Cécile Alduy

OVERVIEW:

Within the field of French Renaissance literature, Professor Alduy's research focuses on 16^th-century poetry and the hermeneutics of literary forms in general. Working at the intersection of cultural history and literature, she seeks to pinpoint both how literary works signify differently than other kinds of discourses and how major historical shifts, such as the rise of a French national identity or of modern notions of authorship, are experimented with and advanced within literary texts. In other words, how literature makes history precisely by being literary.

Her latest book, The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the "Amours" in Renaissance France (1549-1560) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), examines how the very form and poetics of French Petrarchan love collections were exploited by the generation of Ronsard and Du Bellay to promote a collective - and nationalist - agenda, that of a "Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue" and its cultural supremacy.

Primarily interested in poetry and poetics, both contemporary and early modern, Professor Alduy has published extensively on theworks of Marot, Scève, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Louise Labé, La Boétie, Montaigne, and Philippe Jaccottet among others. Her publications also include a revised critical edition of Maurice Scève's Délie (Paris: STFM, 2001) and a comprehensive study of all works written by or on Scève from his lifetime to the present (Maurice Scève. Roma: Memini, 2006).

She has served as guest editor of two collected volumes: the first is a special issue of Réforme Humanisme Renaissance entitled "Licences et censures poétiques. La littérature érotique et pornographique vernaculaire à la Renaissance" (vol.69, 2009); the second, co-edited with Roland Greene, collects the proceedings of the 2008 interdisciplinary conference Between Experience and Experiment In The Early Modern World, published in Republic of Letters (2010) along with new essays on the same topic.

Her most recent work tries to expand the traditional field of Renaissance poetics by exploring new areas of inquiry: multi-authored collections as polemical proto-media (The Anatomical Blazons); the intersection between the emerging field of obstetrics, its book market, and the pre-history of obscenity and pornography ("Archeology of a Close-up"); the instability of gender in male and female lyrics ("The Anatomy of Gender");or the economy of poetic production ("Self-Sustainable Economies").

Prof. Alduy is the Director of the Center of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS).

Prof. Alduy writes a blog on Arcade and is a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zyzzyvas, and the San Francisco Chronicle.