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Dr. Boulards' research on French writer, Victor Hugo

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On February 14 and 15, Dr. Stéphanie Boulard spoke at the Maison Vacquerie-Musée Victor Hugo in Normandy, France, about her last research on Victor Hugo and the obsessive presence of the guillotine in his works. She argues that the guillotine haunts Victor’s Hugo’s entire oeuvre, and shows how it reappears again and again from The Last Day of a Condemned Man to Ninety-Three, with the same insistent repetition that marked the guillotine’s own use in its heyday. Methodical and incisive, the guillotine perhaps represents a privileged view of nineteenth-century history. In her recent book Rouge Hugo (Septentrion 2014), featured at the event, she further demonstrates that it is in any case through the eye, the lunette, of this instrument that Victor Hugo focuses his own critical gaze upon his century.

During the event, Dr. Stéphanie Boulard was interviewed and also appeared in the TV documentary “La Quotidienne” presenting the “8e rencontres autour de Victor Hugo” (8th encounters around Victor Hugo), and in the news presenting the event: http://www.paris-normandie.fr/detail_communes/articles/2544558/victor-hugo-revisite#.VP9VZGbwvoE

On March 21st, Dr. Stéphanie Boulard presents her new project at the International Colloquium: “Victor Hugo and the Arts” at the Ecole d'art Emile Cohl, in Lyon, France. She explores the contemporary artist Arnulf Rainer’s obsessive ‘overpainting’ (übermalungen) on Victor Hugo. She confronts the two practices: the profuse yet dilettante practice of drawing by Hugo, and the hundred übermalungen by Rainer, colouring in, scribbling on and scratching into printed reproductions of Hugo’s artworks that he has gleaned for years, either by photocopying, scanning or ripping them directly from books.

Stéphanie Boulard is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of Rouge Hugo (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014). She directed a special issue of La Revue des Sciences humaines (Ego Hugo, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011) and edited a book on the contemporary writer Claude Louis-Combet: Visions, visitations, passions: en compagnie de Claude Louis-Combet (Corlevour, 2008). In addition, Boulard has authored numerous articles on authors such as Pascal Quignard, Hélène Cixous, Henri Michaux, Jean Genet, Claude Louis-Combet, Victor Hugo, and Honoré de Balzac.

 

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  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Shamiso Barnett
  • Created:03/11/2015
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016

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