Cécile Alduy (French, Stanford)

Speakers): Cécile Alduy (French, Stanford)

*Update: Please note the change in venue to Room 252 in Pigott Hall (Building 260).
 
Since she took over the National Front in 2011, Marine Le Pen has carried the far right party to first place, winning an unprecedented 25% of the votes in France’s latest elections. What does she say that resonates
with French voters so strongly? And how did she manage to turn the once infamous “FN” into an almost mainstream party that claims to be the last champion of French republican values?
 
Using text mining software and textual analyses, Cécile Alduy has ciphered more than 500 speeches and texts by Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen to pinpoint exactly how, and on what topics, the daughter’s
discourse differs from that of her father.
 
In this talk, literary studies meet digital humanities and political science to crack the new National Front rhetorical code and uncover the deeper ideological and mythological structures beyond the stylistic
polishing.
 

Co-sponsored by the French Culture Workshop and the Digital Humanities Focal Group
 
 
Cécile Alduy is Associate Professor of French and Director of the French and Italian Department at Stanford. Her research focuses on French Renaissance literature and contemporary French politics and culture. She is the author of The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the "Amours" in Renaissance France (1549-1560) (2007) and, more recently, Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (2015), which uses digital humanities and textual analysis to probe the rhetoric of the National Front. Prof. Alduy is currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Occasion with Dominic Thomas and Bruno Cornellier on “The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and their Aftermath.”