In Memoriam: Dr. Pascale Casanova

Pascale Casanova

The Department of Romance Studies mourns the passing of Pascale Casanova at age 59 in September in Paris, following a long and debilitating illness. Casanova was a Researcher at the CNRS; Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage. Her fields were literary sociology and 20th-century French culture. Although she had published a first book on Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Revolutionary, she was best known for three of her later publications and especially for the popular and highly regarded radio shows she presented on France Culture for over fifteen years: L’atelier littéraire and then the Mardis littéraires, on which she hosted pretty much all of the most interesting authors of this period. She was a student of Pierre Bourdieu, and considered the implications of his sociologically-oriented thinking about France and Frenchness as they applied more inclusively to the concrete theories and practices of literature, examining the worlds of publication across the globe.

Her major contribution, La République mondiale des lettres, was reviewed by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books Sept. 23, 2004 when it came out in translation. His words capture well the originality and ambition of her project:

“Here the national bounds of Bourdieu's work have been decisively broken, in a project that uses his concepts of symbolic capital and the cultural field to construct a model of the global inequalities of power between different national literatures, and the gamut of strategies that writers in languages at the periphery  of the system of legitimation have used to try to win a place at  the centre. Nothing like this has been attempted before. The  geographical range of Casanova's materials, from Madagascar to  Romania, Brazil to Switzerland, Croatia to Algeria; the clarity and  trenchancy of the map of unequal relations she offers; and, not  least, the generosity with which the dilemmas and ruses of the disadvantaged are explored, make her book kindred to the French  élan behind the World Social Forum. It might be called a literary Porto Alegre.”

Professors Alice Kaplan, Fred Jameson, and Michèle Longino sought to bring Pascale Casanova to Duke University beginning in 2007. She visited for ten days in February 2008, giving a talk from her book La République mondiale des lettres, and meeting with many faculty and students during her short stay. The university then offered her a visiting appointment, beginning in 2010, renewable upon mutual agreement.  Alas, she was able to come for only a short time, since her health was already failing. She came in Fall 2010 for one semester, and during this semester gave a lecture on her then forthcoming book, Kafka en colère, which came out in 2011. She gave a reading from that book at Duke University in December 2011. Her final book came out in 2015, La Langue mondiale, on translation. Alas, by then her health had seriously deteriorated and she no longer traveled. Her presence in the World Republic of Letters will be sorely missed, especially by those who had the great pleasure of knowing and working with her. She was formally a member of the Duke University Romance Studies Department between 9/1/2011 and 8/31/2014. We looked forward to many years of close association and collaboration with Casanova, and regret her untimely death.

 

A list of her books, all available at Perkins Library:

La Langue mondiale: traduction et domination

Editions du Seuil, 2015

 

Kafka en colère: essai

Seuil, 2011

Trans.

Kafka, angry poet

Seagull Books, 2015

 

La République mondiale des lettres

Seuil,1999

Trans.

The World Republic of Letters

Harvard UP 2004

 

Beckett l’abstracteur: anatomie d’une revolution littéraire

Paris: Seuil, 1997

Trans.

Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution

Verso, 2006