External News

Annie Heminway, CALA’s Advanced Creative Writing: French instructor, has been an international literary advisor for the Montreal Literary Festival Blue Metropolis for over 15 years. At this year’s festival, she will be hosting creative writing workshops with her NYUSPS students and other American and Quebecois participants at the Montreal Hotel 10, in presence of three renowned French writers. More information on each workshop can be found below.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?
Thursday, April 27, from 3: 30 to 4:30 PM

The protagonist of Marcus Malte’s novel is a nameless mute boy, constantly on the run. The boy’s odyssey, a quest for human benevolence lasting three decades, from 1908 to 1938, takes the reader on a journey throughout France. In Le garçon, a story of initiation which also a highly critical chronicle of a specific period in French history, Malte uses a novel type of language to create a philosophical and political vision of life, adding a musical dimension to his style: “Liszt saved him, but Mendelsohn brought him happiness.”

Writing workshop, led by Annie Heminway, in the presence of Marcus Malte, recipient of the prix Femina for 2016

OF EXILE AND COURAGE
Friday, April 28, from 9:30 AM to 12:30

In Romain Gary s’en va-t-en-guerre, as in L’exercice de la médecine, Laurent Seksik blends individual destinies and History, also shedding light on his protagonist’s inner life. l’Histoire. Walking in Romain Gary’s shoes, Seksik illuminates the eminent writer’s  struggle to imaginatively transform his father’s painful absence into a spectral presence. Furthermore, Seksik suggests that the key to Gary’s genius, his exaltations, and despair may be found in the figurative presence of his absent father.

Writing workshop, led by Annie Heminway, in the presence of Laurent Seksik, recipient of the Parisien’s best French novel 2013 award and the prix littéraire de Psychanalyse, 2014.

REMEMBERING THE COLORS OF OUR CHILDHOOD
Saturday, April 29, from 9: 30 AM to 12: 30 PM             

How do we remember colors, in all their sociopolitical, physical, symbolic, literary, and artistic manifestations? Writing with charming spontaneity, Michel Pastoureau nostalgically traces the history of color in France, from the 1950s to the present. How do we, accustomed to a seemingly infinite variety of colors, remember the colors of our past. This book is a dream in which we will see the colors of our memories.

Writing workshop, led by Annie Heminway, in the presence de Michel Pastoureau, recipient of the prix Médicis for essays in 2010

BEING A FIREFIGHTER: AN ARDENT LIFE
Sunday 30 April 30, from 9 :30 AM to 12 :30 PM

Try to imagine—if this is not your profession professional firefighter—a firefighter’s heroic life. You are a fifteen-year veteran in Montreal’s Firehouse 15. You have witnessed many tragedies. You have extinguished a fire at Avenue du Parc, you have fiercely struggled to contain a forest fire in the Laurentians, you have helped many people—and cats—whose names you have forgotten. Looking back your career, you recall many powerful moments, painful and joyful. Relying on a few excerpts which will be provided, you will—unconstrained by the traditional regularities of time and place– recount a memorable experience, writing in the first person, or retelling an imaginary colleague’s story.

Workshop led by Annie Heminway in the presence of  firefighters/aspiring writers celebrating Montreal’s 375^th Anniversary.

View the full festival program here: http://bluemetropolis.org/2014festival/

Want to learn French or sharpen your creative writing skills in English? Take a course at CALA this summer!

Culture and Language Bootcamp for Work and Study Abroad: French

French: Accelerated I and II

French II

French: Spoken Contemporary

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Advanced Writing Workshop

Character Development in Fiction

Five Weeks, One Great Short Story

New York Stories: A Writing Workshop

The Fundamentals of Fiction Writing

Annie will also be offering a new French course this Fall–stay tuned for details!

Guest post by CALA instructor Jason Schulman, who will be teaching his new course, The American White Working Class and Modern Conservatism, this Spring.

For most people, academic debates generate little interest because they appear to be so detached from the real world.

But one debate—a multi-year back-and-forth between Thomas Frank and Larry Bartels—combined questions about methodology with real world implications.  At issue was how to define the white working class.

It started in 2004, when Frank, a journalist and history writer, published the best-selling book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.  Frank identified a surprising political trend in which white working-class voters in Kansas were increasingly favoring the Republican Party, despite the fact that its economic platform would largely benefit the wealthy.  He argued that these voters went right, leaving the Democratic Party, because of culture and values, not economics.

In 2005, Bartels, then a professor at Princeton University and now a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, gave a presentation at the American Political Science Association conference, a gathering of top political scientists from around the nation.  In his talk, “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” Bartels challenged Frank’s narrative, arguing that the white working class had actually not abandoned the Democratic Party.  In fact, he argued, white voters in the bottom third of the income distribution were actually becoming more Democratic, while middle- and upper-income whites were the ones shifting their allegiance to the Republican Party.

Frank responded in a piece entitled, “Class is Dismissed,” explaining that he defined the white working class by not by income, but by education (e.g., those without a college degree).  Bartels was wrong, and his analysis of what he saw in Kansas held.

In 2006, Bartels published “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, again challenging Frank, and arguing that the only decrease in support for the Democrats by the white working class was in the South.

The two went back and forth in a few other venues.

The debate mattered for more than academic bragging rights.  It also had implications for the Democrats’ strategy.  If Frank was right, that culture had driven working-class whites to the Republicans, then the Democrats should move to the right on “values” issues (to the degree possible). If Bartels was right, and the white working class generally was still strongly Democratic, there was no need for more conservative or centrist social issue policies.

So it really depends how we define the white working class.

We’ll be reading Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas and Bartels’s “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?” the first week of a new course at CALA, The American White Working Class and Modern Conservatism. https://www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/courses/HIST1-CE9117-the-american-white-working-class-and-modern-conservatism.html