Department of English

• Monday, April 27, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

On Monday, April 27, we are thrilled to welcome Roger Chartier (Collège de France/ University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled “Revolution and Erasure. France 1789.”

Prof. Chartier writes:

 "This presentation will be a contribution to the 2026 Revolutionary Spring Term at Penn, along with the exhibition organized by Lynne Farrington and John Pollack, The Time to Right all Wrongs: France, Haiti and Philadelphia in a Revolutionary Age, and the recent conference The Revolutionary Age: France, Haiti, and America. Its topic and title were inspired by the recent acquisition by our Library of a small book, printed at the end of the year 1789: La Cocarde Citoyenne. Etrenne, Dédié à la Nation, published by Jubert, Doreur Rue St Jacques in Paris. This small booklet brought together, in the same binding, three elements: a narrative of the events that occurred between July and October 1789 (with twenty-five pages devoted to July 14 and the taking of the Bastille), fifty erasable pages allowing one to write, to erase and to write again, and a calendar for 1790. This modest book allows us to link two histories: the history often presented in our Material Text Seminar of erasable writing (made possible on English writing tables, Spanish librillos de memoria or French tablettes) and the history of the erasure of the ancien régime made spectacular by the demolition of the Bastille as it is described and interpreted in numerous pamphlets published in 1789, all sharing the same trope of the despotic fortress already erased even before its actual destruction."

Roger Chartier is Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France and Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His more recent books are Um mundo sem livros e sem livrarias?, São Paulo, Letraviva, 2020; Editer et traduire. Mobilité et matérialité des textes (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), Paris, Gallimard et Le Seuil, Collection Hautes Etudes, 2021; Won in Translation. Textual Mobility in Early Modern Europe, tr. John H. Pollack, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; Cartes et fictions (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), Paris, Editions du Collège de France, 2022, and L’histoire en mutation. Lectures, Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2024.

After Monday's talk, the workshop will reconvene in the fall. In the meantime, recordings of earlier presentations are available on our Youtube channel. Thank you for your participation and support.