University of north carolina at chapel hill
PhD Candidate in French Language and Literature
The ancient and the modern overlap in interesting ways ...
Sixteenth-Century Fiction and the Postcolonial Caribbean
How do current novels from the Francophone Caribbean converse dynamically with the French Renaissance? And why would this be important?
A native of northern Canada, I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in French Language and Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My dissertation explores these questions by focusing on a cultivated intertextual resonance by French Caribbean novelist Maryse Condé with French Renaissance satirist François Rabelais.
A primary framework of anachrony permits an examination of the implications that this relationship has in the context of twenty-first-century efforts to decolonize canonized hierarchies of knowledge. Decolonizing hierarchies? What's that?
Well for instance, it asks who gets to decide what things we should know or learn. Or which things are more important than others. Or ...
"Have you ever thought what is meant by 'to gob in the basin'?" ~François Rabelais - Lyon, France, 1548
Or what it means to say ...
"When you get to the land of the legless, crawl on the ground!"
~Maryse Condé - Guadeloupe, 1981
My academic aim is to show the beautiful interactivity between ancient and current literary functions based on the notion of trans-historicized resonances in literature. That is, motifs or praxes that cross time and space. This means writing about both Reformational France and the postcolonial Francophone Caribbean, advocating models of study that create transcultural spaces of broader debate.
How are these authors' questions relevant to our lives now? My particular interests center on sites where religious teachings, dissent, alterity, and social power dynamics intersect. This includes a focus on morality and supremacist thought. Do those things sound pretty relevant in today's politics?
"Well now: in good health, cough a good cough; have three drinks; merrily shake your ears, and then,
you shall hear tell wondrous things ..."