Sébastien Côté

Biography

Before joining the Department of French at Carleton University in 2006, I studied French literature and German at Université Laval and Universtät des Saarlandes (Saarbrücken, Germany), completing a M.A. thesis on the French interwar: Quand l’authenticité devient politique: Gilles de Pierre Drieu la Rochelle ou l’esthétique de l’ambiguïté. Some years later, I defended a dissertation in Comparative Literature (Université de Montréal) entitled Discours ethnologique et dissidence chez Carl Einstein et Michel Leiris: autour de la revue DOCUMENTS. Since my arrival at Carleton, I have been pursuing research on Michel Leiris and the ethnographic discourse in 20th century French literature, but my focus has gradually shifted toward the written heritage of New France (1534-1763), or what I call le patrimoine lettré de la Nouvelle-France.

Research Interest

Representations of the Americas in French fiction written before 1800 (plays, short stories, novels) The written heritage of New France in Quebec and Canadian literary history Travel writing in the Americas (16th-20th century), and the archeology of the noble savage 20th-century French literature (1900-1950): Giono, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Bataille, Leiris, Breton, Céline, Nizan, Drieu la Rochelle 20th-century cultural and intellectual history in France (literature, political commitment, ethnology, art, and the avant-garde)