s paper explored the importance of the auditory sense in the tragic fate of the 14 novel’s protagonist, Florent. Subjected to auditory overload at his work in the Central Market in Paris, Florent is ultimately arrested and exiled because he chooses to speak and to reveal his “dangerous” ideas instead of remaining silent as he had promised himself.

Viti published “L’Ogresse and La Bête: Time in Mimouni and Zola” in Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 80 (2007): 95-100. The essay contrasts the twentieth-century Algerian writer, Rachid Mimouni, and the nineteenth-century Naturalist, Emile Zola, in their portrayal of time. In his short story collection, La Ceinture de l’ogresse, Mimouni essentially rejects modernity and its chronometric temporal scheme in favor of a return to ancient customs and ways of reckoning time. Zola, ever the disciple of progress, insists upon the temporally sequential and linear, especially in his novel, La Bête humaine.