Spring 2013
Around the Quads
Five Minutes with ... Elisabeth Ladenson
Elisabeth Ladenson Ph.D. ’94 GSAS is a professor of French and comparative literature as well as the general editor of Columbia’s Romanic Review, a journal devoted to the study of Romance literatures. Born and raised on the Upper West Side, Ladenson earned a B.A. from Penn in French and comparative literature and an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia in French and Romance philology. She taught at Virginia from 1992–2005, after which she returned to Columbia; she has been chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology since September. Ladenson’s books include Proust’s Lesbianism (1999) and Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (2007).
What did you want to be growing up?
You mean, did I dream of being an academic when I was a child? No, no; are there kids who dream of becoming academics? I was going to be a writer, and I guess I have become that in the sense that I write books. But I thought I was going to be a novelist or something of that sort. Just a writer, capital W.
What drew you to studying French?
When I went to college, I thought that I was never going to take French again because I’d been forced to take it for something like 12 years growing up. My first name is spelled with an “S” instead of a “Z” because part of my mother’s family is French and she was a Francophile. But I quickly eliminated several other majors and also discovered a course called “French Cinema and the Novel,” in which we watched films and read French lit but we also read theory, including Freud. And shortly after that, I learned that — even though I was at Penn — my financial aid package could be applied to the Columbia program at Reid Hall. So I went off to France and didn’t come back for two years, at which point I spoke French well and had discovered French literature and had too many credits to major in anything else.
Photo: Isabelle ChagnonWhat do you teach?
Graduate and undergraduate 19th-century and early
20th-
century French literature courses. I also taught Lit Hum for four years and
would like to get back to it. But what I would really like is to take a
crack at CC and then go for the trifecta, with Art Hum. I have a great
commitment to the Core. … In fact, when I came back here, the first thing I
said in my interview was, “I really, really regret not having taught Lit Hum as
a graduate student.” I was not whistling Dixie, as they say; I really wanted to
do that. And it has not been a disappointment. It’s enriched my scholarship so
much.
Shifting to your area of specialization, what would you say to someone who asks, “Why should I focus on this era in French literature?”
I don’t think it’s a particularly attractive time; it’s not that I like the period, I like the authors who were bothered by the period and who responded to it with great novels and poetry. Pre-revolutionary France is a much more interesting and vibrant culture. But it’s oppression and awfulness that produces great literature, often. And the dreary 19th and early 20th century produced incredible literature: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Balzac, even the crazy Zola, Proust, Colette.
You’re working on a book about Colette now. Tell me about that.
The book is my attempt to break out of a strictly academic kind of writing. And Colette, she’s the author of Gigi; she published her first book in 1900 and her last book in 1949. Her first books were published under her husband’s name, and they were kind of salacious. She also had a career as a journalist and as a music hall dancer. …
She’s a brilliant writer but I’m also interested in her career. She seemed to enjoy provocation and doing the opposite of what people expected of her. She bared her left breast on stage, creating a huge scandal. She seems to have been bisexual; she engaged in a protracted kiss with her female lover dressed in drag on the stage of the Moulin Rouge in 1907. But she also became the president of the Académie Goncourt, which was and still is France’s most prestigious literary society. By the time she died, she was one of the most respected writers in France. The analogy that I finally came up with is it’s as though Lady Gaga were to cap off her career by winning the Nobel Prize.
What’s your favorite place to be?
My girlfriend and I bought a house in Normandy last year. … Of course, there are lots of places I haven’t been that would be nice but I find that the older I get, the less I enjoy traveling. I like my living room quite a lot.
What books are on your nightstand?
An Irish novel, Skippy Dies, that’s quite good.
What would you do if you weren’t a professor?
I guess I lack imagination in the sense that books are all I’ve ever cared about and I can’t really imagine caring about anything else. In that sense I have the best job in the world for me, because I get to write and read and talk about books.
But what does alarm me a little bit is that they are affected by digital technology. Yes, e-readers are wonderful innovations but I love books as physical objects. I don’t want to read something that can run out of battery power or break. I can carry a book around and if it gets wet, it’s still readable. Yes, they’re heavy, but I can write in them, I can dog ear the pages. The demise of bookstores alarms me because browsing in bookstores has been one of the great pleasures of my life. I shudder to imagine a world in which one can’t do that.
Interview: Alexis Tonti ’11 Arts
Photo: Isabelle Chagnon