This essay introduces an initiative designed to build bridges across languages and to promote collaboration with those closest to us in disciplinary terms within the humanities. We describe our collaborative teaching experience in a course on cultures of immigration at the University of West Georgia in which students and professors of three languages shared the classroom, brought their disciplinary expertise to bear, and traded positionalities. We outline how we organized the course, including the practicalities of accommodating both traditional and innovative curricular demands. We discuss the strategies we used to emphasize that the project was an experimental endeavor rooted in a Freirean understanding of collaborative learning as well as of teaching. Finally, we consider how such collaboration fosters empathy daily, emphasizes our similarities while not undermining our differences, and cultivates productive, cross-fertilizing reflection on identity (personal, departmental, national, and other) among students and faculty alike.

Reviews 235 générale, notamment en matière d’histoire et d’études religieuses, et enfin par la brièveté dans l’explication des thèses qui lui donnent tout son intérêt, le volume reste de toute évidence écrit pour le public très restreint des universitaires spécialistes de ces questions. On espère vivement que les fascinantes pistes de recherches lancées sur les rapports antagonistes entre la rhétorique de Bossuet et la rhétorique mondaine (347) ou sur la théorie politique du coup d’État (711) seront explorées pour le bénéfice des études françaises en général. Swarthmore College (PA) Jean-Vincent Blanchard Roberts, Hugh, Guillaume Peureux, et Lise Wajeman, éd. Obscénités renaissantes. Genève: Droz, 2011. ISBN 978-2-600-01466-3. Pp. 493. $142.80. This volume, the product of an international research network funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK), seeks to provide a panorama of the notion of the obscene in Renaissance France. Studies explore this theme in a broad array of genres and disciplines, from lyric poetry and the nouvelle to the emblem book, the law, and early modern medical writings. As Michel Jeanneret states in his elegant preface, they also endeavor to underline the centrality of the obscene to the very nature of literature. Like literature, argues Jeanneret, the obscene represents a locus of verbal experimentation, a forum for the transgression and contestation of societal and cultural values, and a medium through which we may freely explore forbidden desires. The editors adopt a hybrid approach, seeking to give unity to the varied collection by grouping contributions according to themes and placing brief introductions before each chapter. The authors spent two years working collaboratively on the topic of the obscene in Renaissance France, and there are numerous examples of cross-pollination throughout the volume. The first section explores the ‘pre-history’ of the obscene in classical, medieval, and Renaissance texts. This approach allows scholars to situate the succeeding studies within a broad historical context, and establishes a set of critical problems that will recur throughout the volume: the emergence of a semantic field of associated terms; the elusiveness of a clear definition of the obscene; and the interrelated movements of censorship and proliferation. Sections two and three investigate, respectively, the intersection of visual and sonic artistic production with the notion of the obscene, and the relation of obscenity to comedy in the Renaissance. Section four studies the role of the obscene from an anthropological and ethnographical perspective , and the final section examines its political implications. Obscénités renaissantes contains many excellent studies,but several stand out for this reader.Emily Butterworth’s brief lexicographical survey of the network of French terms associated with the Latin word obscenum in sixteenth-century French-Latin dictionaries provides valuable insight into the emergent concept of the obscene in the Renaissance. Grégoire Holtz’s study of travel narratives situated in the East Indies argues that their“effets d’obscène” resulted from a “construction européocentriste” (294), but also that we might find in these texts traces of “une obscénité made in India, produite par des codes moraux et esthétiques qui ne sont pas ceux du voyageur” (295). Perhaps the most important theme that emerges from this volume is that of relativity: the obscene must be understood in relation to a specific set of circumstances, whether textual, cultural, geographical, or performative. It becomes clear as the reader explores this volume that we should think of the obscene in terms of reception rather than production, since the category simply does not exist in the absence of an audience. Because of its astute focus on and deconstruction of these different performative contexts, this volume will be of great interest to scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. University of West Georgia Robert Kilpatrick Schweiger,Amélie. Flaubert en toutes lettres: l’écriture épistolaire dans la correspondance et dans l’œuvre. Rouen: PU de Rouen, 2012. ISBN 978-2-87775-571-9. Pp. 144. 15 a. Scholars of Flaubert’s correspondence like Charles Carlut and Hélène Frejlich tend to...

This article investigates the ways in which Erasmus' theorizing of the apophthegm interacts with his practices of compilation, paraphrasing, and commentary in the Apophthegmata. Putting key passages from the dedicatory epistle to William of Cleves in dialogue with the commentary on and marginalia to several apophthegms reveals the tension between Erasmus' theory of the apophthegm and his practice of collecting and elucidating classical fragments. Far from offering his reader condensed biographies of illustrious men, as Plutarch had claimed to do in the preface to his Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata, Erasmus the editor and paraphraser opens up a space where the modern writer struggles for ownership over the words of the past.

This article investigates the ways in which Erasmus’ theorizing of the apophthegm interacts with his practices of compilation, paraphrasing, and commentary in the Apophthegmata. Putting key passages from the dedicatory epistle to William of Cleves in dialogue with the commentary on and marginalia to several apophthegms reveals the tension between Erasmus’ theory of the apophthegm and his practice of collecting and elucidating classical fragments. Far from offering his reader condensed biographies of illustrious men, as Plutarch had claimed to do in the preface to his Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata, Erasmus the editor and paraphraser opens up a space where the modern writer struggles for ownership over the words of the past.

This article examines the topos of speech as the mirror of the mind (oratio speculum animi) in the Adagiorum Chiliades and the Moriae encomium. It has been argued that Erasmus uses this metaphor to express the idea that the ingenium of the speaker or writer emerges fully in language, which supposedly offers a transparent representation of a hidden essence. A topographical reading of the mirror image in the Chiliades, however, reveals that issues of illusion and obscurity unsettle the notion that speech offers clear access to an invisible interior. A close analysis of adages dealing with this theme shows, instead, that the reader or listener must piece together the pectus (mind, heart) of the speaker/writer from enigmatic clues left in language. Erasmus’s obsessive engagement with the theme of versatility in the Chiliades further complicates the mirror metaphor, for it juxtaposes the ambiguous ideal of adaptability to circumstances with the idea that speech provides access to a singular essence. Folly’s ironic citation of the mirror commonplace in the Moriae encomium shows to what extent language can suggest multiple essences, or even the absence of a fixed identity.