Helen Solterer
Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Duke University
Monday, October 3, 2022
3:30 PM (ET)
Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101), John C. Hodges Library
Talk Title: “Justice, Mercy & Two Disabled Homeless: Scenes from an Open-Ended Social Drama in French”
About the Talk:
The figures Justice and Mercy, well-known to Christian and Jewish communities from a Biblical episode, were enacted frequently by Christian and civic fraternities in early modern towns. These same city people also improvised a sketch featuring one blind person and another who appears ‘lame.’ The scenes they played: the trial of these figures before time ‘began’ and the travails of this duo after the so-called Fall.
What do these dramas that embody both ideal principles and people in trouble tell us about popular views on irreconcilable social relations? In this brief cultural history, Helen Solterer will investigate a set of such scenes in French-speaking towns around 1450, in the wake of World War Two, and again today to show how people use early theatrical fictions to meet the civic conflicts of their time, to respond to inequities, and to energize the struggle of living together day in, day out.
About the Speaker:
Helen Solterer is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. Her writing and teaching combine her research on early modern literature and culture and her work in twentieth-century cultural history. Timely Fictions in French, her latest book supported by the Guggenheim Foundation is nearing completion. Out this fall, the collection of essays edited with Vincent Joos, Migrants Shaping Europe: Multilingual Literatures, Arts and Cultures. After hours, she writes in the vein of family history. James Joyce Remembered, edition 2022, a collective volume, co-edited with Alice Ryan, that she spearheaded with University College Dublin colleagues around the essay of C.P. Curran, her grandfather, appeared for the Decade of Centenaries marked in Ireland. Earlier books include: Medieval Roles for Modern Times, Theater and the Battle for the French Republic, translated into French, and the MLA prize-winning Master and Minerva, in a feminist vein.
Helen Solterer was invited to campus by Sara Ritchey, an associate professor in the Department of History.