The idea to write this book was born out of my empathy for others who are suffering like I have. After traveling so much during my youth and suffering from the emotional trauma of constantly being harshly bullied, I finally settled in New York City for many years, where I started volunteering for the Red Cross about ten years ago. This launched my whole career in translation and interpretation and made me start to write poems after living and surviving cancer.
French Prose in 2000 stems in some important measure from work presented in September 1998 at the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990’s held at Dalhousie University. A good number of papers given at that time, and since revisited in the light of exchanges, join here certain others specifically written for the purposes of this book. Together they constitute a wide-ranging and modally varied interrogation of the current state of French and francophone prose writing, its multifaceted manners, its richly divergent fascinations, its many theoretical or philosophical groundings. The book thus ceaselessly moves its attention from fictional biography to the roman noir, from the writing of Glissant and Chamoiseau to that of the étonnants voyageurs, from the powerful discourse of women such as Chawaf or Condé, Ernaux or Germain, Sallenave or Kristeva, to that of writers as diverse in their modes as Le Clézio and Quignard, Duras and Renaud Camus. All chapters focus, however, in near-exclusive measure, on the prose production of the last ten or twelve years.
Described by some as a “necropolis for babies,” the province of Quebec in the early twentieth century recorded infant mortality rates, particularly among French-speaking Catholics, that were among the highest in the Western world. This “bleeding of the nation” gave birth to a vast movement for child welfare that paved the way for a medicalization of childbearing. In Babies for the Nation, basing her analysis on extensive documentary research and more than fifty interviews with mothers, Denyse Baillargeon sets out to understand how doctors were able to convince women to consult them, and why mothers chose to follow their advice. Her analysis considers the medical discourse of the time, the development of free services made available to mothers between 1910 and 1970, and how mothers used these services. Showing the variety of social actors involved in this process (doctors, nurses, women’s groups, members of the clergy, private enterprise, the state, and the mothers themselves), this study delineates the alliances and the conflicts that arose between them in a complex phenomenon that profoundly changed the nature of childbearing in Quebec. Un Québec en mal d’enfants: La médicalisation de la maternité 1910—1970 was awarded the Clio-Québec Prize, the Lionel Groulx-Yves-Saint-Germain Prize, and the Jean-Charles-Falardeau Prize. This translation by W. Donald Wilson brings this important book to a new readership.
