French and Italian Expert - Cécile Alduy

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Cécile Alduy
Associate Professor of French, Chair of Graduate Studies (French)

Biography

Primarily interested in Poetry and Poetics, both contemporary and early modern, Professor Alduy stresses philology and contextualization in order to anchor interpretation in the texture and contexture of literary works. She has recently been investigating books by Scève, Ronsard, La Boétie, Montaigne, Bonnefoy and Philippe Jaccottet, among others.

Assistant Professor Alduy’s recent book, The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the “Amours” in Renaissance France (1549-1560), examines how the poetics of love collections were exploited by the generation of Ronsard and Du Bellay to promote a collective - and nationalist - agenda, that of a "Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue" and its cultural supremacy.

Professor Alduy's newest project revolves around the rhetoric of the body in early modern French literature and medecine. She is working on a print and digital critical edition of Blasons anatomiques du corps féminin and on a book project entitled The Anatomy of Literature: Books and Bodies in Early Modern France.

She has created a comprehensive archival and pedagogical website focusing on the representation of the body in early modern literature, the arts and medicine. Part archive, part coursework, part creative workshop, the site features a collective blog, course material, personal e-diaries, biographies, and a digital “iconotheque” of more than three hundred digital scans of medical plates, architecture drawings, and literary works accessible through a sophisticated search engine. renaissancebodyproject.stanford.edu

Professor Alduy’s other projects include launching, together with Roland Greene, “Renaissances,” a lecture and workshop series on early modern literature designed to present the current work of distinguished literary scholars to the Bay Area community; and launching the Stanford French Film Festival, “From Script to Screen,” together with Margaret Cohen in 2004, which brought distinguished French film-makers and critics to Stanford campus.  She is also a research affiliate for the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Forum on Contemporary Europe.

A former student at the École normale Supérieure rue d'Ulm, Professor Alduy received her Ph.D. in French Literature in 2003 from the University of Reims. Before joining Stanford, Professor Alduy taught French Literature at Boston University and at the University of Reims (France). She has published a revised critical edition of Maurice Scève’s Délie, which complements a number of articles she wrote on his work, and published Maurice Scève (Roma: Memini. 2006), an extensive, annotated bibliography of all things ever written by or about Scève.  She recently published an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books with Domenick Ammirati reviewing  Michel Houellebecq's book The Map and the Territory. 

Professor Alduy also writes a blog on Arcade.

 

Key Works

  • "Lyric Economies: Manufacturing Values in French Petrarchan Collections (1549-1560).” Renaissance Quarterly, 63.3 (Fall 2010): 721-753
  • Between Experience and Experiment. Guest Co-Editor with Roland Greene, Special Issue, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 2 (April 3, 2010)
  • The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the “Amours” in Renaissance France.  Geneva: Droz, 2007.
  • Maurice Scève.  Roma: Memini, 2006.
  • Maurice Scève. Délie object de plus haulte vertu, a critical edition. Preface and bibliography by Cécile Alduy. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2001.

 

Prof. Alduy in the News

 

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