UW, Division of French and Italian Studies

Friday, February 29, 2008
2:30-4:30pm
Simpson Center for the Humanities (Communications, Room 202)
UW, Seattle

Doug Collins (Associate Professor, French Studies) presents
"An Ear for Evil: The Sociology of Balzac's Music Fiction"

“La-la-la-la,” sang Nietzsche, wordlessly, in The Gay Science. This was the music of robust health to be contrasted with that of Wagner: “I should not know how to get along without Rossini,” he said. “No other music excels it,” Hegel wrote to his wife, after hearing Rossini’s Otello. “As long as I have money to go to the Italian opera and to pay for my return trip, I shall remain in Vienna.” But Balzac would have none of it, as Rossini’s musical language in general, and his Otello, specifically, were a focus of his baleful concern. What escaped the philosophers in the naiveté of their praise for “the overflowing animal vitality of a Rossini” (Nietzsche) were the corrosive social consequences of this frivolity, its relation to the infectious calamity of the “ecstatic delight in the commonplace soul of the Average Man” (Stendhal).

William Mitchell (Graduate student, Comparative Literature) presents
“Importing the Métropole: Representation and Simulacra in La Plus Grande France”

The permanent occupation of Algeria in 1830 marked the dawning of a new era of French colonialism. During a historical juncture of radical social and political transformation, the colonies represented an underdetermined site for the elaboration of a modern French state. That elaboration, however, presupposed a model that had yet to coalesce. My discussion will examine how the colonies acted as a laboratory of nation building for the French state as well as analyze the key role that representation of physical space played in mediating between the métropole and her overseas holdings.

For further information about this event please contact the Division of French & Italian Studies at (2060 616-3486 or email frenital@u.washington.edu.

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