Researchers and Research Support
The researchers from the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney working on this project are:
- Dr Elizabeth Rechniewski - Researcher and Team Leader
- Professor Margaret Sankey - Researcher
- Emeritus Professor Angus Martin - Researcher
- Ms Lorraine Ryan - Research Assistant 199? - 2002
The project has received financial support from the University of Sydney.
French Studies, SEAMELS, University of Sydney, 2006, NSW, Australia
Tel: 612 9566 4487
Email: elizabeth.rechniewski@french.usyd.edu.au
Having research qualifications in French literature and civilisation, and in the social sciences in general, I worked in the early 1990s on several University research projects which drew on both the social sciences and literary and discourse analysis to develop the pedagogy of cultural and national identity. An early study of political and right-wing discourse developed into research into discourse analysis of the written media, and increasingly into the presentation and representation of national identity in the print media and in literature. This culminated in an invitation in 1996 to join the international research project: ‘Xénophilie/ xénophobie dans l'espace d’influence franco-australien’ (‘Xenophilia, xenophobia in the French-Australian sphere of influence’), a four year long project studying the representation of France in Australia and Australia in France, coordinated by Professor Peter Cryle, University of Queensland, and Professor Geneviève Zarate, ENS Paris, Fontenay-St-Cloud. The central focus of this project was an examination of the forms of nationalist discourse in a variety of media. The project led to several international conferences and publications. In collaboration with Christine Develotte, I developed new tools of analysis designed in particular to highlight the construction of national identity in the press. I have spoken at conferences both here and in France on my research for this project and have published three articles, including one in the prestigious applied linguistics journal: Mots.
I have recently extended these techniques of analysis to other forms of print media. In 2000 I was the Chief Investigator on the ARC funded (small grant) project: ‘Communications and National Identity in 18th Century France’. In the course of this project a substantial data base of material relating to the growth of the infrastructure and conditions for the development in eighteenth century France of a truly national consciousness was compiled from the Encyclopédie and other sources. A number of papers and publications have resulted from this work, including ‘Being French’, at the ISSEI conference, Aberystwyth, July 2002 (published in conference proceedings, 2002) and ‘Imagining the Nation’ at the ASFS conference, Sydney, September 2002 (submitted for publication in the journal National Identities). An article ‘References to “national character” in the Encyclopédie : the Western European nations’ has been accepted for publication by the journal Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century.
Publications in last ten years
‘References to “national character” in the Encyclopédie : the Western European nations’ accepted for publication by the journal Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2003.
‘Social Representations and Causal Explanations: a Case Study in the Attribution of Blame’, Les Cahiers de l'Arli, journal of the Atelier de Recherche sur le Langage et l'Image, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Cachan, March, 2003.
‘Discourse analysis of newspaper headlines: a methodological framework for research’ with Christine Develotte: Web Journal of French Media Studies, November 2001 (http://www.wjfms.ncl.ac.uk/).
‘Expressions de l'identité nationale dans les titres de journaux : une étude comparative de journaux français et australiens pendant une période de crise’, with Christine Develotte in Malewska-Peyre, H., Tanon F., et Sabatier C (eds), Identité, Altérité, Acculturation. Perspective francophone, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2001, pp. 273-290.
‘Crise ou absence de crise : un effet de discours’, in Mots, 64, December 2000.
‘Change and continuity in Bourdieu's theory of the field of restricted production’ in Rethinking creative processes, F.Grauby & M. Royer (eds) Peter Lang, 2001, pp. 177-191.
‘“They all speak English anyway”: Integrating Languages into the European Studies curriculum’, in Teaching European Studies in Australia: Problems and Prospects, Aleksander Pavkovic and Catherine Welch (ed), Contemporary European Studies Association of Australia, 1999, pp. 63-70.
‘Reinventing ourselves: the Changing Curriculum and the Teaching of French’, in Traditions and Mutations in French Studies, Ph. Lane and John West-Sooby, eds, Boombana Publications, 1997 (joint authorship), pp. 105-134.
‘The Vendée Myth in Contemporary French Politics’, in Europe, retrospects and prospects, proceedings of the 1995 biennial conference of the Australasian Association of European Historians, Southern Highlands Press, 1996. J. Perkins and J. Tampke (eds), pp.185-194.
Antécédents littéraires de la vision existentialiste, Suarès, Malraux et Sartre, Paris, Minard, 1996.
‘The Origins of Engagement’ in Forms of Commitment, Brian Nelson (ed), Monash Romance Studies, 1, 1995, pp. 15-30.
‘Intellectuels et grand public’, in Essays in French Literature, no. 31,1995, pp. 99-111, Nov 1994.
‘Forms of commitment’, Meanjin, Winter, 1993, pp. 59-68.
‘André Suarès et André Malraux: du poète à l’homme d’action. Une étude des Conquérants’, French Studies, vol XLVI, April, 1992, pp. 160-173.
French Studies, SEAMELS, University of Sydney, 2006, NSW, Australia
Tel: 612 9351 6797
Email: margaret.sankey@french.usyd.edu.au
Margaret Sankey has been McCaughey Professor French Studies since 2002 and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, elected in 2002. She has been the Chief Investigator on a number of ARC funded projects and is a member of the editorial boards of the Australian Journal of French Studies and of the Australian Universities Modern Languages Association.
Her research career has been devoted to the study of the history of ideas and mentalités in France with particular reference to the early modern period, specialising in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and focussing on the work of Cyrano de Bergerac and of the abbé Paulmier. This research and her work on terra australis and French expeditions of discovery to Australia has led her to reflect on the French in relation to the non-European Other, themes feeding into those of colonial and national discourse.
In the project on Communications and National Identity she is focussing more particularly on the nexus between philosophical thought and nationhood and to explore the interface between ideas of nationhood and colonial imperialism.
Publications relevant to the project
“L’Abbé Paulmier méconnu: le mythe et l’histoire des Terres australes en France au dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles”, Studies in Eighteenth Century French Fiction in Honour of Angus Martin, ed. Wallace Kirsop, Australian Journal of French Studies, XXXVIII, 1, 2001, pp. 54-68.
“Perceptions of the Aborigines Recorded during the Baudin Expedition: the Dynamics of First Encounter”, Australia in Between Cultures, Specialist Session Papers from the 1998 Australian Academy of the Humanities Symposium, ed. Bruce Bennett, Canberra, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999, pp. 55-76.
“The Baudin Expedition in Port Jackson, 1802: Cultural Encounters and Enlightenment Politics”, Explorations, 31, December 2001, pp. 5-36.
"The Paradoxes of Modernity: Rational Religion et Mythical Science in the Novels of Cyrano de Bergerac", Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Crocker, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London, 2001, p. 41-61.
“Le matérialisme dans L’Autre Monde de Cyrano de Bergerac”, Materia Actuosa: Antiquité, Age classique, Lumières: Mélanges en l’honneur d’Olivier Bloch, eds Anthony McKenna and Alain Mothu, Paris, Champion, ISBN 2-7453-0237-X, 2000, pp. 157-179.
“The Question of authorship in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage dans la lune: a computer-assisted statistical analysis”, with Morna King, The Culture of the Book: Essays from two Hemispheres in Honour of Wallace Kirsop, eds Brian McMullin et al, Melbourne, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, ISBN 095982717-X, 1999, pp.136-147.
“Lire le manuscrit clandestin: L’Autre Monde de Cyrano de Bergerac” in La Philosophie clandestine à l’Age classique, eds. A. McKenna and A. Mothu, Paris, Universitas/Oxford, The Voltaire Foundation, ISBN Fr 1251-5310, ISBN UK 0-2794-0544-3, ISSN Fr 2-7400-0033-2, 1997, pp. 279-291.
L'Autre Monde Ou Les Empires et Estats de la Lune, Édition diplomatique d'un manuscrit inédit, Cyrano de Bergerac, L'Autre Monde Ou Les Empires et Estats de la Lune (Bibliothèque Fisher, University of Sydney, RB Add. Ms. 68), Paris, Lettres Modernes, (Bibliothèque Introuvable 19), 1995, 18cm, XLII-101pp.
“Cyrano de Bergerac: romancier philosophe”, Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe siècle, eds. A. McKenna and P.-F. Moreau, St-Etienne, Presses de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1996, pp. 95-109, 1996
* “Le Voyage initiatique et la représentation de l'experience dans l'Autre monde”, Il senso del nonsenso, Scritti in memoria di Lynn Salkin Sbiroli, eds. Monique Streiff Moretti, Mireille Revol Cappelletti, Odile Martinez, Perugia, Università degli Studi di Perugia, 1994, pp. 47-72.
“Intertextuality and Utopia: the Abbé Paulmier and the Terres australes”, Essays in Honour of Professor Ivan Barko, eds. J. Hatten, G. McAuley, M. Sankey, R. White, Brisbane, Boombana Press, 1994, pp. 165-181.
“Anthropology and Myth: the Antipodean Other in F.-A. Péron's Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes”, Australian Aborigines and the French, ed. M. Blackman, U.N.S.W. Occasional Monographs, no. 3, 1990, pp. 137-149.
“The Baudin Expedition: Natural man and the Imaginary Antipodean”, Proceedings of George Rudé Seminar VI: Two Hundred Years of the French Revolution, ed. by D. Garrioch, Monash, 1989, pp. 149-160.
French Studies, SEAMELS, University of Sydney, 2006, NSW, Australia
Email: angus.martin@french.usyd.edu.au
Angus Martin was McCaughey Professor of French from 1992 to 1999 and is currently an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sydney. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, elected in 1986. Until the end of 2001 he was Chair of the National Scholarly Communications Forum, an organisation devoted to investigating the impact of digital media in academic research. He is currently Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Journal of French Studies.
An investigation of French prose fiction of the eighteenth century has been the major focus of his research over the past forty years. He has been the recipient of a number of ARC large grants over that period, which have resulted in three major books and over forty articles in his specialist area. He sees his most significant contribution to his field as his surveys of French prose fiction 1700-1815 and the analysis of this data. This continuing work, together with a more recent research interest in the overall structures of communication in eighteenth century France, will inform his contribution to the Nation and Communication project.
Publications particularly relevant to the project are:
"Les Textes narratifs", in L'Aube de la modernité, éd. Peter-Eckard Knabe et François Moureau (Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, XVI, série publiée sous les auspices de l'Association internationale de littérature comparée), Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2002, pp. 95-160.
"Les Communications en France au XVIIIe siècle", Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises, no. 54 (mai 2002), 329-346p.
"French Prose Fiction Published Between 1701 and 1750: A New Profile of Production" (with Richard Frautschi), Eighteenth Century Fiction, XIV, 3-4 (April-July 2002), pp. 735-756.
"The Uses of Generic Bibliography: French Prose Fiction in the Age of Napoleon", The Culture of the Book: essays from two hemispheres in honour of Wallace Kirsop, Melbourne, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 1999, pp. 312-322.
"Notes sur les fictions en prose dans la presse cosmopolite au XVIIIe siècle: le Journal britannique, 1750-1757, et le Journal étranger, 1754-1762", Littérature et séduction: mélanges en l'honneur de Laurent Versini, Paris, Klincksieck, 1997, pp. 805-817.
"The Novel as a Print Genre", The Textual Condition: Rhetoric and Editing (Papers of the 1993 ASPACLS conference), eds. M. Blackman, F. Muecke, M. Sankey, Sydney, Local Consumption Publications, 1995, pp. 1-20.
"Le roman européen au XVIIIe siècle et la statistique bibliographique", Dix-huitième siècle, 25, 1993, pp. 101-114.
"French Fiction Titles in the Eighteenth Century: a Computer-Assisted Analysis", Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 304, 1992, pp. 994-998 (Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment, II).
"Fiction and the Female Reading Public in Eighteenth-century France: the Journal des dames (1759-1778)", Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 3,3, April 1991, pp. 241-258.
La Bibliothèque universelle des romans, 1775-1789: présentation, table analytique et index, Oxford, The Voltaire Foundation, 1985, 473p.
Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1751-1800 (in collaboration with Vivienne Mylne and Richard Frautschi), London, Mansell & Paris, France Expansion, 1977.