photographiste

"I felt as if books connected me to the world, to universal human experience. I earned my scientific baccalaureate to reassure my parents, but I then went to preparatoty classes for literacy studies and was delighted to discover that there was such a thing as literary criticism. I wrote a thesis and obtained an Accreditation to Supervise Research (HDR), and my project focused on the mythical figure of Cassandra through the ages - how what was feminine knowledge and a feminine gaze on the world was systematically dismissed, how a pacifist gaze remained silent. A rather considerable proportion of so-called major literature constantly reactivates these types of stereotypes, in which women are objectified, perceived as muses, but neither equals nor creators. In university programmes, either unconsciously, automatically, or through paternalistic or misogynistic reproduction, women's invisility continues to be perpetuated.

I am a comparatist, an open discipline which is based on comparing linguistic and cultural areas, making it possible to go beyond national literatures. What attracted me to this field was the fact that it lies at the interface of different disciplines, in particular cultural history, and also at the heart of literary studies. The literary canon was established primarly by men, which implies the phenomena of the undervaluing and and the ousting of women despite an abundant corpus of authors that we must unearth to make their voices heard. It is important to make students aware of these issues, to be the relayers. Figures of fiction pass through our self-representations and our representations of the world, and this is attested by myths. Gender is a fiction integrated from childhood without our knowledge; what interests me is the awareness raising through deconstruction."

Véronique Léonard-Roques,
Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Western Brittany

next