Last spring, Professor of French, Francophone and Film Studies Eliane DalMolin was approached in Paris by a Professor of Comparative Literature at Fudan University, Shanghai, who was familiar with her work. This professor asked DalMolin to consider a fully funded invitation to Fudan in October 2015 to speak about her past work on Baudelaire and Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Feminist Deconstruction, and her current work on Zoopoetics and Ecolyricism. As Professor DalMolin is keen to point out, “all good stories start in Paris.”

Accompanied by a French philosopher and specialist of Jacques Derrida and René Girard, DalMolin spent two weeks in Shanghai, from October 6 to October 19, where she enjoyed “the best possible conditions and experienced the remarkable Chinese sense of hospitality.”

The invited speakers presented their work in a series of four seminars to a mixed audience of graduate students and professors from all disciplines, both from Fudan and other Universities in Shanghai. Professor DalMolin remarks that the exchanges “were intense, stimulating, rich and all so rewarding.”

The final chapter of the invitation was DalMolin’s participation in a colloquium organized by the Department of Chinese and the Department of Literary Theory, on the topic of “French Theory”. She was asked to open the colloquium with a full review and account on the major proponents of “French Theory,” from Barthes, Lacan, Foucault to Derrida. The second part of her presentation was dedicated to Ecocriticism and Zoopoetics as contemporaries discourses that have inherited from French Theory.

During the colloquium, Professor DalMolin and the other presenter were also interviewed by a journalist from the Wen Hui Daily newspaper, touching on a variety of topics from French theory to the upcoming American presidential elections and world politics.

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