[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] In “Celia Britton, pioneering scholar who pushed the boundaries of French studies,” Charles Forsdick (The Scotsman) brings attention to the academic trajectory of Celia Margaret Britton (March 20, 1946-June 18, 2024) in Europe. Here are excerpts from this obituary essay.
Celia Britton, who has died at the age of 78, was a pioneering scholar and teacher in contemporary French studies, responsible for some of the most significant developments in the field in recent years. Appointed in 1991 to the Carnegie Professorship in French at the University of Aberdeen, one of the longest-established and most prestigious chairs in the subject in the UK, Celia remained in that role until 2002, turning her department into an internationally renowned hub for research in French studies.
Following research at the beginning of her career on the nouveau roman and French film, Celia would go on, across more than three decades, to publish a substantial body of writing on French Caribbean literature, thought and culture, most notably on the Martinican author and thinker Edouard Glissant. It was in particular during her time in Aberdeen that she played a central part in the development of postcolonial studies within modern languages. Celia’s brilliance as a researcher and her ability to provide emerging areas of enquiry with the theoretical and conceptual rigour they required were widely celebrated, not least with her election to a fellowship of the British Academy in 2000 and appointment by the French government to the grade of Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2003.
For the first 20 years of her career, in books including Claude Simon: Writing the Visible (1987) and The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory and Politics (1992), Celia built a reputation as a leading critic of the avant-garde fiction of writers including Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. However, by the mid-1990s her interests had shifted to the French Caribbean, the region whose literature and culture she would study for the rest of her life. French studies was at that time still predominantly canonical and metropolitan in focus. Celia’s work would challenge this situation considerably. In two books written while she was in Aberdeen, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (1999) and Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French-Caribbean Thought (2002), she brought a remarkable theoretical and conceptual rigour to the study of Caribbean literature and thought in French. Celia’s contribution was twofold: not only did she steer the field of Francophone studies towards much-needed theoretical rigour, but also revealed the Anglocentrism of postcolonial studies by opening it to voices from other language traditions. Two subsequent volumes, The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (2008) and Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing (2014), revealed the breadth of Celia’s interests as her attention extended to Maryse Condé and other writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe. One of the real strengths of Celia’s work was her ability to draw into conversation different writers and thinkers, creating – not least through her championing of Glissant – a sense of the compelling need to take French Caribbean literature and thought seriously as a cohesive contribution to world culture in its own right. [. . .]
In 1991, at a time when there were very few women professors, Celia was appointed to the University of Aberdeen. During her tenure lasting over a decade, she founded and directed a dynamic Centre for Francophone Studies, which not only attracted some of the most talented students and scholars in this area to work at Aberdeen, but also ensured the visits of a series of key authors in the field, including Glissant himself, who had by that stage become a good friend and visited her home in Stonehaven. Teaching – whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level – was always as important to Celia as her research. She was an extraordinarily gifted educator and cared deeply about all her students. It was at Aberdeen that she set up courses on Francophone Literature and Culture, which were particularly innovative at the time. Celia’s final appointment was as Professor of French at University College London, a post held between 2003 and 2011. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/obituaries-celia-britton-pioneering-scholar-who-pushed-the-boundaries-of-french-studies-4742876
Also see « Hommage à Celia Britton (1946-2024) » by Loïc Céry, L’Institut du Tout-Monde, Le Club de Mediapart,
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/institut-du-tout-monde/article/080724/hommage-celia-britton-1946-2024
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] In “Celia Britton, pioneering scholar who pushed the boundaries of French studies,” Charles Forsdick (The Scotsman) brings attention to the academic trajectory of Celia Margaret Britton (March 20, 1946-June 18, 2024) in Europe. Here are excerpts from this obituary essay. Celia Britton, who
