New Faculty Profile – Sébastien Côté Traveling back in time through French literature

by Nicole Findlay

Sébastien Côté is tackling one century at a time as he explores French literature spanning the first half of the 20th century and the four centuries that precede the modern era. Côté has recently joined the Department of French as an assistant professor.

While completing his doctoral studies at the Université de Montréal, in the Department of Comparative Literature, which he credits as being “located at the crossroads of French and North American criticism and thought,” he developed an interest in postcolonial studies. With this perspective, he decided to take a new look at contemporary French and German literature. Côté examined two major avant-garde writers of the 20th century – Michel Leiris and the lesser-known Carl Einstein, and was inspired by the theoretical perspectives put forward in James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture. Côté analysed the literary representations put forward by intellectuals living in France, of the inhabitants and peoples of its African colonies.

Through his research, Côté hopes to gain a better understanding of the factors that contribute to the multiple representations of “otherness” in French literary history. As an example, Côté questions why many “French writers contributed first to invent the literary figure of the “noble savage” in the 16th century, and then to reinvent it unceasingly following every European territorial “discovery”?”

He is now beginning to work his way back through a plethora of tomes written over the course of four centuries. Due to the international influence of French literature, he will also pursue works written in German, Italian and English. Still, he laments the constraints of his multilingualism.

“My research would become even more interesting if I had a better knowledge of both Spanish and Portuguese.”

Côté’s work is not bound by language alone, to contextual the multi-national works he also needs to cross into other disciplines, among these, history, anthropology, art history and ethnography.

Prior to joining Carleton, Côté completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal , and spent a year researching at the Universität des Saarlandes, in Saarbrücken, Germany.