Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy

Jérôme Brillaud is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester. His research is primarily on early modern French culture with a focus on philosophy. He is the author of Sombres Lumières (2011) and A Philosophy of Simplicity (2019).Virginie Greene is Professor of French at Harvard University. She is a specialist in medieval literature with strong interests in history and philosophy and Proust and his times. She is the author of Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy and Le Sujet et la Mort dans La Mort Artu.

• List of PlatesNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction 1. Encountering the Divine: On the Cognition of God in Early French Christian Humanism, Jacob Vance, New England Conservatory, USA2. Event and Invention: Reading Montaigne and Rousseau Through Deleuze, Tom Conley, Harvard University, USA3. Encountering Venture: Dissonance, Deceit, Autobiography, Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale University, USA4. Colonial Encounters of “La Belle et la Bête”, Kylie Sago, Harvard University, USA5. Missed Connections: Literary History and Saint-Aubin’s Le Danger des liaisons, Sanam Nader-Esfahani, Amherst College, USA6. Rejected Encounters with Women Writers: The Case of Les Pensées errantes, Caleb Shelburne, Harvard University, USA7. Encountering Women Writers and their Texts: Louise de Keralio’s Pioneering Anthology, Vicki Mistacco, Wellesley College, USA8. Châtelet, Lavoisier, Charrière: Negotiating the Borderlands of the Republic of Letters, Ian Van Wye, Independent Scholar9. Women’s Fictions and Translations in Support of Enlightenment Values, Monique Moser-Verrey, Université de Montréal, Canada10. Stowe meets Thomas: What is Literary Property? Gary Wihl, Washington University, USA11. Form Encounters Sense: the Semiological Dimensions of Wagnerian Anti-Semitism, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Université de Montréal, Canada12. “Un autre moi-même”: Between the Self and the Other in Proust’s Correspondence, François Proulx, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA13. Ekphrasing as Encounter: “Try Say” with Georges Didi-Huberman and Hélène Cixous, Ginette Michaud, Université de Montréal, Canada14. Caring for Encounters, Verena Conley, Harvard University, USA15. Private Lives, Public History: Encountering the Filmmaker István Szabó, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University, USA16. Creation and Re-creation Across Cultures and Disciplines: Tahitian Encounters from Bougainville to Gauguin and Beyond, Christie McDonald, Harvard University, USA

An impressive collection of some of the most talented scholars in French and European Studies. The authors formulate a concept of “encountering” as alternatively a “falling into place” and as a “convergence” – concepts that get to the heart of what good criticism does, namely to “take the risk of meeting anew.” Encounters with God, encounters with eighteenth-century women writers, encounters with music and the visual arts, encounters with others – the range of topics and first-rate scholarship attests to Christie McDonald’s enduring influence and inspiration on literary and cultural studies.