Thursday, June 1, 2017
5pm, Ulster Hall
Michael O’Dea is Emeritus Professor of French at the Université Lyon II (France) and is a specialist of Rousseau and music. His latest publications include the edited volumes Rousseau en 2012. Puisqu’enfin mon nom doit vivre. SVEC 2012:1; Rousseau en musique, co-edited with P. Saby and O. Bara as a special issue of Orages, littérature et culture 1760-1830 (2012) and Rousseau et les philosophes, SVEC 2010:2. On June 1 at 5pm, he will present a lecture on “another Rousseau” and explore Rousseau’s implicit critical response to the cultural wars of his time. Professor O’Dea will analyze whether Rousseau, an assimilated French immigrant, with perfect mastery of the codes of the receiving society, might be shown to be using that mastery against his hosts, half-seduced by their certainties, half-enraged by their arrogance.
This event is part of the 20th Biennial Meeting of the Rousseau Association: Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau held at UF 1-3 June 2017.
The Rousseau Association is an international interdisciplinary association whose membership draws from philosophy, literature, political science, linguistics, music, and visual arts. Its focus is the renowned thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose vital contributions to all of these humanistic fields continue today to reward scholarly study. The conference will examine through a variety of approaches Rousseau’s multifaceted assessment of silence: for example, what he calls the language of action, an eloquent, though silent sign language in his reflection on the origin of languages; his discussion of avowal and secrecy, deception and sincerity in autobiographical texts such as Confessions; his reflection on the status of authorship and his denunciation of the publication of anonymous writings in polemical essays; or his study of the representation of passion on the stage and its implicit effect on the spectator in his works about performance and theater.
This event, which is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, the Department of Philosophy, and the France Florida Research Institute, is free and open to the public.
For more information please contact Dr Weltman-Aron (bweltman@ufl.edu)