Carpenter Presents a Paper at a French Workshop on Baudelaire

Scott Carpenter, Professor of French, recently presented a paper titled, “Être soi-même et autrui; l’altérité et Le Spleen de Paris” at a journée d’étude (workshop) devoted to the work of Charles Baudelaire held at the Université de Lille 3 in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France.

Carpenter teaches courses on the representation of “otherness,” nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry, the aesthetics of falseness, and literary theory. He has published extensively (sometimes with students) on such authors as Charles Baudelaire, George Sand, Honoré de Balzac, and Prosper Mérimée. In addition to Acts of Fiction (1996, on political representations in nineteenth-century literature) and Reading Lessons (2000, an introduction to literary theory), he has co-edited an intermediate French reader (Vagabondages littéraires). His most recent book focuses on literary and cultural mystifications: Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France: Frauds, Hoaxes and Counterfeits (2009). He also writes fiction, and when he has free time he can often be found on rural roads astride his bike.