Paul Novak, Mariam Moustafa, and Amelia Ahn were part of a team of Fordham College at Lincoln Center students who competed with students from Columbia and New York Universities to tackle influential French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s famous assertion that, Je est un autre (“I [am]somebody else”).

Held at the French Embassy in Manhattan, the annual competition of eloquence challenged students to answer in French the complex question—“Do we experience ourselves as if it belongs to another person?”

“In the working world, public speaking is a vital skill to have, and students learned some valuable lessons about confidence and engagement,” said Hélène Godec, an artist-in-residence of Fordham’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, who helped the students prepare for the competition.

Ahn, in her presentation “The masks that we wear,” argued that when we use social media we’re not actually portraying our true selves. Rather, we are presenting an “other” self.

Ahn said she enjoyed presenting her ideas because it helped to her to become more comfortable speaking in public.

“It was a good learning experience,” she said.

Novak used Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of anti-Semitism and Jewishness to explore the philosophical concept of “alterity,” or otherness, in his presentation.

“The largest point of my piece was about how fear of the unknown and ignorance toward others is what creates ‘the other,’” he said.

He said the competition allowed him to further immerse himself in the French language.

“Hearing native and non-native speakers present their ideas is a great chance to practice listening, conversation, and overall interlingual communication,” he said.

Produced by L’Atelier Theatre Productions, Les Bonnes (The Maids), which runs through March 19, is based on a provocative 1947 play by French dramatist Jean Genet. It follows two sisters working as chambermaids, Solange (Hélène Godec) and Claire (Laura Lassy Townsend), as they plot an uprising against their master madame (Cloé Xhauflaire).

The experimental production, directed by Oliver Henzler, is performed in French with English subtitles created by Fordham College at Lincoln Center students Lucy O’Brien and Mariam Moustafa; and Fordham College at Rose Hill student Ellen Thome.

The students joined the Les Bonnes production team as part of an independent internship with Godec, who teaches courses in French theater and business culture. An accomplished French actress and oral communications expert, Godec runs a weekly atelier in French for Fordham students. Her credits include Dialogues en soliloque, Les nuits de la colère, and Au dessus des chiffons.

Working with Godec on the poetic Les Bonnes, provided a real-world experience in theater and English/French translation, the students said.

“The most challenging part happens as we run the subtitles when the actors change lines or skip a scene,” said Moustafa. “We start running through the PowerPoint [and]it is literally a mini panic attack trying to match the English subtitles with the actress’ lines in the play. But after the show, we laugh at these moments and we make sure to do our best the following show.”

O’Brien said the fast-paced nature of the play also has its perks.

“My translation skills have gotten infinitely better because I had to think on the spot,” she said.

Through the play’s physical movements and the students’ English subtitles, English-speaking theatergoers are able to immerse themselves in the play’s riveting storyline, the actress said.

“You can watch the performance without understanding every spoken word,” said Godec.

“We don’t approach our roles on a psychologically realistic level. I enjoyed exploring my character in a very visceral way.”

Organized by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, the event promotes the French language and allows students to engage in the Jesuit tradition of eloquentia perfecta—in a foreign language.

Before a large audience at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 18 students from Fordham and Columbia University had three minutes each in which to present their responses to the question: “Faut-il être fidèle?” Or, Must One Be Faithful?

The students tackled the question from a variety of angles, considering the importance of fidelity in terms of family, friendships, romantic relationships, politics, religion, and also one’s own ideas and beliefs.

Five distinguished members of New York’s French community judged the competition, including: Alexis Buisson, managing editor of French Morning; Fabrice Jaumont, PhD, education attaché for the French Embassy, Thomas Michelon, deputy cultural counselor for the French Embassy, Isabelle Milkof, PhD, professor of French and theatre at the Lycée Français of New York, and François-Xavier Schmit, founder of Albertine, a French bookstore in the embassy.

Of five winners, three were from Fordham—Victor Rodriguez, Vanessa Zhou, and Isabelle Mohi. The trio took 1^st, 2^nd, and 5^th place, respectively, for their sound and engaging arguments, mastery of French, and the vivid expressiveness of their delivery.

Zhou, a sophomore, and Mohi, a freshman, were enthusiastic about participating. “It was great,” said Mohi. “Writing my response helped me a lot with my French.”

“French is a beautiful, fantastic language,” said Zhou.

Rodriguez, a freshman who is Puerto Rican, captured first prize by speaking passionately about economic inequalities faced by his country.

“I just felt like I had one chance to say something in a different language. I should bring light to the fact that in different languages we can say the same thing about a real plight, and no matter what person is hearing it in whatever language, you can really identify,” Rodriguez said.

Prizes for the winners included cash gifts, a year’s subscription to the French Institute Alliance Français (FI:AF), and gift certificates.

While the public speaking task would be a difficult one in English, all the competitors executed it after just four semesters of French study—a core requirement for all Fordham students.

Andrew Clark, PhD, professor of French & Comparative Literature and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, inaugurated the Prix d’éloquence in 2015 to give students invaluable experience in bringing their French skills into the real world.

“When you’re in a classroom, your interaction with the language is kind of artificial in a certain respect,” he said. “You respond to certain questions, you read certain texts.

“To see people laughing, responding, interacting with what they’re saying gives the students a sense of the life of the language beyond them.”

Other sponsors of the event included the Deans of Fordham College, the French Embassy in the United States, French Morning, FI:AF, Albertine, Almondine Bakery, and Sorteer.com.

–Nina Heidig

The grant will allow Lise Schreier, PhD, an associate professor of French, to devote the 2016-17 academic year to completing research on her forthcoming book, The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

“A grant such as this is significant for the Department of Modern Languages and Literature because it makes us visible as strong researchers,” said Schreier, whose specializations include 19th-century French literature, French colonialism, and race and racism.

“We are a research-oriented department with a variety of courses. Teaching language is a pathway to understanding various cultures.”

Schreier, a native of Saint-Étienne, France, is studying the 18th-century phenomenon of child-gifting, the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Senegal, Algeria, India, and the Ottoman Empire as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories for upper-class French women.

Archival material about child-gifting is scant, and few scholars have undertaken research on the practice. Schreier’s own investigation has required some creative thinking as she shifted from letters to literature to artwork searching for clues of these children’s existence.

Some evidence came from mentions of the children in letters between wealthy French women. “Other information comes up in places like letters to tailors, which shows how these children were dressed, where they lived in the castles, how much money was spent on them,” she said.

Schreier is also interested in later references to child-gifting that appear in books assigned to French schoolchildren, which often involved a young character who was given a dark-skinned child as a gift. She argues that even after the abolition of slavery in France, when the actual practice of child-gifting ended, these stories served to inculcate colonial ideals in young French citizens.

The message of the books, Schreier said, was that “the French had to raise their children in such a way as to make them good, strong colonial citizens. This started in schools—particularly with girls, who were used to reading books about dolls, reading how to interact with a doll, raise a doll, educate a doll.

“These young readers, already used to being responsible for a doll, would be given a book in which an African boy was gifted to a French child in place of a doll. The inference they were expected to make was that it was normal to take care of a black child, just like a doll. When they’re older, it was hoped, they’d already be used to thinking of colonial subjects as their responsibility.”

This also points to the significant role that women played in advancing French colonialism, Schreier contends.

“From paintings of Old Regime noblewomen adorned with flattering attestations to their wealth, to 1870s moralistic novels featuring women advancing the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ with the loyal help of their dark-skinned charges, the child-gift motif articulated evolving models of femininity in a trans-national France,” she wrote in the grant narrative.

The NEH is an independent federal agency created as a result of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Of the more than 1,200 applications each year, less than 7 percent of applicants receive one of the coveted grants.

The population of France is 60 million. The world population of French speakers, on the other hand, is roughly 260 million. So when studying the history of the French language, it behooves one to spread a net much wider than France itself.

Lise Schreier, Ph.D., associate professor of French, knows this well. Schreier’s research into the history of colonialism focuses on France, but also on Haiti, a country that financially supported a third of France’s population before it won its independence in 1804. The complex ties between the two countries are not widely understood, she said.

“This relationship was not taught in France, and it was not taught in the States, and I realized there was this huge part of French studies that is still being erased,” she said. “Once I realized this, it helped me to understand what I had to do next.”

Schreier believes that integral to the study of a nation’s language is the nation’s history as well. Her compass for what direction to take her research is the classroom, and, in the case of Haiti, the result was “Francophone Caribbean Literature,” a class she developed and taught last year in response to the 2010 earthquake.

“Whatever I do, I also want to use and discuss in class,” said Schreier. “It is important to not limit ourselves to a pretty image of France, and sometimes that’s what students arrive with.

“Of course it’s really interesting to study French, but there’s also a very complex history that they need to be aware of.”

Her current research, for a book tentatively titled The Playthings of Empire: Exoticized Children and the Politics of French Femininity, 1780-1895, explores one of the ugliest aspects of French history: The custom of offering African children as travel souvenirs to French women.

It was a practice that started in the 15th and 16th centuries and became much more common in the 17th century. By the 19th century, it had ended, but it lived on as fiction, with an important twist. In 1879, required reading in many French schools described how African children were offered up as gifts to French children, not grown women. The idea was that, to become fully realized adults, the children needed a “toy” to practice with.

“This practice was real before the ‘glorious days’ of French colonialism, and then it disappeared,” said Schreier. “But then it came back as a fictional narrative in schools. So tens of thousands and of French children read these books and were taught that what they should do is teach African children to become ‘civilized.’ Even when they became adults, several generations of French people considered all Africans as children.”

Finding examples of the texts that detail both the original practice, and the later fictionalized one, required a great deal of detective work. In addition to archives, she found source material at flea markets and in the attics of private homes. (“You might find one line in one letter, saying ‘Yes, I have one of those children,’” she said.)

Schreier actually discovered one image for the book after she was done with her research. The painting, of a woman with a dark-skinned child, was hanging in a castle two hours outside of Paris that she was visiting while on vacation.

“It gave me an entirely new direction because I knew that this woman had had one of these children, and I could look at her correspondence, and continue building my list,” she said.

This project follows her first book, Seul dans l’Orient lointain. Les voyages de Nerval et Du Camp, (Pub. de l’Université de St. Etienne, 2006), which, in English, translates as Alone in the Orient (Nerval and Du Camp’s travels). In that tome, she explored a curious 19th century phenomenon: Most French authors at the time traveled to places like Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, and although they were most often accompanied by others, they systematically claimed to have traveled alone.

The writer Lamartine was a good example. While he claims in his writings to have bravely traveled alone to Jerusalem, his cook was writing letters back home about how Lamartine was seasick, tyrannical with his entourage, and generally making life difficult for his retinue of helpers. Lamartine’s wife and only child also accompanied him on the trip (the couple’s child died during the journey, a catastrophe not mentioned in the travelogue).

Schreier surmises that, at that time, the Middle East and Africa were viewed as spaces where young French artists could come of age, but for that to manifest itself, the artists had to be on their own.

Once again, research took Schreier to unexpected places, because much of her sourcing relied on private papers.

“That book was one of those cases where you literally have to go to the head librarian, knowing what type of wine she likes, and then go to her house and put the bottle on her table. You see the piles of letters on her desk, and you know that you have to talk your way through, to get your chance to see them. That takes a lot of convincing,” she said.

What kind of wine did the librarian like?

“It was a very good Bordeaux. I spent a lot of money on that, but it worked,” she said.

Tiercelin joined the Fordham philosophy faculty this year and will spend one semester on campus each of the next two academic years. She has been a professor at the University of Paris XII in Créteil, France, since 1996. Tiercelin is the author of numerous articles and books, including Le Doute en Question: Parades Pragmatistes au Défi Sceptique (Editions de l’Eclat, 2005), Hilary Putnam, l’Heritage Pragmatiste (Presses Universitaires de France, 2002) and C.S. Peirce et le Pragmatisme (Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).

The majority of institute’s members are in the scientific fields, and each year it appoints five French scholars as senior members. Tiercelin is only one of six philosophers in active membership in the organization, which was established in 1991.