New College of Florida and Alliance Française de Sarasota will host a lecture by Professor Philippe Chardin from the University of Tours on April 13, at 4:00 pm in the Harry Sudakoff Conference Center on the College’s East campus. Dr. Chardin’s talk is entitled “Mal du siècle et mal du lieu: romantisme et ‘bovarysme’ dans ‘Madame Bovary’ de Flaubert.” The presentation is in French. This event is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.
Philippe Chardin has been Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, France since 1998. A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and an Agrégé de l’Université, he received his Doctorate from the Université Paris-Sorbonne. His teaching career took him first to the Université de Poitiers and subsequently the Université de Reims where, for ten years, he was the Chair of the Modern Literature Department.
A specialist of European novelists from the second half of the 19th century to the present, (Flaubert, Dostoïevski, Gorki, Stevo, Musil, etc.), he studies works in a comparative perspective, and is interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and politics. His many publications include Un Roman du clair-obscur: L’Idiot de Dostoïevski (1976); Le Roman de la conscience malheureuse (1983), a study of how some European and American novelists saw the pre-First World War period; L’Amour et la haine ou la jalousie dans la literature: Dostoïevski, James, Svevo, Proust, Musil (1990), Musil et la littérature européenne (1998), Proust ou le bonheur du petit personnage qui compare (2006). He was the editor of several collective works, in particular Réceptions créatrices de l’œuvre de Flaubert (2000) and Roman d’éducation, roman de formation dans la littérature française et dans les littératures étrangères (2007). His next book will be: Littérature et pensée totalitaire au XXe siècle.
He is also the author of four novels and a collection of short stories. Alma mater (2000), a satire of the French university system, and (amazingly!) the first comic novel dealing with this subject, has been compared to David Lodge’s satire of British and American universities.
For more information, please contact the Office of Public Affairs at [email protected] or call (941) 487-4153.