What French Women Dada Writers in the Resistance Have to Tell Us: An intern's journey
When Emily Wieder enrolled at IFE Strasbourg and accepted an internship at the National University Library (BNU), she had no idea she would run across Dada art and find a calling. “It all started during my time in Strasbourg. The history and the art was all there. The city really was my classroom.”
Emily Wieder was a junior French and History major at Elizabethtown College when she enrolled at IFE Strasbourg and undertook an internship at the National University Library (BNU) at the University of Strasbourg, where her tasks included organizing collections left to the Library. Emily soon discovered she loved the work, loved literary research, and so after completing a research project on “Reading from Poe to Apollinaire via Baudelaire”, she found funding for summer research to stay immersed in 20th-century French literature. “I was curious about the relationship between some artists and poets that I had come across while writing my IFE independent research project...Back on campus while writing my honors thesis, my advisor pointed out that I could get paid to do that kind of work as a graduate student and, eventually, a professor. That option would not have crossed my mind if I had not gone abroad!”
Emily's course was now set, and she is currently an ABD student in French Literature at the University of Iowa, whose “awesome Dada Archive” has become her second home. “My doctoral work is very much an outgrowth of my time at the BNU. I have refined my topic, but my basic interest in women surrealists stems from that semester.” More specifically, Emily is becoming a specialist in women literary surrealists who actively resisted the Nazis during World War II. “I show that the force of [their] resistance is in the way their language so subversively and satirically exposes the shortcomings of the fascist regime.”.
Her research has already taken Emily to France again to explore various archives, including the Jacques Doucet Library (where several IFE students have served as interns), which houses the letters of Réne Char including those to his companion Greta Knutsen, a Dada artist and active resistant. Knutsen figures importantly in Emily's research, and the trail then took her recently to Princeton where Knutsen's letters to Char are archived and where at length she dug up Knutsen's code name in one of the letters, a discovery which, as Emily says “is going to unlock so much more information”.
As Emily explains, “the implication for this project is to demonstrate just how easily language constructs ideas about what’s normal (like stigmatizing a group of people) and how easily language can deconstruct those malicious stories (like showing how unjust the Nazi regime was). Words do matter. The 1940s give us a good road map for thinking critically about information, caring for others, and maintaining integrity. We always can use those reminders.”
One of the unexpected benefits of her recent sojourn in Paris was a chance to participate in a colloquium sponsored by APUAF (the association of study abroad programs in France) on language acquisition. In her telling, Emily was excited to have a chance to “ talk specifically about teaching French with other professors...hearing about strategies that work for fostering engagement was incredible!”
Watch this space for stories from French and Spanish doctoral students – IFE alums – about the place of language pedagogy (or not) in their training, including more on that from Emily.