Crosspost from la Fondation Catherine Gide

by John Sorrentino Posted on January 23, 2012

This is a report on the Gide panel from the MLA 2012: “The Feminine in André Gide’s Life and Works” on the website for the Catherine Gide Foundation (Fondation Catherine Gide).  Justine Legrand writes:

Du 5 au 8 janvier 2012 se tenait à Seattle le Congrès annuel de la MLA (Modern Language Association). Parmi un panel de plus de 700 sessions d’études sur les littératures françaises, espagnoles, américaines, allemandes, italiennes, l’Association des Amis d’André Gide proposait une séance consacrée à la femme dans l’œuvre et la vie d’André Gide intitulée The Feminine in André Gide’s Works and Life.

Cette session, qui avait lieu le vendredi 6 janvier 2012 au Sheraton de Seattle, était dirigée par Christine Latrouitte Armstrong, professeure associée de Français à l’Université de Denison (Ohio, USA).

Les trois interventions (en français pour la première et en anglais pour les deux suivantes selon l’ordre de passage établi par la présidente de séance) d’une vingtaine de minutes chacune ont permis de toucher à un point clef de l’œuvre gidienne dont certaines portes ne demandent qu’à s’ouvrir.

  • “La place de la femme: Le second problème gidien”
    Justine Legrand, Paris Sorbonne Université, Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne ;
  • “Quel deuil pour quel corps? Gide’s Elegiac Poetics in Et nunc manet in te”
    Alina Opreanu, Harvard Univ ;
  • “Imagining Madeleine” John Sorrentino, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York.

Ces trois communications ont été suivies de questions et réflexions sur la condition féminine, et offrent de réelles perspectives de recherche sur des thèmes déjà abordés mais souvent peu développés par la critique gidienne.

Check out the fabulous photo of the three presenters: me, Alina Opreanu (Harvard), and Justine Legrand (La Sorbonne), and the moderator, Christine Latrouitte Armstrong (Denison). http://www.fondation-catherine-gide.org/2012/01/andre-gide-parisian-in-america.html

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Report from the MLA – Seattle 2012

by John Sorrentino Posted on January 13, 2012

Got back from the MLA earlier this week and my head is still spinning. What an amazing experience.

First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the panel that I had the privilege of being part of: The Feminine in André Gide’s Works and Life .  My co-panelists and I discussed different aspects of how Gide presents and deals with women in his works: Prof. Justine Legrand (La Sorbonne) presented a stunning paper on Geneviève and the ways that Gide posited lesbianism within that work; Prof. Alina Opreanu (Harvard) discussed Et nunc manet in te, Gide’s elegiac memoir about his life with and marriage to Madeleine following her death, a presentation that lead almost seamlessly to mine entitled “Imagining Madeleine” where I discussed the way that the drama of the character of Alissa in La Porte étroite articulates to an imagined/eventual future Gide’s estranged marriage to Madeleine.  The evening before my presentation, I added a reference to Charles O’Keefe’s book Void and Voice (where O’Keefe declares that the narrator of La Porte étroite, Jérôme, “lies”).  One of the people in attendance who offered some rather insightful (and hilarious) reflections during the Q&A turned out to be none other than Charles O’Keefe himself.  What a joy and honor to have him there, and what a relief that I did not know that it was he beforehand!  Special thanks to the Association des amis d’André Gide and Prof. Christine Latrouitte Armstrong (Denison) for convening and supporting the panel.

I attended some other amazing panels that I found truly inspiring.  One was a poetry panel where my department chair, Prof. Peter Consenstein, discussed Georges Perec (“Georges Perec, a Man Asleep, Is You,”), as well as a panel on disability studies that has fortified my own work with Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale with respect to the character of Gertrude, and finally a panel on the Digital Humanities that my friend and colleague Prof. Lauren Klein (Georgia Tech) convened on slave narratives.  The question I ask myself is in what ways can I use DH in the research and reading of Gide?

In all the experience was worth more than I could have expected or hoped for.  It was inspiring to be at this conference among academics in the humanities from all over the world, and a true privilege to see so many past and current colleagues in attendance.

See you all at the MLA 2013 in Boston!

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SocioWiki NYC – Spring 2007

by John Sorrentino Posted on May 21, 2011
SocioWiki NYC - Macaulay Honors College/Brooklyn College, Spring 2007

SocioWiki NYC - Macaulay Honors College/Brooklyn College, Spring 2007

The “SocioWiki” was the first wiki project (I will be posting more) I directed with Macaulay Honors College students at Brooklyn College for their Seminar 2 “The Peopling of New York City.” When we began this project, none of us – not the students, nor I, nor most of my colleagues – knew anything about MediaWiki, so the learning curve was substantial. The main reason that we decided to create our website on a wiki platform was because of the collaborative nature of MediaWiki, as well as the ability to roll back pages and keep track of changes.  For the professor, being able to see exactly who did the work based on each page’s “history,” helped him evaluate individual student’s participation.

The students worked in groups, focusing the people who live in selected neighborhoods of New York City (Hells Kitchen, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Park Slope).  They provided an analysis from a historical, immigration and sociological perspective, employing customized maps (using Google Maps), YouTube videos and interviews, walking tours, galleries of photos, and even a flash-based map on the home page (pictured above) that linked to the home pages of each neighborhood. The wiki worked well as a place where the projects could be built from scratch, and website visitors can look at the “history” of any page to see an archive of how the students imagined and developed their ideas.

My job as administrator involved installing the “extensions” that enabled mapping, YouTube video embedding, audio embedding, and footnoting, as well as installing and customizing the “skin” of the site.  I created and conducted workshops that aided students with MediaWiki markup, page creation, and organization, and I took what I learned back to my colleagues so they could employ them with their own students.

 

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