Events at Reed

Stamos Metzidakis, professor of French and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, has research interests in French and Francophone poetry, prose poetry, literary theory, and North American French history and culture. He is the author of Repetition and Semiotics: Interpreting Prose Poems and Difference Unbound: The Rise of Pluralism in Literature and Criticism, and editor and coauthor of a volume of essays, Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium. Part travelogue, part history, part autobiography, this lecture derives from a forthcoming book, Recollecting French America: A Postmodern Chronology, which examines key moments in the 500 years of French exploration and settlement in North America. Blending fact and fiction, it revisits, oftentimes in lyrical fashion, many of the places and events associated with this continent’s vast and continuing Francophone culture. These include sites not only in Acadie, Québec, and Louisiana, but also in the Upper Great Lakes region, Mississippi, and Missouri River Valleys. Postmodern in style, it questions the objectivity of historiography even while relying heavily on the notion of history itself. Sponsored by the French department.