Marva is invited to share what she learned about Victor Hugo’s fight for social justice in creating her Victor Hugo on Things That Matter.The organizations hosting her talk “ ‘To Love is to Act’: Victor Hugo and Social Justice” include these:
Sorbonne Nouvelle (Université de Paris III-Censier), sponsored by the UVa Club of Paris.May 16, 2012
Colonnade Club Faculty Author Series, University of Virginia, Pavilion VII on the West Lawn, Charlottesville, Virginia, September 21, 2010
Virginia Festival of the Book, at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, 201 East Market Street, Downtown, Charlottesville, Virginia.March 21, 2010
The Wall Street Journal quotes Marva in an article about Christie’s 2012 Paris auction of 500 artworks and objects from Victor Hugo’s family
March 30, 2012 7:09 p.m. ET
Victor Hugo, who wrote the famous, often-adapted novels “Les Misérables” and “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” called his visual artworks “random pen strokes thrown more or less maladroitly on paper by a man who has other things to do.” But the author drew some 3,000 mostly ink-on-paper pieces, many dark and experimental.
A card drawn by Victor Hugo, part of a Christie’s auction. CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LIMITED
A forthcoming auction of 500 artworks and objects from the family’s cache shows how Hugo’s artwork influenced his descendants. The items are expected to fetch some $1.3 million when they hit the block Wednesday at the Christie’s salesroom in Paris.
Hugo (1802-85) sketched frequently during his travels and his exile from France from 1851 to 1870, when he lived in Brussels and the English Channel Islands. The author drew on cards: One 5-by-8-inch example from 1855, included in the sale, pictures an eerie plume of smoke creeping toward a small rendering of a landscape painting that’s propped up on a shelf of sinewy, birch-like letters. They read: “VICTOROGUH.” The piece is expected to sell for between $67,000 and $110,000.
“His work got more and more imaginative and fantastical during his exile,” says Hugo scholar Marva A. Barnett, a professor at the University of Virginia and editor of “Victor Hugo on Things That Matter: A Reader,” published in 2009. “He experimented in ways that a lot of people at the time weren’t. He painted with coffee. He would soak a piece of lace in ink and press it on the paper to get that pattern.” Then Hugo would add eyes to make the imprints look like skulls.
The sale includes works of Hugo descendants as well. His great-grandson Jean was a painter active in 1920s-era Surrealist circles in Paris. Ms. Barnett says that Jean introduced Hugo’s then-little-known ink drawings to the likes of Surrealist masters Jean Cocteau and André Breton. Jean Hugo’s own Surrealist-inflected paintings will be for sale at Christie’s too. “The Metamorphoses” from 1929, is expected to fetch $40,000 to $66,000.
Marva A. Barnett, French professor and founding director of the Teaching Resource Center, and R. Jahan Ramazani, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, are the recipients of the 2011 Thomas Jefferson Awards at the University of Virginia. The awards were presented today at Fall Convocation, held in the John Paul Jones Arena.
Barnett and Ramazani are the 61st and 62nd recipients of the Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest honor the University community bestows upon its faculty. The convocation included recognition of 360 third-year U.Va. students who earned Intermediate Honors and a keynote address by J. Milton Adams, vice provost for academic programs.
The Thomas Jefferson Award selection committee chose Barnett to receive the award recognizing excellence in service, which has been sponsored since 1955 by the Robert Earll McConnell Foundation. Ramazani was honored with the award recognizing excellence in scholarship, established in 2009 by the Alumni Board of Trustees of the University of Virginia Endowment Fund Inc.
Marva A. Barnett
Professor of French College of Arts & Sciences
Founding director, Teaching Resource Center
Over more than 20 years, Marva Barnett, founding director of the Teaching Resource Center, has done much to improve the caliber of teaching at the University, according to the dozens of letters supporting her nomination for the Thomas Jefferson Award recognizing excellence in service to the University.
Her contributions “have been nothing short of transformative for the academic mission of this institution,” biology professor Claire Cronmiller wrote in her nominating letter.
Barnett stepped forward with her idea for the Teaching Resource Center, or TRC as it is known, “at a time when the University needed to reaffirm its commitment to the educational experience of its students,” Cronmiller wrote. “During the last 21 years, she has easily inspired, excited, guided and helped hundreds to become more effective and happier instructors and University contributors.”
Barnett holds a master’s in French from the University of Maine at Orono and a B.A. from Westminster College in Salt Lake City. She received her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University, where she studied at the Harvard-Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning.
When applying for faculty positions, she envisioned a university with a center that would provide opportunities for both faculty and graduate teaching assistants to develop and hone their teaching expertise. Although U.Va. did not have such a center, Barnett accepted a position as an assistant professor of French in 1983 and soon began working to design a five-day teaching assistant orientation workshop in the French Department.
In 1990, she got the Teaching Resource Center off the ground, which has since sprouted several ancillary programs, such as Excellence in Diversity Fellows, University Teaching Fellowship and Tomorrow’s Professors Today. The newest addition, the University Academy of Teaching, brings together master teachers who have already helped others reach a higher level of excellence and who are interested in offering their expertise to colleagues across Grounds.
Letters supporting her nomination came from all corners of U.Va., as well as from former faculty and students. Her ability to identify a need and then find a way to meet it is legendary. One writer commented, “She has a bias for action.”
“There was a time when, in certain circles, putting effort into one’s teaching was considered less important than research accomplishments,” wrote one of the many faculty members who have worked with the TRC. “Moreover, in its first years, some assumed the TRC served merely a remedial function for poor teachers who required ‘fixing.’
“From the beginning, however, Marva demonstrated that the most outstanding teachers are those willing to examine their pedagogy with the same rigor they apply to their research.”
She introduced TAP – the Teaching Analysis Poll – in which a member of the Teaching Resource Center staff meets separately with a professor’s students to ascertain what’s working in the classroom and what’s not.
One professor said he asked for a TAP assessment out of desperation because of dismal student evaluations early in his U.Va. career. “I expected to be raked over the coals, but I came away from the experience enthused. The scores that second semester came up,” said the faculty member, who went on to receive a University Teaching Fellowship. “The center threw a life ring to a drowning new teacher who arrived with precious little instruction on how to swim in the classroom.”
Barnett also recognized early on the importance of building a diverse faculty, wrote a former faculty member. “Marva actively developed strategies to ensure that minority faculty members became productive scholars and thus were fully engaged,” he wrote.
The TRC offers workshops each August and January on topics ranging from the multicultural classroom to course development. Many of the letters said Barnett also helped them in informal ways, listening as they described a problem and then suggesting practical steps to take. “Marva is a mentor’s mentor and a teacher’s teacher,” one supporter wrote.
Barnett also teaches courses on reading and writing French texts and on Victor Hugo. Her “Victor Hugo on Things That Matter: A Reader,” was published in 2009, and another Hugo text, “Lettres inédites de Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo,” is slated for publication in 2012.
R. Jahan Ramazani
Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English
College of Arts & Sciences
For his boundary-crossing scholarship in poetry and service to the intellectual life of U.Va., Jahan Ramazani is the recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award recognizing excellence in scholarship.
In her nominating letter, English Department chair Cynthia Wall said Ramazani is one of the world’s leading literary scholars. After reading the dozens of supporting letters, she wrote, “I am even more astonished at the influence he has had and the respect he has inspired in colleagues and students locally, nationally, internationally.”
A College of Arts & Sciences colleague expressed admiration for Ramazani’s editing in 2003 of the “Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,” which he expanded beyond the traditional canon of English-language poetry. “By rejecting a provincial understanding of English poetry, he has indeed remapped the field,” she wrote. “With confidence and conviction, he juxtaposes W.B. Yeats or Nobel laureate Derek Walcott with the Indian poet A.K. Ramanujan, the Jamaican Louise Bennett or the Ugandan Okot p’Bitek.”
Ramazani is the author of four books, starting in 1990 with “Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy and the Sublime.” Wrote a colleague at another institution, “It was greeted by most Yeatsians as one of the few books on Yeats written in the ’90s that has really made a difference in Yeats studies in particular and in poetry studies in general.”
His second book, “Poetry of Mourning,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. With his third book, “The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English,” published in 2001, Ramazani declared “that poetry in English emerging from formerly colonial nations had not yet been sufficiently described,” another supporter wrote.
“A Transnational Poetics,” published in 2009, won the 2011 Harry Levin Prize as the best book in comparative literary history published between 2008 and 2010. The book “does, in my opinion, indicate a wholly new direction for postcolonial and transnational studies to follow,” a faculty member at another university wrote, adding, “At the moment, then, Professor Ramazani really is the field of postcolonial poetry.”
A Rhodes scholar and Guggenheim fellow, Ramazani holds master’s degrees from Yale and Oxford universities, and a Ph.D. from Yale. An Echols scholar at U.Va., in 1981 he received his B.A. in English literature with highest distinction. During his undergraduate years, he was the jazz director at the University’s radio station, WTJU-FM. A recent graduate, whose father had been Ramazani’s roommate, was so taken with her father’s stories, she enrolled in Ramazani’s “Contemporary Poetry” course.
“As an instructor, Professor Ramazani did for his students what I imagine he did for WTJU listeners: open their minds to an art that seemed esoteric, dissonant and inaccessible,” she wrote.
A former Ph.D. student said he changed the course of his research because of Ramazani’s insights. “It is no overstatement to say that Jahan Ramazani opened up a world for me,” he wrote.
His contributions to scholarship as well as the life of the University were detailed in supporting letters from U.Va. colleagues in the English Department and across Grounds. Ramazani was the Mayo National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor from 2001 to 2004 and English Department chair from 2006 to 2009.
One English colleague wrote, “The centerpieces of Jahan’s tenure as chair were his leadership in revamping the way we fund students in our Ph.D. program, the careful and even-handed way he dealt with the need to cut the department’s budget as the financial crisis took its toll on the University’s finances, and the excellent hiring he was able to do against the strong economic headwinds.”
Another colleague, who served with Ramazani in the Faculty Senate, which Ramazani chaired from 1997 to 1998, noted that Ramazani began the “Intellectual Community” initiative, “a simple, yet powerful, idea to bring U.Va. up to the level of the very best institutions in the world, where … faculty and students and administrators and staff joined together to improve our collective lives.”
Ramazani’s father, R.K. Ramazani, professor emeritus of government and foreign affairs, received the Thomas Jefferson Award in 1994. They are the first father and son to each have won the award.
About the Author
Marian Anderfuren Director of Media Relations U.Va. Media Relations 434-243-2293
Marva offers a UVa Flash! Seminar on connections between Hugo’s battle against the death penalty and death-penalty cases today, most particularly the Theresa Lewis execution in Virginia last September 24.
Discussion will focus on the beginning of Hugo’s modern novella, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, and two of his works of art that lobby against state-sanctioned murder:
La Conscience humaine devant une mauvaise action (1866) / Human Conscience Faced with an Evil Act, in which Hugo drew an arm and hand reaching out from nowhere in a strong “halt” gesture
Monday, November 22, 2010 5:00-6:30 p.m., in Hotel D on the East Range, University of Virginia.
Invited to kick off the “Banquet Hugolien” with the first text, Marva celebrated Victor Hugo’s work with over 20 other Hugo scholars, journalists, and actors at a public picnic in the Paris Place des Vosges. She recited “Les Djinns” (from Les Orientales) at this “Festival Paris en Toutes Lettres” event sponsored by the newspaper Libération and organized by journalist and Hugophile Edouard Launet on June 13, 2010.
The French blogger Akialam mentioned Marva’s participation (as “une professeur américaine”) in her post about the Banquet Hugolien—and included a photo of the day’s button (“badge”) attached to her handbag:
Un petit article sur un évènement qui a eu lieu la semaine dernière et auquel j’ai eu la joie d’assister dans le cadre du Festival Paris en toutes lettres, dont l’édition 2010 s’est tenue du 9 au 13 juin.
Le dimanche 13, donc, me voilà Place des Vosges pour assister au grand banquet hugolien, en hommage à Victor Hugo, vous l’aurez sans doute deviné. Les gens ont amené leur pique-nique et sont invités à se réunir autour des tables dressées sur l’herbe. Pendant le repas, des admirateurs du grand homme, connus ou anonymes, lisent leur passage favori de son oeuvre à la foule rassemblée.
Etant moi-même une grande admiratrice, je n’ai pourtant lu que peu de ses oeuvres et ne connais pour l’essentiel que son talent de dramaturge. Trois choses m’ont profondément surpris au cours de cette rencontre: d’une part, c’est de constater à quel point son oeuvre est universelle. Des lecteurs de plusieurs nationalités sont venus partager leur amour de l’oeuvre de Victor Hugo. Je me souviens notamment d’une professeur américaine et d’un Japonais. D’autre part, c’est d’apprendre qu’Hugo avait effectué de nombreux dessins. Enfin, j’ai redécouvert Hugo sénateur et ses textes d’une force et d’une logique imparable. Entre autres, a été lu un plaidoyer contre la réduction des subventions de la culture alors que l’Etat français cherchait à faire des économies. Que l’on soit d’accord avec ses arguments ou non, force est de constater que son texte est d’une étonnante modernité, à tel point que s’il était prononcé de nos jours à l’assemblée (si l’on en excepte les allusions à la monnaie, tout de même), il de déparerait pas. Ce banquet hugolien a été pour moi l’occasion d’une étonnante redécouverte de textes si puissants qu’ils justifient à eux seuls la fascination qu’exerce encore aujourd’hui le grand Victor.
Et le badge distribué pendant l’évènement orne désormais fièrement mon fidèle sac à main!
Victor Hugo sitting on the “Rock of Exiles” on the island of Jersey
Famously writing “When freedom returns, I will return” (“Quand la liberté rentrera, je renterai”), Victor Hugo rejected Napoléon III’s amnesty for French exiles during the Second Empire. One of the most renowned nineteenth-century exiled writers, Hugo became an exemplar of the exiled author and a citizen of the world by tenaciously supporting the French Republic in the face of the Emperor. Exile for reasons of politics and censorship was common in the nineteenth century, and still today many writers are forced into exile—or choose exile—because of their ideas.
View from Hugo’s Hauteville House while in exile on Guernsey (Photo: M. Barnett)
Questions central to the Colloquium include these:
What does the exile phenomenon tell us about authors’ roles?
What can students learn about the value of community engagement by considering how following their conscience leads some writers to leave their homeland?
What do writers lose and gain by going into exile?
View from the Hauteville House “look-out” on Guernsey. (Photo: M. Barnett)
We look broadly at exile by expanding the French Department’s Müller Colloquium on Victor Hugo and connecting it with the Colloquium on Exile organized in March by the Spanish and History Departments in collaboration with the Colegio de México. French culture, literature, and history has profound and long-standing connections with both Latin American and Middle Eastern culture; in addition, Hugo’s ideas have had enormous impact in Latin America and Spain. We enhance our exchanges with a performance of Alain Lecompte’s one-man show HUGO LIVE, in which the composer/singer recounts Hugo’s life through his poetry set to music.
Supported in part by the University of Virginia Page-Barbour Fund and co-organized with Professor Hanadi al-Samman (Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures).
Participants’ Comments:
A multi-faceted event…
The graduate students did a terrific job!
The carefully researched and gracefully composed presentations showed a depth of
knowledge and analytical skills, and were engagingly delivered.
I very much enjoyed the part of the colloquium I was able to attend, and I heard many good reports that made me wish even more that I could have attended the
whole conference.
Le colloque a permis de faire dialoguer non seulement des chercheurs de différentes disciplines mais aussi de faire se rencontrer chercheurs confirmés, grad et undergrad students.
My warmest thanks for the generous hospitality of all who were in involved in putting everything together.
The opportunity to spend several intensive days with everyone was invaluable in extending and expanding the conversation.
What a wonderful gathering of terrific people with great ideas to share!
I learned so much, and I’m even thinking I should read Les Travailleurs de la mer this summer!
After her Victor Hugo on Things That Matter was published, Marva is invited to join French Hugo specialists at a roundtable and book signing, the Salon du Livre Victor Hugo, at the Musée Victor Hugo in Villequier, France, on February 20, 2010.
Victor Hugo’s ideas had a huge impact on his time, and that impact continues today, according to “Victor Hugo on Things That Matter,” a new book from University of Virginia professor Marva Barnett, who teaches in the Department of French.
The book draws upon excerpts from his voluminous writings, which include poetry, plays, novels, letters, political speeches and drawings, to offer insight into the ideas and character of a man considered a literary genius and perceptive social critic – and how applicable his thoughts are to the modern world.
“I am inspired by the feeling that I am sitting down with a live person when I read his work,” Barnett said.
Barnett acquaints the reader with Hugo’s world by organizing the book chapters by key motifs or themes in his private and public lives. Chapters concerned with his private life focus on love and passion; children; death, grief and tragedy; nature; the mysterious, the exotic and the grotesque; God and religion; rights, law and conscience – where private and public intersect.
On the public side of his life, chapters are devoted to his views on the role of the poet in society; liberty and democracy; tyranny and exile; social justice; poverty, crime and education; and humanity, progress and peace.
“This is someone who faced a lot of personal tragedy, a lot of political unrest, who had a brilliant literary talent and many truly intriguing ideas,” Barnett said.
One of Hugo’s daughters died at age 19 in a boating accident; another, his youngest, became mentally ill after an ill-fated love affair. Hugo lived through the many 19th-century French political upheavals and was exiled along with other legislative deputies in 1852 after a coup d’état by Napoleon III. When he returned to Paris in 1870, he was welcomed as the “Father of the French Republic.”
“Despite his tragedies, Hugo does have an optimistic view of the human capacity for progress, and I wanted more people to know what he thought and be able to enjoy his work,” Barnett said.
In the book, Barnett’s introductions, footnotes and glossary are written in English, while Hugo’s excerpts are in French.
For the non-French speaker, it provides an orientation to Hugo’s work as well as the times in which he lived. For the English speaker with some French fluency, “readers will find their rusty French loosens and the language comes back to them with ease,” Barnett said.
Hugo was the leader of the Romantic movement. “Romantics felt that nature was alive and life was all around us, and people needed to engage with that,” Barnett said. “His poetry is groundbreaking and revolutionary because he more or less slaughtered the classic rules of poetry – and similarly for theater.”
His poetry foreshadowed the work of symbolist poets. For a poem about evil genies, Hugo developed a line structure that forms the shape of a magic lantern, and a rhythm that echoes the genies’ flight.
In his plays, he broke away from the Classicists, who had held sway for more than two centuries with their conventions of portraying kings and nobles in tragic productions and relegating the common man to comedy. In the preface to his play, “Cromwell,” Hugo laid out the manifesto for the Romantic movement in theater, which argued for a more lifelike portrayal.
“Hugo saw that life is full of antitheses,” Barnett said. “Life is, and human experience is, full of happiness and sadness, and good and bad, and ups and downs; and so to separate tragedy from comedy is artificial and unreal.”
He also wrote personally about his experiences, explaining his viewpoint to his critics in the preface to his 1856 “Les Contemplations”: ‘When I speak to you of myself, I’m speaking to you about yourself. How can you not feel that? Ah! Insane, you who think that I’m not you!’ Barnett translated.
The Hugo work that is perhaps most familiar to English-speaking audiences is his 1862 novel, “Les Misérables.” Adapted to the stage in 1980, “Les Misérables” is one of the best-known and oft-performed musicals of the last quarter-century.
In the story, Hugo elevates a common man and ex-convict, Jean Valjean, as he struggles toward redemption, a closer connection with God. The narrator sometimes looks into Valjean’s conscience, saying in one case: “We are going to look again into the soul and conscience of a man. There is nothing more terrifying than that sort of contemplation.”
But Valjean’s upstanding life after 19 years at hard labor shows Hugo’s optimistic side. “Hugo brings to life the human spark and spirit,” Barnett said. “That’s one thing I would like people to be able to experience from his work, his abiding optimism.”
Hugo, who began as a supporter of the monarchy, or an ultraconservative, as they were called, is “an interesting study in personal evolution; his life experiences and his awareness of them changed his beliefs,” Barnett said.
In his early 20s “he saw that the poor people didn’t have much to go with and he became more and more liberal,” she said
“On the political front, he fought for freedom of the press and literary freedom,” Barnett said.
“He believed and talked about what he called the universal republic, meaning that everyone should have a say and that human rights were extraordinarily important. People needed to be educated to have an intelligent voice in this conversation,” she said.
Over the years, serving in numerous legislatures, he advocated against the death penalty, and for rights for children and women and social justice issues we still struggle with today.
Hugo dominated the French literary scene for most of his adult life. His influence was pervasive and his popularity wide. When he died in 1885, at age 82, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million mourners crowded the streets of Paris for two weeks.
Since 2002, the bicentennial of his birth, there has been a “big surge of interest in the impact he had on literature and ideas,” Barnett said.
By Jane Ford Senior News Officer U.Va. Media Relations
Charlottesville listener Marva Barnett sent me this reaction to Nina Totenberg’s summation of Wednesday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case POTTAWATTAMIE COUNTY V. MCGHEE.
“What is just? What is legal?They are all too often not the same thing.Nina Totenberg’s recounting of the current Supreme Court case about prosecutorial immunity shines a spotlight on what Victor Hugo called “the quarrel between rights and law.”Not until that quarrel is resolved, he wrote (in the preface to his collection of socially-conscious speeches), will society reach true civilization.
In this case, attorneys for the Council Bluffs, Iowa, prosecutors argue explicitly, bluntly, that Americans have no constitutional right not to be framed for a crime they didn’t commit. Terry Harrington and Curtis McGhee were imprisoned in 1977 for a murder they had no hand in.Tenaciously stating his innocence, Mr. Harrington was finally released in 2003 after a case review in which eyewitnesses recanted their testimony.Under Iowa law neither man has legal recourse to receive compensation for the 25 years lost because of fabricated evidence.Their suit against the Council Bluffs police and prosecutor for violating of constitutional rights has reached the Supreme Court.An objective case summary shows that the police and prosecutor ignored evidence pointing to another, well-connected suspect and accepted testimony against Mr. Harrington from a man with a criminal record who erred in his story about the murder location and weapon involved.
Still, attorneys for the prosecutors, while hypothetically admitting that Mr. Harrington might have been framed, contend that such framing is legal, though perhaps not just.Victor Hugo must be raging in his Paris Pantheon tomb!Were he able to put pen to paper, he would this morning be dashing off a public letter.Justice is divine, he would write, far above the laws that people create.When everyone can see where justice lies in a cause, should we not choose what is just over what is legal?Why are laws not written to promote justice?Human rights come from God, and laws cannot morally overcome them.Jean Valjean, after 19 years at hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread, learned this from a man of God.The author of Les Misérables would be making the case for Mr. Harrington, human rights, and justice.”
Marva Barnett, creator of Victor Hugo on Things That Matter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
Marva Barnett’s piece is not, of course, a discussion of the legal intricacies of procedure and precedence that will weigh heavily in the Supreme Court’s decision. Instead it addressed the question–as WMRA’s Tom DuVal, with whom I love to talk over these kinds of knotty questions, pointed out–“should anyone be allowed to get away with unjust acts just because a law says it’s okay?”
If you’ve got a few moments to devote to thinking about the distinctions between what is legal and what is moral, I’d suggest taking a look at Ms. Totenberg’s summation and then re-read Marva Barnett’s challenging reaction. I did both yesterday, and I’m still pondering the issues involved.
Marva leads a workshop in French for Virginia high-school teachers on bringing Victor Hugo’s works to their students: Au-delà de “Demain, dès l’aube . . .”: L’Actualité de Victor Hugo (in English: Beyond “Demain, dès l’aube . . .”: Victor Hugo for Today’s Students). During this day-long, interactive workshop sponsored by the UVa Center for the Liberal Arts on November 15, 2008, Marva engages over thirty French teachers in thinking about how their students could read and enjoy Hugo’s work beyond his famous poem “Demain, dès l’aube . . . .”
Workshop description: Victor Hugo’s lyrical poem of grief and love, “Demain, dès l’aube . . . ,” highly comprehensible to French language learners, is popularly and effectively taught in high-school and college courses. Written in generally simple language about a subject everyone can understand (a daughter’s tragic death), this poem is deeper and richer than it first appears, which makes it a memorable lesson in the power of poetry.
Yet Hugo’s work provides an even richer source of texts, themes, and contemporary relevance for teachers who wish to help their students connect their personal interests and values with French culture and literature. Since, like most Romantics, he not only wrote about his personal feelings but also deeply considered the meanings of life, death, and God. Because he also fiercely debated social justice issues, Hugo offers ideas about topics of concern today. Since both his poetry and prose are vibrantly direct, students can find his writing lively and fascinating.
In this workshop, teachers learn more about Hugo’s personal and social beliefs and read and discuss some of Hugo’s texts that intrigue students. Working together, they design appropriate pedagogical activities for poems, speeches, and novel excerpts that will engage their students in thinking about such important life issues as love, social justice, and God. They leave with a broadened knowledge of Hugo’s work and practical activities they can use in the classroom.
Colleagues engage directly with these texts, which also work well with first-year and second-year UVa students:
Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (excerpt from Hugo’s highly modern novella written from the perspective of a murderer facing the guillotine)
“Éclaircie,” Les Contemplations VI, x (a famous, accessible poem about the presence of God in the world)
“La Misère,” excerpt of Hugo’s 1851 speech against poverty
“Puisque mai tout en fleurs dans les prés nous réclame . . . ,” Les Chants du crépuscule XXXI (a lyrical love poem)
Invited to kick off the “Banquet Hugolien” with the first text, Marva celebrated Victor Hugo’s work with over 20 other Hugo scholars, journalists, and actors at a public picnic in the Paris Place des Vosges. She recited 
Yale University Press, 2010
xxii, 491 pages, 26 b/w illus.
Price: $62.00
ISBN: 978-0300122459