This workshop is co-sponsored by: Comparative Literature, The Contemporary, the Department of Sociology, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and The Europe Center

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Literary scholars have generally been loath to analyze description as a practice and technique; as such, it has long suffered from critical disengagement. Academics disparage descriptions as long-winded, unnecessary rhetoric which readers skip on a regular basis. And yet, for unfathomable reasons, authors continue resorting to descriptions in their texts. 

The purpose of Cynthia's dissertation is to uncover the motivations underlying authors’ persistent recourse to descriptions. To that end, Cynthia examines 18th-century French and Italian novels and focus on a particular kind of descriptive element: characters’ “literary portraits”. Cynthia will show how in the 18th century, literary portraits were more than just sums of characters’ physical descriptions and moral traits. Instead, their function was to convey meaningful, crucial information that would eventually influence the outcome of a given text. In addition, Cynthia will demonstrate how this narrative function, disguised as “mere” description, was deployed along three main axes: aesthetic, ludic and pedagogic. Each axis will constitute a chapter of the dissertation, showing, respectively, how literary portraits were justified by three core concerns: aestheticizing the narration, entertaining readers, and instructing them in morality.

A diachronic perspective will identify a century’s worth of patterns and differentiate substantial, long-term changes from fleeting fads, while an interdisciplinary approach will uncover how literary descriptions borrowed/lent techniques from/to other fields of knowledge, such as esthetics, fine arts, anthropology, natural history, and medicine. Cynthia's approach, based on the analysis of descriptive practices, will bring to light the cohesive aspects and interactive relations between those seemingly disparate fields.
 
Cynthia Laura Giancotti-Vialle is a 5th year PhD student in the French and Italian department at Stanford University. She holds a B.A. in French and Chinese Languages and Cultures from the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy and an M.A. in 19th c. French Literature from Paris VII-Paris Diderot. Her current area of research concerns descriptive practices in 18th c. fictional works, but is also interested in  modern life-writing and fictional representations of violence against women. 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

CLOSED WORKSHOP

Since 2012, the Governance Project at CDDRL has sought to develop better comparative measures of state quality. Existing measures like the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, TI’s Transparency Perceptions Index, or the state-quality measures in the Varieties of Democracy series are based on perception or expert surveys.  They often produce aggregate measures for an entire country, without distinguishing between ministries, levels of government, or regions within countries.  And almost none of them measure aspects of governance like bureaucratic autonomy that many observers feel are critical to state performance.

The Governance Project has developed a survey instrument that seeks to correct some of these deficiencies by surveying bureaucrats in different countries directly.  While such a survey is obviously subject to its own problems like social acceptability bias, they at least try to reach into the insides of executive branches in ways that existing perception surveys do not.  To date, the project has completed surveys in China, Brazil, Ukraine, and is undertaking one in India.  The survey instrument is based on the Federal Viewpoint Survey (FedView), which has surveyed US bureaucrats over an extended length of time and can serve as a comparative baseline.  These surveys are conducted in conjunction with local partners that perform the actual surveys and provide input and analysis into the survey instrument.

It is our hope to generate cross-national comparative data that will encompass an increasing number of countries, and in the long-run produce time-series data.  Our model is the World Values Survey, which from the 1980s going forward has expanded the number of countries covered.  We hope to make this data publicly available to academic researchers around the world.

The Governance Project has entered into a cooperative agreement with the World Bank and University College, London, to devise a common survey instrument, to standardize surveying practices, and to coordinate the choice of survey targets for future surveys.  

This workshop is co-sponsored with Stanford University's Center on Global Poverty and Development.

[[{"fid":"237366","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"3":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"}},"attributes":{"style":"height: 165px; width: 500px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto","data-delta":"3"}}]]

Image

[[{"fid":"237529","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"8":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto","data-delta":"8"}}]]

Image