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Man as a Speaking Machine and the Teaching of Speech: The Stakes of Articulation in Eighteenth-century France

A lecture by Sabine Arnaud (Centre Alexandre Koyré, EHESS)

Date: Wednesday 3 May, 6:30-8 pm
Venue: French Institute in Prague, 5th floor, Štěpánská 35, Prague 1
Language: English

Abstract

The fascination for the invention of a speaking machine lay at the intersection of two important topics for the eighteenth century: articulation as a sign of civilization, and the polemic of man as machine. As the teaching of speech for so-called “deaf and mute” pupils developed, some saw the machine as that which would complete the work of nature and provide mankind with new means of communication. Others went so far as to present the machine as a model that could teach articulation and the workings of the human voice. As such, the speaking machine represented, on the one hand, a source of enchantment and awe: if machines could speak, could language still be considered an exclusively human characteristic? On the other hand, if articulation was mechanical, what distinguished humans from animals? My paper will analyze how eighteenth-century French philosophers, engineers, men of letters, and pedagogues mused upon language acquisition and articulated the relationship between body, machine, and language in relation to their ideas about humanity as such.

Illustration: Poster of Abbé Mical’s Talking Heads (Têtes parlantes)

 

Laure Teulières : Foreigners from Here

Lecture by Laure Teulières on “Foreigners from Here: Migrants and Migrations in France through Films from Toulouse Cinematheque

When: Wednesday 26 April, 6:30-8 pm
Venue: French Institute in Prague (5th floor), Štěpánská 35, Prague 1
Language: French

An invitation to review a part of the history of immigration in France through a commented screening. The Toulouse Cinematheque, one of the main film archives in France, has led innovative research on migrants and migrations thanks to its collections. “Foreigners from Here” (as a book and as a program) is a way to share our findings with the public. Rather than quoting excerpts of famous films, the lecture will highlight rarely screened documents: some fiction, others news reports, institutional or activist fims, as well as family films.

Check Laure Teulières’s program in Warsaw and Prague in the frame of CEFRES Visegrad Forum on our calendar.

Around the migrations of the 20th century – prospects from the two sides of the Channel

When and where: 27 April 2017, 2:00 – 7:00 pm, Hybernská 3, room 303
Languages: English & French
Organizers: Luďa Klusáková and Jaroslav Ira (Institute of World History, FF UK)

Invited speakers

Laure Teulières (FRAMESPA, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès): Representations of the foreigner in France after the First World War

Abstract
After the First World War, France experienced an unprecedented wave of immigrants and the topic appeared in numerous public discourses (press, studies and essays, public reports, political declarations, etc.). In order to understand the operating representations at the time, that were confronted by such a phenomenon, one needs to understand a set of complex cultural references and cross them with different scales of analysis. This presentation aims to discuss the typological approach and to seize the social and cultural framework that explains them. The regional dimension being one of the parameters to be taken into account, the French South West region will therefore be mentioned in particular. The foreigner, thus, is not just he or she with a different nationality or ethnic group – moreover differently perceived depending on reputations and customary stereotypes. One must also take into account the distinctions that are not regularly mentioned: between townsfolk and farmers, sedentary or itinerant, isolated or in a family … A diachronic perspective that stretches on till the Second World War which allows to better distinguish within this domain what has more to do with permanence and circumstance.

Simon Gunn (Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester): From Workers to Communities: Migration and the Politics of Ethnicity in Bradford, England, c.1945-1980

Abstract
In the two decades after the Second World War a host of different groups from Europe, the Caribbean and South Asia came to the northern English city of Bradford to work in the woollen mills. The result was to create one of Britain’s earliest and most distinctive postcolonial cities, in which Pakistanis represented the single largest ethnic minority. This paper traces the changing identities of Asian migrants in Bradford, from the category of ‘workers’ in the 1950s to that of ‘communities’ in the 1960s and 1970s. In this process, ‘culture’ became increasingly important as a means of identifying Asian populations in the city and of the public self-identification of those populations. I argue in the paper that this process of ‘culturalization’ was double-edged, bringing with it problems which were to become visible in the Bradford ‘race riots’ of 1995 and 2001.

2/ Comparative perspective from Central Europe

Tereza Horáčková: Diversity of a diaspora integrated through economic strategies: Vietnamese in the Czech Republic since the 1950s

Nóra Abdel-Salám: Diverging Migratory Tendencies of the Youth in Central Europe – Case Studies of the Hungarian and Czech Models

 

 

Identity Strategies: Heritage and Diversity

In the frame of FF UK Divesity week, the Institute of World History and its partners are organizing a workshop on “Identity Strategies: Heritage and Diversity”

Where: Hybernská 3, Prague 1 (room 303)

What do cultural patrimony, identity and diversity share in common? This question will be tackled during the workshop:
What strategies are in question when speaking about the choice and presentation of UNESCO monuments? Linda Kovářová, who compares the UNESCO monuments in the Czech Republic, Italy and Japan, will speak about this topic more in detail.
Aurore Navarro in her presentation about her research concerning retailers of so-called quality food in Prague is going to persuade us that identities go through our stomach: the food divides and unifies, delimits and designates.
Why the rich breton culture and tradition didn’t become the base for confident regional patriotism? Did the elites of Brittany choose a wrong strategy? Martina Reiterová is going to look for an answer to this question.
Alena Křivánková is going to reveal us who was interested in occitan at the beginning of the French Revolution and why this language didn’t become a link for southern French identity.
Jan Krajíček is going to present us technocratic dreams of František Radouš dating the 1930s, one of those being the idea that an underdeveloped and peripheral region like the Vysočina region constitute an ideal place for modernisation strategies.

Come and join us at this collective brainstorming!
In case you have other ideas, we would like to listen to them in the workshop.

Program

Linda KOVÁŘOVÁ (FF UK) UNESCO a koncept diverzity na příkladě Kutné Hory, Hirošimy a Villa Romana di Casale

Aurore NAVARRO (CEFRES/Université de Lyon) Food quality and retail trade in Prague: heritage, reinvention and innovation.

Martina REITEROVÁ (FF UK):  Problematické dědictví? Identifikační strategie bretonských regionalistů přelomu 19. a 20. století.

Alena KŘIVÁNKOVÁ (FF UK): „Okcitánština“ – počátky vědeckého zájmu a sporů o jeden (?) jazyk

Martin THARP (FHS UK): Thomasius’ Legacy or the Language Paradox of European Universities

Jakub NEUMANN (FF UK): Proměny kladenské industriální krajiny ve 20. století

Jan KRAJÍČEK (FF UK): Periferní region jako technologický projekt: modernizace Vysočiny podle Františka Radouše (1939)

See the complete program with abstracts (in Czech) here.

 

Visegrad Forum: Laure Teulières, between Warsaw & Prague

Program

Tuesday 25 April – Warsaw

Immigration in order to repopulated: measures, narratives and migrant social paths in France post-WW1. A workshop around Laure Teulières organized by the Center of French Civilization and Francophone Studies.
Language: English

Wednesday 26 April – Prague

6:30-8:00 PM
“Étrangers d’ici”: migrants et migrations en France à travers des films de la Cinémathèque de Toulouse. A lecture by Laure Teulières organized by CEFRES.
Where: French Institute (5th floor), Štěpánská 35, Prague 1
Language: French

Thursday 27 April – Prague

2:00-7:00 PM
Around the migrations in the middle of the 20th century – prospects from the two sides of the Channel. A workshop around Laure Teulières and Simon Gunn.
Organizer: World History Department, FF UK
Where: Hybernská 3, Prague 1 (room 303)
Language: English

Imre Kertész, the “Medium of Auschwitz”

A lecture by Clara Royer (CEFRES) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the ÚSD AV ČR and CEFRES in partnership with the Jewish Museum.

Where: CEFRES library – Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: 5 pm to 7 pm
Language: English

Abstract

To Imre Kertész, “Auschwitz” was the “Ecce homo” of two thousand years of European Christian culture. Such collapse of the so-called humanist culture led him to undertake a radical criticism of literature and of language. Analysing the totalitarian condition through his literary work, he strove to reconquer a free self through writing. Indeed, this existential practice enabled to become a creator, that is, to turn into the subject of his own creation. But how to create a work of art in such circumstances?
This lecture will try to cast some light on how Kertész strove to become “the Medium of Auschwitz” through a historical approach of the genesis of his literary work. It will appraise the historical and personal conditions of the birth of Kertész’s first published novel, Fatelessness.