Blog

Les Misérables

Charles Walton’s review of the new film version of Les Misérables echoes my own disappointment with it:

Victor Hugo was no Karl Marx, but he did believe in progress through revolution — a fact that viewres of Tom Hooper’s new film Les Misérables, would never guess.  Adapted from the immensely popular musical version of Hugo’s classic (first performed in Paris in 1980), Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one.  It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.

I think this may actually give the film a bit too much credit. Sitting in the theater with a group of students, I couldn’t help think what a missed opportunity the film was as I considered another recent book adaptation: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.  In a way, the two mirror one another.  While the original version of The Hobbit is a plot-driven children’s novel of about two-hundred pages, the film, once complete, will be an epic exposition of an entire mythology over the course of about six hours.  The original version of Les Misérables, on the other hand, is a 1,500 page meandering rumination on the relationship between progress and revolution (among other things), while the film is a two and a half hour love story that overshadows, rather than works through, its major social themes.  Indeed, while the film puts on display the social miseries of early nineteenth-century France, it only does so in order to maneuver the audience back to the individual characters as exemplary, rather than normative, representations of those problems. Social discontent propels individual characters towards their various ends — for better or worse — but fails to justify, or even represent, the revolutionary impulse as a social phenomenon.

In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, we get the themes without the crisp plot, in Les Miserables we get the plot without the themes.

The French Intervention in Mali in Context

Historian of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century France, David Bell, puts the French intervention in Mali into its historical and contemporary political contexts:

It remains to be seen whether France’s military intervention in Mali will be considered a military success, but it already seems possible to count it a political one. The war has earned support from across the French political spectrum, President François Hollande has garnered acclaim for his leadership, and the French public broadly supports the country’s stated humanitarian mission. The intervention recalls the days when “la grande nation” laid claim to an ambitious international role, particularly within its former colonial empire.

But in today’s France, this portrait of unity and resolve is actually something of an aberration. Far from expressing a confident sense of mission, the French public has recently been more inclined to a sense of decline, malaise, paralysis and crisis. And it is at least partially justified.

Via Arthur Goldhammer.

New Courses

I’m rapidly gearing up for another semester and have prepped new versions of my syllabi for survey courses on Modern Europe and Modern France, as well as a new course on “Sex and the City.” The new sites for these courses have just been put up and can be accessed under “Teaching” above. These websites will remain mostly static. Although I am trying out some new kinds of assignments this semester, I am not having students in these courses use digital tools as I have in the past, primarily because doing so requires a level of individual attention and constant grading not amenable to a semester where I’m teaching three survey courses. Once I’m back to seminars, I plan on trying out new things with blogs and wikipedia especially. In any case, I hope the materials I make available through these websites will be useful to other students and instructors.

Blogging Interwar Europe

I may not be blogging at the moment, but some of my students are.

History of Sexuality Lecture

I just delivered a guest lecture/seminar to a class called “Body Politics.”  It was essentially an introduction to the history of sexuality, Foucault, and early sexology with an eye towards the week’s reading by Joanne Meyerowitz from her fantastic book, How Sex Changed.  The powerpoint for the lecture can now be accessed for students and other interested parties.

Teaching Carnival

Profhacker is hosting a new teaching carnival, with useful links for teachers and students alike.

Productivity Tools

Two of my favorite digital humanities blogs, Profhacker and Gradhacker, are collaborating on a series of posts highlighting strategies and tools for using technology smartly.  I highly recommend that my students take a look as they begin work on their research projects.

Half of Recent College Graduates Can’t Find Full Time Jobs

In the course of my morning blog and news reading, I come across this devastating fact via Ezra Klein.  Half of recent college graduates can’t find full time jobs.  This is a major failure at many different levels of government and higher education, puts what scan only be deemed a student loan crisis in perspective, and will have major ramifications far into the future.

Images of Urban Space via Gallica

Although Google Books continues to improve as a research source, I continue to believe that the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica, is easier to search and use for those interested in French language sources.  The two most recent posts on the Gallica blog piqued my interest.  First up is a list of the fifty most-downloaded documents.  The list includes a number of notable names, but is otherwise most surprising for its eclecticism.  The second post introduces readers to a newly digitized collection of images documenting Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century.  I’ve only gone through a few pages of them, but they are too most notable for their very banality.  Here’s one example, not chosen at random:

34 quai de l
34 quai de l’hotel de Ville : [dessin] / JA Chauvet [Jules-Adolphe Chauvet]
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France

I came across this particular image by searching within the collection for the “Quai de l’hôtel de ville,” a street as the name implies that progresses along the river and forms one border of the Place de l’hôtel de ville.  This specific street has stuck with me since my archival research because it was one of the few locations noted by the police has being the site of bars and cafés catering to men who sought sex with other men during the 1880s and 1890s.  There is little in the image itself to suggest male-male eroticism, unless we stretch ourselves a bit and imagine that the two figures to the left are pressing together — certainly not an impossibility, however unlikely.

But I do get a bit of pleasure knowing that this kind of ordinary socializing was precisely what one would most likely have encountered had you entered one of the cafés whose clientele consisted of men who sought sex with other men.  The police frequently noted how the men who went to these locations utilized various techniques — playing cards was mentioned a couple times — to deflect away any accusation that their intensions were anything other than honest male sociability.  In other words, although there is nothing explicitly in the image to suggest that the men it depicts were anything but upstanding citizens, there’s also nothing to suggest that they necessarily were.  Some would perhaps argue that I’m seeking out ambiguity where there isn’t any.  I would respond by arguing that to understand the urban spaces of the late nineteenth century as anything but ambiguous is to fundamentally misconstrue the meaning of the transforming city.

Some Digital Humanities Links

— The Chronicle of Higher Education describes a new effort to map archival materials online.  Mostly for Americanists at the moment, it seems.

— AcademiPad lists 30 online resources for academic life, writing, and technology.

— ProfHacker announces the Digital Humanities Winter Institute.  I almost went this year to the summer event, but for a variety of reasons decided against.  Maybe see you in Maryland this winter?