Student textbook for Paris in Architecture, Literature, and Art (409 pp., 97 b/w ill., 98 colored ill.) Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2018. Illustrations by author.
Paris in Architecture, Literature, and Art is a student textbook and teacher manual in cultural studies that capitalizes on the limited exposure liberal arts students have to architecture and the widespread popularity of Paris across the curriculum. Each chapter presents a cultural movement, such as the Gothic, classical, romantic, and modern, that is predominant in the Parisian landscape. The interdisciplinary approach promotes critical thinking, inspiring students to identify and translate aesthetic concepts from one discipline to another and to explore, for instance, what impressionist literature or Cubist architecture might be.
Teacher Manual e-book for Paris in Architecture, Literature, and Art (753 pp., 18 b/w ill., 59 colored ill.). Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2018. Illustrations by author.
The teacher manual provides detailed commentaries on all documents presented in the student textbook, with analysis that will engage scholars while remaining accessible to instructors without a background in architecture, literature, or art.
e-book available at Peter Lang Publishing https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/62533?format=PBK
Papa a dit, Maman aussi, a coming-of-age memoir in French. Paris: Éditions Unicité, 2015. Available on Amazon.fr and electre.com.
The memoir portrays a Parisian family in the 1960s, seen through the eyes of a young girl. Her coming of age is marked by her struggle with gender identity. “Papa a dit”: the father holds the verb, and she chooses to identify with him—better to be a tomboy in a society that does not value women much. “Maman aussi”: the mother, deprived of a verb, exists only as a reflection of the father—but the echo is not without dissonance.
“Papa laughs and says, ‘Yes, it’s always like that, even if we can’t always see it. Even if you’re a little girl who’s sleeping. In fact, the Milky Way is always there, even during the day.’ His voice turns dreamy. ‘But you have to look up to see the stars.’” —May Spangler, Papa a dit, Maman aussi.
Monstrer Diderot, Ph.D. Dissertation in French, 1996
MONSTRER DIDEROT examines monsters as a privileged figure that illuminates Diderot’s materialist and transformist philosophy. Hybrid monsters reveal the continuous and creative nature of matter, yet although they may seem scientific, they are largely constructs of the text, such as the deformed bipeds’ catachresis or the shifting genres in Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse’s chiasmus. Finally, monsters serve as textual operators in the proliferation of the polypous text or in the textual copulation of the chèvre-pied.
“The polyp, or freshwater hydra, is a small, extraordinary creature. You can do anything to it—decapitate it, mutilate its arms, cut it into pieces, feed it, starve it, force it to eat another polyp, or turn it inside out: it always comes out whole, alive, and able to reproduce.” —May Spangler, Monstrer Diderot.