French and Foreign: Émigré Writers in Occupied France
French Department P.O. Box 208251 New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8251
Alice Kaplan
My dissertation explores the wartime experience of Eastern and Central European émigré writers who came to France in the 1910s-1920s and adopted French as their literary language. Well-known authors including Romain Gary, Irène Némirovsky, Eugène Ionesco, and Elsa Triolet, as well as lesser-known figures, among them Arthur Adamov, Benjamin Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca, bear witness to a double displacement: they wrote about immigration and the choice to write in French just as France denied them the right to claim French nationality and identity. Reading their works alongside their correspondence and unpublished diaries, as well as in light of scholarship on transnationalism and multilingualism, reveals a new aspect of literary production in France during the Occupation.
Instructor, Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced French (French 110, 120, 130) Yale University, French Department, Fall 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2013 Teaching Assistant, Jewish Identity and French Culture (French 353, Prof. Maurice Samuels), Yale University, French Department, Fall 2012
“Un Enfant génial: Irène Némirovsky and Jewish Russia as the Irretrievable Origin,” Proceedings of the Conference Russian Émigré Culture: Conservatism or Evolution?, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming “Informations juives (1941-1942) ou les ambiguïtés d’un périodique français/yiddish au début de l’Occupation” Archives Juives, October 2013 Introduction to and translation of Un enfant génial by Irène Némirovsky, Yale French Studies, No. 121, special issue “Irène Némirovsky and Jonathan Littell: Two French Exceptions,” pp. 227-61, Spring 2012
Bourse Chateaubriand, Fox International Fellowship, Yale University, Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies