Peking University, May 7, 2019: Jacques Neefs, a prominent French scholar and a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, visited the Department of French Language and Literature, School of Foreign Languages at Peking University from April 17to 20. During his visit, Neefs delivered two lectures and talked to professors and students of the department.

The lecture scene

On April 18, Neefs gave a lecture titled “Flaubert: The Art of the Modern Fiction”, in which Neefs focused on Flaubert’s works such as Madame Bovary and Bouvard et Pécuchet. He argued that in these works, Flaubert revolutionized the art of fictions by pushing the fictional elements in prose to the extreme. Flaubert’s novels, according to Neefs, explore the society, the daily life, the desires embedded in the human nature, as well as the relationship between human, knowledge, and faith. After Flaubert, French novels gained a new aesthetic value, echoing the new aesthetic initiated by Courbet, Manet, and Cézanne in the field of arts. At the end of the lecture, Neefs gave the Department of French Language and Literature some valuable materials as presents, including a latest issue of Europe, an important journal for which he serves an editor.

On April 19, Neefs delivered the second lecture during his visit. In this lecture, titled “The Birth of Works: Manuscript Studies, from Ideas to Works”, Neefs introduced different ways in which literary works are created. He used the manuscripts from Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Perec, and Beckett as examples to introduce the Genetic Criticism, an approach to literature formed in the 1970s.

Besides giving lectures, Neefs met postgraduates of the Department of French Language and Literature and answered their questions. He also had discussions with the faculty members of the department.

Jacques Neefs has recently been selected for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This was the first time he participated in an academic event after he was elected to the academy. As a leading scholar in Flaubert studies, he is currently editing a new edition of the complete works of Flaubert (Œuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert) for the series of Pleiades Library (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) at the Éditions Gallimard. Neefs is the former vice president of University of Paris 8, responsible for humanities studies and international cooperation. At Johns Hopkins University, he was the Louis Marin Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures from 1996 to 2006, and was named professor emeritus on July 1, 2018.

Neefs had a long connection with China. In the late 1980s, he was in charge of organizing the predoctoral class for French literature, co-hosted by Université Paris 8 and Wuhan University. Since many of French literature scholars in China are alumni of that class, Neefs is called “the teacher of teachers, the professor of professors”, said Professor Dong Qiang, dean of the Department of French Language and Literature.

Written by: Fan Kaixin
Edited by: Ma Yaoli
Source: PKU News (Chinese)