[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] In “Celia Britton, a pioneering scholar who pushed the boundaries of French studies,” Charles Forsdick (Scotsman) draws attention to the scholarly trajectory of Celia Margaret Britton (20 March 1946 – 18 June 2024) in Europe. The following is an excerpt from this obituary essay.
Celia Britton, who has died aged 78, was a pioneering scholar and teacher of modern French studies and was responsible for some of the most important developments in the field in recent years. She was appointed Carnegie Professor of French in 1991. AberdeenShe held the position of Professor of French Studies until 2002, one of the longest-standing and most prestigious in the UK, and built her department into an internationally renowned centre for French studies.
After studying the Nouveau Roman and French cinema early in her career, Celia has published extensively on French cinema for over 30 years. Caribbean Celia has conducted extensive research in the fields of literature, thought and culture, particularly on the Martinican writer and thinker Édouard Glissant, and played a central role in the development of postcolonial studies in modern languages, particularly during her time at Aberdeen. Celia’s academic brilliance and ability to bring the theoretical and conceptual rigour required by an emerging field of research have been widely praised, leading to her being elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000 and receiving the Chevalier of the Academie Palmes de l’Academy from the French government in 2003.
For the first 20 years of her career, Claude Simon: Writing What You See (1987) and The New Romance: Fiction, Theory, Politics (1992), Celia built a reputation as a leading authority on avant-garde novels by authors such as 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, which would lead to a lifelong study of the region’s literature and culture. At the time, French studies was still largely orthodox and metropolitan-focused. Celia’s work significantly challenged this state of affairs. In two books she wrote during her time in Aberdeen:Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Language and Strategies of Resistance (1999) and Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French Caribbean Thought (2002), she brought remarkable theoretical and conceptual rigor to the study of Caribbean literature and thought in French. Celia’s contribution is twofold: not only did she bring the field of French studies to a much-needed theoretical rigor, but she also exposed the Anglocentrism of postcolonial studies by opening it to the voices of other linguistic traditions. In her two subsequent books, Community Sense in French Caribbean Novels (2008) and Language and literary form in French Caribbean literature (2014), which also focuses on Marie-se Condé and other writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, reveals the breadth of Celia’s interests. One of the real strengths of Celia’s work is her ability to draw a range of writers and thinkers into dialogue, and, through her defence of Glissant in particular, she has made clear the strong need to take French Caribbean literature and thought seriously as a coherent contribution to world culture in its own right. [. . .]
Celia arrived at the University of Aberdeen in 1991, at a time when there were very few female professors. During her tenure, which lasted more than a decade, she established and directed a vibrant Centre for French Studies, which not only brought the most talented students and scholars in the field to Aberdeen, but also guaranteed visits from leading authors in the field, including Glissant himself, who by that point had become a good friend and visited her at her home in Stonehaven. Teaching, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level, was always as important to Celia as research. She was an exceptionally gifted educator and cared deeply about all her students. At Aberdeen, she established a course in French Literature and Culture that was particularly innovative at the time. Celia’s final appointment was as Professor of French at University College London, where she served from 2003 to 2011. [. . .]
Read the full article below https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/obituaries-celia-britton-pioneering-scholar-who-pushed-the-boundaries-of-french-studies-4742876
See also “Homage to Celia Britton (1946-2024)” by Loïc Sery. 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
