Sébastien Côté, Associate Professor in the Department of French, has received a prestigious fellowship from the Centre de la Francophonie des Amériques. As part of this fellowship, Côté will travel to Louisiana to give a series of talks about his research on the written heritage of New France. This includes established literary classics such as the Jesuits Relations, and other unpublished manuscripts or books that have been out of print for centuries.
Founded in 2008 and based in Quebec City, the Centre de la Francophonie des Amériques is an organization that promotes Francophone culture in the Americas, in collaboration with numerous partners.
Côté explained the genesis of his fellowship.
“The idea developed spontaneously during the summer in Montreal, when I met Vincent Bouchard, a colleague and friend of mine who is now teaching at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Since Louisiana also has a French colonial past, the link was obvious to him, and he thought my research might be of interest for many of his colleagues and students. We thought it was worth trying.”
Côté will present three papers during his time at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette – one in English, hosted by the Center for Louisiana Studies, and two in French.
In his first talk, he will discuss the reception of New France writings in Quebec and Canadian literary history, including comparisons with the status of French colonial writings in American literary history (Jesuits in the Great Lakes region, Hennepin, Cavelier de la Salle and Louisiana); this will be a graduate seminar in French.
His second lecture will focus on the forgotten manuscripts and out-of-print works. By editing and making them available to a wider audience (students, for instance), he believes it is possible to bring New France back to life, at least literarily speaking. To illustrate this sometimes painstaking process, Côté will talk about a huge, anonymous, and virtually unknown manuscript he is currently editing, Les lettres canadiennes (1700-1725).
His final presentation scrutinizes the discursive construction of New France, from early travel writings to French fictional works (plays, novels, short stories) from the 18th century, and finally Québécois historic novels from the 19th and 20th century.
With the presentation of his three papers, Côté hopes to forge some new found research relationships.
“The main goals of the Centre de la Francophonie des Amériques are to support initiatives that facilitate rapprochements between individuals and groups, as well as to create exchange programs and partnerships that will lead to projects that are relevant to the Francophonie,” said Côté.
“I hope that my short travel to Louisiana during winter reading week will allow me to meet with students and colleagues who share an interest for French colonial literature in North America, so that we can begin to discuss in Lafayette and pursue afterwards, if we feel that further developments are required. In short, I am really looking forward to being introduced to a whole new network. And who knows, maybe next year the Department of French will host a colleague from Lafayette!”
For many reasons, receiving this fellowship holds a lot of symbolic meaning for Côté.
“Good and bad, there is often a misconception about this period (1534-1763) and the body of works it produced. I think this lukewarm reception in Québec and Canadian literary history is closely linked to European models and, at least for French Canada, the difficulty to accept any kind of colonial status.”
“If the case of New France seems complicated, I was curious about the destiny of French colonial writings in Louisiana. This fellowship recognizes that there is some interest for these subjects. It will also give me the opportunity to see how my ideas resonate in a region that shares some distant, textual memories with French Canada.”
Sébastien Côté Bio
An Associate Professor in the Department of French at Carleton University (Ottawa), Dr Côté first studied French literature and German at Université Laval and Universtät des Saarlandes, then Comparative Literature at Université de Montréal, where he defended a dissertation entitled Discours ethnologique et dissidence chez Carl Einstein et Michel Leiris: autour de la revue DOCUMENTS. While pursuing research on Leiris and the ethnographic discourse in 20th-century French literature, he has progressively shifted toward a new field of inquiry, i.e. the writings of New France, or what he calls the patrimoine lettré de la Nouvelle-France. Since 2008, he has published many articles dealing with this body of works, especially about its institutional reception. In addition, he has edited Paul Lejeune’s Brève relation du voyage de la Nouvelle-France (1632/2011), as well as a collection of essays, Relire le patrimoine lettré de l’Amérique française (with Charles Doutrelepont, PUL, 2013). Among his ongoing projects are the edition of Les lettres canadiennes (1700-1725), an unpublished manuscript, and a comprehensive study of the reception of New France writings in both Québécois and Canadian literary history.