Associate Professor of French Chair, Department of Languages
and Literatures
A person is serious if he believes in what he would
have others
believe.
-- Milan Kundera, "Introduction
to a Variation," Jacques and His Master: An Homage to Diderot in
Three Acts, translated by Michael
Henry Heim (New York: HarperPerennial, 1985), p. 6.
Right now (what a word, now, what a dumb lie)
. . .
-- Julio Cortazar, "Blow-Up,"
Blow-Up and Other Stories, translated by Paul Blackburn (New York:
Pantheon, 1985), p. 118.
Reality exists only through experience, and it must
be personal
experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a
narrative. Reality can’t be verified and doesn’t need to be, that can
be left for the reality of life experts to debate. What is important is
life. Reality is simply that I am sitting by the fire in this room which
is black with grime and smoke and that I see the light of the fire dancing
in his eyes. Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this
instant and it can’t be related to another person. All that needs to be
said is that outside, a mist is enclosing the green-blue mountain in a
haze and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a
swift-flowing stream.
-- Gao Xingjian, Soul
Mountain, translated by Mabel Lee (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
Seriously, now, really: Milan Kundera is often considered a Czech
writer, but
he arrived in France in 1975, moved to Paris in 1978, became a French
citizen, and in the mid-1990s adopted French as his primary language
of literary expression.
Julio Cortazar was raised in
Argentina, but he moved to Paris in 1954 and spent most of his time there
until his death in 1984. Gao Xingjian, who received the Nobel Prize
in Literature for the year 2000, was born in Ganzhou in
eastern China, but left China in 1987 and is now a French citizen, living
in Paris. From different directions these three writers gravitated to
France, (like so many others), finding in
its culture and heritage a source of food for the mind and spirit --
and the other sort of food as well. Perhaps you'll find something of
interest on this page that will convey something of the
inexhaustible and infinitely explorable depths of French culture that have
made it such an attractive magnet in our planetary culture.
Paul Bénichou In recent years
the work of Paul
Bénichou (1908-2001) has been the focus of my scholarship. I have
created a web
page devoted to his work, containing a number of critical studies of
Bénichou as well as a brief biography and an annotated
bibliography. I am presently engaged in translating Bénichou's
Le Temps des prophètes (1977).
Le Monde Read
Le Monde to follow current events in France.
Libération ...or
try a more popular presentation of the news: this is an
impressive site. Much of this daily Paris paper is
presented, and in addition you can read the
first chapter of some recently published French books.
Live Views
of France
See what's happening in France right now. You can choose from
dozens of livecam links.
Joie de vivre Order
authentic French products for kitchen, home, and table!
Tennessee
Bob's French Links Scroll through "Tennessee Bob"'s extensive
compendium of Internet links related
to the French language and Francophone culture, organized by theme.
Yahoo! France Search the internet
with a search
engine specializing in the Francophone domain.
Le
Louvre Visit
the museum where my sister-in-law Sylvie Guichard works as an
Egyptologist.
Texts, images, and articles from the
Bibliothèque Nationale Consult 80,000 documents
(about
10,000,000 pages) extending from the Middle Ages to 1914 on the Gallica
2000
server created by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Images and
century-by-century articles on the history of the book, French
historiography, French views of the wider world, social and political
topics, French literature (17th-19th centuries still in preparation),
and philosophical/theological ideas make this source a virtual
encyclopedia. -- SPECIAL NOTE: In many cases, reliable texts of complete
works of
literature (such as the works of Balzac) can be easily downloaded from
this site -- see,
on the "Découverte" screen, the link to "Mode texte."
French 422 Nineteenth-Century French
Literature (Fall 2001).
French 431 Twentieth-Century French
Literature (Fall 2000).
You can send me an E-mail message by clicking herejensenmk@plu.edu,
you can contact me by calling 253-535-7219 during my
office hours (Fall 2008: Wednesday and Friday,
8:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.)
or you can write
to me: Department of Languages
and Literatures, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA 98447.
