“Why was I Chinese?" To answer this question, the French writer Philippe Sollers uses literature as a personal experience: “what brought me to China was literature, that is to say my personal experience?" (Improvisations, 1991) From the 18th century to the present day, China is nothing less than the Dream of the Red Chamber of French literature, but is this a mere exoticism, a way of looking at a supernatural body from another galaxy, or does it have deeper, more real and fundamental repercussions on the very language of French literature?
Secret room from The North China Lover by Marguerite Duras to Le Lys d’Or by Philippe Sollers, winding of time in the poems of Victor Segalen, Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse, historical and political violence from André Malraux to Simon Leys: China is a strong segment of French-writing literary psyche. Between dream and reality, from the Red Chamber to the Red China, has China created a mutational identity in French literature aka what is the role of China in the maturation of a multilingual contemporaneity?
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago.
In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.
