CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - More than 200 scholars from Europe and North America will meet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to take part in the 2003
Twentieth-Century French Studies Colloquium March 27-29 (Thursday to Saturday) in the Illini Union, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana.
All academic events are free and open to members of the university community.
Sessions will focus on topics such as French music and films, globalization and its discontents, modern and post-modern fictions, Jean Genet and the queer literary canon, and French culture and culture studies. At least three sessions will be devoted to the great French novelist Marcel Proust. Lawrence Schehr, a professor of French at Illinois, is the conference organizer.
Plenary session speakers are François Noudelmann, professor of French literature, philosophy and thought, College International de Philosophie, Paris, and Jeffrey Mehlman, professor of French studies, Boston University. Noudelmann's talk, to be given in French, is titled "Pour en finir avec la genealogie"("To Be Done With Genealogy"). Mehlman's talk is titled "Losing It: The Neo-Conservative Turn in Recent French Thought."
Illinois' French department is sponsoring the colloquium with support from various campus units, including the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Center for Advanced Study, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Silicon, Carbon, Culture Initiative, as well as the French Consulate through the resources of the Multidisciplinary Center in the French department.