Marie-Cecile Ganne-Schiermeier
Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies
Academic focus includes authorship, textual strategies, and the fashioning of subjectivity. Passionate about teaching and her commitment to students.
A native of southwest France, Marie-Cécile Ganne-Schiermeier holds a Ph.D. in French literature and an MA in English literature from Boston University, as well as a Licence de lettres modernes from La Sorbonne. She has taught in several institutions, including UMass Amherst, Boston University, Fordham University and Drew University. She is committed to seeking out new and enhanced pedagogical approaches, including the use of technology in the classroom, and is dedicated to teaching and to her students. Her academic focus includes anonymously-authored early modern French texts and her research concentrates on authorship, textual strategies and the fashioning of subjectivity. Currently, she is interested in Asian Francophone literature and the rise of chocolate as a culinary and social commodity in early modern France.
Education
- M.A., Boston University
- Ph.D., Boston University
- Licence de Lettres Modernes, Sorbonne Paris IV
Currently teaching
Challenging Literary Tradition: Women and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century
FREN208
Through the centuries, women's writing has been ignored, criticized and maligned. It was only in the 1970s and 80s that the place of women in literature was recognized and their originality and creativity fully studied. In this course, we will examine how women authors break with social language and literary codes, how they express themselves through familiar genres such as the novel and poetry but also less "mainstream" ones: fairy tales and letters. We will view these women not as the object of desire or discourse, but as subjects thinking and creating independently, expressing their desires, their wishes for themselves and humanity, their vision of society and the world, and their own experience of love, power and powerlessness.
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Reading, writing, and speaking skills and critical thinking are developed through analysis and discussion of cultural and literary texts. Issues of cultural diversity, globalization, and identity are considered. Thorough grammar review.