April 6, 2015
Cro presents at Southeast Coastal Conference on Languages and Literatures
Melinda A. Cro, assistant professor of French in the modern languages department, presented "Onomastic Deviations and Metaliterary Consequences in the Gascon extravagant (1637)" Friday, March 27, to the 17th-century French literature panel at the Southeast Coastal Conference on Languages and Literatures in Savannah, Georgia.
A complex and often considered fragmentary comic novel by Claireville, the Gascon extravagant is at once fascinating and challenging to read. Cro contends that Claireville combines figures of the author and the creative process in addition to references to a specific literary tradition and careful onomastic deviations in order to write a novel that serves as a reflection upon the "new" genre of the comic novel. In short, the text is actually a metanovel that provides insight not only into the author's literary process but also offers the beginning of a poetics of the genre as a whole.