Speaker: Claire Kramsch, Professor of German and Foreign Language Education, University of California, Berkeley

Biography:

Claire Kramsch is Professor of German and Foreign Language Education at UC Berkeley and Director of the Berkeley Language Center. She teaches second language acquisition and applied linguistics and directs PhD dissertations in the German Department and in the Graduate School of Education. In 1998, she received the Goethe Medal from the Goethe Institute in Weimar for her contributions to cross-cultural understanding between the United States and Europe. In 2002, she received the Distinguished Service Award from the American Modern Language Association as well as the Faculty Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley. She is the past president of the American Association of Applied Linguistics and the past editor of the international journal Applied Linguistics. She has written extensively on language, discourse, and culture in applied linguistics. She is the author of Discourse Analysis and Second Language Teaching (1981), Interaction et discours dans la classe de langue (1984), Reden Mitreden Dazwischenreden. Managing conversations in German (1985), Context and Culture in Language Teaching (1993), Language and Culture (1998). She is the editor of Redrawing the Boundaries of Language Study (Heinle 1995) and Language Acquisition and Language Socialization. Ecological Perspectives (Continuum 2002). She is currently writing a book on The multilingual subject.

Title: "Discourses of Liberation and Collaboration in Vichy France"

Abstract:

Taking as a case study the German occupation of France  between 1940 and 1945, and drawing on Michel de Certeau’s theoretical analysis of the Practices of Everyday Life (1974), this paper examines the strategies deployed by the German occupation forces to win the hearts and minds of the occupied, and the tactics used by the occupied to accommodate to, collaborate with, resist or subvert the language of the enemy in all its manifestations. Whether encoded in French or in German, the language of the ‘enemy’ is an insidious combination of linguistic events, discursive and semiotic practices, and subjective representations and memories that engage both the self and the other, identities and identifications, historic facts and myths. Of particular interest is the semiotic guerrilla warfare waged by both sides as they resignify each other’s symbols in order to give legitimacy to their construction of social reality. The resulting entanglements are complex and they do not end with the end of the occupation.