The French Center of Excellence and Department of French & Italian are pleased to announce the speakers for the Spring 2024 lecture series. The third of our speakers is Professor Tili Boon Cuillé. Professor Cuillé is a Professor of French & Comparative Literature Washington University in St. Louis.
Professor Cuillé's talk is entitled Magical Agents, Material Girls: The Pink Shoe from Paris to Paris Hilton
The translation of the Arabian Nights into French transformed the European cultural landscape. Characterized as an invasion of the land of fiction, the oriental tales’ magical lamps and flying carpets rapidly displaced the talking beasts and seven-league boots of French fables and fairy tales. In this presentation, Tili Boon Cuillé (Washington University in St. Louis) explores the relationship between magical objects and material culture.
Fanchette’s Foot is the first documented instance of shoe fetishism in French literary history. A recasting of the Cinderella story, it is littered with references to the oriental tale. Restoring this work to the context of 18th-century print and market culture, Professor Cuillé analyzes it not in terms of Freudian fetishism but rather in terms of commodity fetishism and ornamentalism. Such subject-as-object enchantment pervades both French and American consumer culture, as she reveals by pursuing the pink shoe from the streets of Paris to Paris Hilton’s shoe closet in Sofia Coppola’s films.
Professor Cuillé's talk will take place on Thursday, April 18 from 4:30pm-5:30pm in Hagerty Hall 180. Light refreshments will be served after the talk. To register, you can click here or call 614-247-4105.
If you are interested in purchasing other works of Professor Cuillé, click here.
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. This series is also supported by the following departments and centers at Ohio State African American & African Studies, History, History of Art, Spanish & Portuguese, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Slavic & Eastern European Languages & Literatures, the Humanities Institute, and the Center for Languages, Literatures, & Cultures.
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.
