The MIT Global France Seminar aims to bring together MIT faculty, instructors, and graduate students from across disciplines interested in the study of French and francophone cultures around the world. The seminar series is free and open to the public.
In her talk, Marie-Hélène Huet will examine the origins of the game of the goose and its role in an adventure novel written by Jules Verne in 1900: Le Testament d’un excentrique (The Will of an Eccentric). Marie-Hélène Huet is M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French at Princeton. Professor Huet has written extensively on cultural history, historiography, 18th- and 19th- century literature, and the French Enlightenment. She is the author of L’Histoire des voyages extraordinaires, Essai sur l’oeuvre de Jules Verne (Minard, 1973); Le Héros et son double (Corti, 1975); Rehearsing the Revolution. The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793-1797 (University of California Press, 1982); Monstrous Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993), which was awarded the Harry Levin Prize in Comparative Literature; Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and The Culture of Disaster (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Fall 2012).