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CONTACT INFORMATION PAULINE DE THOLOZANY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES STRODE TOWER 512 CLEMSON UNIVERSITY CLEMSON, SC 29634 [email protected] |
My name is Pauline de Tholozany and I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages at Clemson University. I specialize in 19th-century French literature. Before coming to Clemson, I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wellesley College; I have also worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Gettysburg College and Bryn Mawr College.
I received my Ph.D. from Brown University in 2011. My first book, L'école de la maladresse: de J.-J. Rousseau à J.J. Grandville, has been published by Honoré Champion in 2017. The book is a history of clumsiness. I wrote it because I was intrigued by our ambiguous attitude towards clumsiness: on the one hand, we read it as a sign of ingenuity and originality (think about romantic comedies, for instance). But on the other hand, pharmaceutical companies advertise for pills said to reduce “social anxiety disorders”… So despite the glamorized version of clumsiness that Hollywood promotes, we face a very real social pressure to not be awkward, clumsy, or shy. My book looks at the history of that ambiguous attitude -- it can be traced to the 18th and 19th centuries. This website describes my teaching practice more than my scholarship, but if you are interested in clumsiness, the book is available here. What we do when we teachI have taught at institutions that are very different from each other: some are coeducational institutions while others are women’s colleges. Some are Liberal Arts Colleges, and others are big universities. All of them are private except for Clemson, a South Carolina public institution. These many changes of setting have been challenging and enriching at every step of the way. For instance, at Wellesley, I took advantage of the Book Arts Lab and the Book Studies training offered to faculty. In my Fictions of Childhood class, we printed a "Keep Calm and Manipulate Emile" poster with a Vandercook Press (image on the left).
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In my First Year Seminar on adventure, we bound our collective adventure novel in the Book Arts Lab. These types of projects give students an idea of what the printing and making of a book might have entailed in the 18th and 19th centuries. At Clemson, I have designed a session on book studies and the history of illustration during which I bring my own books and prints to class, put students in groups, and give each group a questionnaire about the materials on the table (see image on the right) -- we learn about lithographs, etchings, text and image relationship. Such projects help students shape their own thoughts not only about the past but also about the immediacy of our means of communication today. For that reason, I like to incorporate creative assignments to my classes (such as the roman photo reproduced above) : these types of projects help with language skills and they also help students to be more deliberate about how they communicate their ideas.
Clemson has been particularly formative for me, because I had to re-think a lot of things that I had taken for granted before. One of those things was my freedom of speech and that of my students. I had also not thought enough about why students should be interested in Literature: I found that some students might look at Literature like it is a foreign object, one that gets intellectualized by "experts" but that is not theirs because it is divorced from their reality. This made the question "why do we read?" urgent. Like Rancière's Ignorant schoolmaster, I believe in universal intelligence. I was disheartened to see that some students may feel disempowered in front of a literary text, that perhaps they thought I was asking too much. I had to think about how to ask differently. I spent a year revising my teaching. For instance: how do I interest students in the History of the book and of printing techniques? How do I make it relevant to them, here and now?
I have learned to rely more on creative projects in order to make students curious about how they would represent a given issue or topic. Making a creative project wakes the students' interest for how others may have done it in the past. They are then more likely to enjoy a session on the history of the book. They are also more likely to think critically about any given issue if they have had to represent it with their own words, visuals, or audios beforehand. Clemson has recently opened a Digital Studio that trains and supports students working with Adobe Creative Cloud. I have myself taken part in trainings there, and I hope to design more assignments that make use of the studio and software in the near future.
I am tremendously proud of our achievements as a learning community, to borrow bell hook's phrase. Over the years at Clemson, I have had students present their work on Sarrasine and Ourika at a professional conference; I have had students create podcast episodes on Feminism; I have assisted students in becoming moderators on campus-wide panels on white supremacy, underrepresented communities, and more recently on trauma-informed practices. Most importantly, I have seen them embrace critical thinking and make texts their own.
There is one constant in every class, no matter where one is and what one teaches, and that is the students’ intelligence. Depending on teachers, settings, contexts, or disciplines taught, the ways to make that intelligence flourish vary. But it is there, always. Today, more than before, teaching is the ground on which I grow my intellectual practice. By this I mean not only my scholarship, but also the ways in which I see myself as part of a community of thinkers and activists. I have the Clemson students to thank for this.
Clemson has been particularly formative for me, because I had to re-think a lot of things that I had taken for granted before. One of those things was my freedom of speech and that of my students. I had also not thought enough about why students should be interested in Literature: I found that some students might look at Literature like it is a foreign object, one that gets intellectualized by "experts" but that is not theirs because it is divorced from their reality. This made the question "why do we read?" urgent. Like Rancière's Ignorant schoolmaster, I believe in universal intelligence. I was disheartened to see that some students may feel disempowered in front of a literary text, that perhaps they thought I was asking too much. I had to think about how to ask differently. I spent a year revising my teaching. For instance: how do I interest students in the History of the book and of printing techniques? How do I make it relevant to them, here and now?
I have learned to rely more on creative projects in order to make students curious about how they would represent a given issue or topic. Making a creative project wakes the students' interest for how others may have done it in the past. They are then more likely to enjoy a session on the history of the book. They are also more likely to think critically about any given issue if they have had to represent it with their own words, visuals, or audios beforehand. Clemson has recently opened a Digital Studio that trains and supports students working with Adobe Creative Cloud. I have myself taken part in trainings there, and I hope to design more assignments that make use of the studio and software in the near future.
I am tremendously proud of our achievements as a learning community, to borrow bell hook's phrase. Over the years at Clemson, I have had students present their work on Sarrasine and Ourika at a professional conference; I have had students create podcast episodes on Feminism; I have assisted students in becoming moderators on campus-wide panels on white supremacy, underrepresented communities, and more recently on trauma-informed practices. Most importantly, I have seen them embrace critical thinking and make texts their own.
There is one constant in every class, no matter where one is and what one teaches, and that is the students’ intelligence. Depending on teachers, settings, contexts, or disciplines taught, the ways to make that intelligence flourish vary. But it is there, always. Today, more than before, teaching is the ground on which I grow my intellectual practice. By this I mean not only my scholarship, but also the ways in which I see myself as part of a community of thinkers and activists. I have the Clemson students to thank for this.
Teaching at Clemson
That brings me to the photograph that illustrates the front page of this website. I took it during a week that changed my intellectual practice and the ways in which I view myself as a teacher and as a member of an intellectual community.
The students you see on this image were on those steps for many reasons. It was April of 2016. A week before, some people had hung bananas on a sign commemorating African-American labor in the construction of Clemson. We received an email from our president; the email stated that “a sign was defaced”. The word racism did not appear in his message. I did not know of the incident, and so I did not know what to make of it. I remember thinking: did someone draw a Mickey Mouse on a stop sign? I wondered why we were receiving an email about a defaced sign… Later on, when students made the details of the defacement public on social media, a series of discussions were organized by the administration; but the students felt that they failed to address their concerns. So they decided to organize a sit-in.
The students you see on this image were on those steps for many reasons. It was April of 2016. A week before, some people had hung bananas on a sign commemorating African-American labor in the construction of Clemson. We received an email from our president; the email stated that “a sign was defaced”. The word racism did not appear in his message. I did not know of the incident, and so I did not know what to make of it. I remember thinking: did someone draw a Mickey Mouse on a stop sign? I wondered why we were receiving an email about a defaced sign… Later on, when students made the details of the defacement public on social media, a series of discussions were organized by the administration; but the students felt that they failed to address their concerns. So they decided to organize a sit-in.
At first, there were maybe 20 people outside of that building. Then, a bit more came. Then 5 of those students refused to leave the building at night and they were arrested for trespassing. So more people came to show solidarity. And what we had, on those steps, was a lively, active, and intelligent community. I saw students drafting a list of demands – and there were maybe 80-100 people writing that list collectively, with no microphone. As they settled on the steps of the building, camping outside at night, they organized material things (recycling, composting, safety measures, water supplies, food supplies). They created a Library. They had a dance lesson session. They organized tutoring hours. They had dance shows and poetry boards. Some faculty members came to teach on those steps.
I realized that I had thought of teaching as a practice that hopefully enriched the students, but that I had insufficiently questioned my role as a teacher, one whose role is to accompany the students in their intellectual endeavors, including in those endeavors that are not restricted to the classroom, a given paper, or a predetermined learning outcome. Being a teacher means to support my students and make sure that they are in a position to speak.
On the second week, towards the end of the sit-in, someone in the administration called the students “impatient”. And I had two thoughts: the first was that I might have thought of “patient” as a better adjective to qualify those students. We had, after all, been on those steps for a long time, and what they were protesting about had also lasted for way too long. The second thought came right after that first one: why am I so quick to claim that the students are patient? Why am I accepting so quickly that one compliments someone for their patience, but never for their impatience? What if those words and the moral dichotomy that they imply are in fact tools used by those that want to either resist change or keep their power in place? As I was wondering about impatience, on those steps, I started taking notes. I talked about it with multiple friends, colleagues and students. Three years later, I am working on a book-long project on impatience.
I realized that I had thought of teaching as a practice that hopefully enriched the students, but that I had insufficiently questioned my role as a teacher, one whose role is to accompany the students in their intellectual endeavors, including in those endeavors that are not restricted to the classroom, a given paper, or a predetermined learning outcome. Being a teacher means to support my students and make sure that they are in a position to speak.
On the second week, towards the end of the sit-in, someone in the administration called the students “impatient”. And I had two thoughts: the first was that I might have thought of “patient” as a better adjective to qualify those students. We had, after all, been on those steps for a long time, and what they were protesting about had also lasted for way too long. The second thought came right after that first one: why am I so quick to claim that the students are patient? Why am I accepting so quickly that one compliments someone for their patience, but never for their impatience? What if those words and the moral dichotomy that they imply are in fact tools used by those that want to either resist change or keep their power in place? As I was wondering about impatience, on those steps, I started taking notes. I talked about it with multiple friends, colleagues and students. Three years later, I am working on a book-long project on impatience.
Again, a bit like in the clumsiness project, I am realizing that a lot of our negative views about impatience are linked to historical developments that took place in the 18th and 19th century; I think that we need a history of impatience, so that we can understand how the word is made to contribute to forms of oppression. That project directly stemmed from what I saw and heard and discussed on the steps of Sikes Hall in 2016. So although this website is dedicated to my teaching, I want to point out that the best teachers on the Clemson campus are without a doubt the Clemson students. I am grateful to Clemson for the opportunity I was given to be part of such a courageous, determined, and intelligent community. Thank you for teaching us, Clemson students.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, or if you would like to look at more material. I look forward to hearing from you!
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, or if you would like to look at more material. I look forward to hearing from you!