Ellen M. McClure (Ph.D. University of Michigan
Assistant Professor of French
(312) 996-5588 ellenmc@uic.edu
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Ellen McClure's research and writing interests lie in seventeenth-century French literature, politics, and religion. She has recently taught courses on the nobility in seventeenth-century France and on the history and ideology of the French language. Her first book, Sunspots and the Sun King : Sovereignty and Mediation in Seventeenth-Century France, will be published in 2006 by the University of Illinois Press. It deals with the difficulty, given the inherent incompatibility of the frameworks of sovereignty and legitimacy, of embodying authority in seventeenth-century France, whether in diplomacy, theater, or the king himself. Ellen has also published several articles, on subjects ranging from Racine's Andromaque (in Actes de Dartmouth) and Bérénice (in Philosophy and Literature), to Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme (in Romanic Review). She is currently working on an article dealing with neo-Stoicism in Corneille's Horace and on another treating Cartesian modernity and agency in La Princesse de Clèves. Her next book project, inspired by the Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar she will co-teach in the spring of 2006 on the interactions of Europe and the East during the early modern period, will deal with questions of idolatry and representation in counter-Reformation France.
My book, "Sunspots: Sovereignty and Mediation under Louis XIV" has been accepted for publication by the University of Illinois Press. This project reflects my interest in the intersection of literature, philosophy, religion,
and politics in seventeenth-century France. By examining the contradictions inherent in the claim that the French king is the image of God on earth, and also in the idea that diplomats represent the person of the king abroad, I investigate the crisis in mediation in both politics and literature that characterizes a century best described as transitional.

Publications:

"Sunspots: Sovereignty and Mediation under Louis XIV"

"Une parfaite et sincere bonne correspondance et amiti?: French-Turkish Trade and Artistic Exchange in Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme," in Romanic Review 90.2 (March 1999), 155-166.

"Beyond Gramsci: Richard Hoggart's Neglected Contributions to the British New Left," in Disposition XXI.48 (1996 [1999]): 21-30.

"De werkelijkheid als wapen: Protestantisme en absolutisme onder Lodewijk XIV," in Barend Van Heusden, Elds Jongeneel (eds.), De Spiegel van Stendhal: Over de weergave van de werkelijkheid in literatuur, Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij, 1998, 122-135.

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