Dr. Olivia Choplin, an assistant professor of French, has published an article in The American Review of Canadian Studies, Vol. 44, Issue 1, 2014.
<p>Choplin’s article was published on line on March 19, 2014 and is available in the print version of the journal volume 44, Issue 1, pp. 1-14.</p>
[/caption]Dr. Choplin specializes in Québecois theater and psychoanalytic theory among other research and teaching interests. She teaches French Theater in Production every other Winter Term (offered Winter 2015; prereq FRE 222).
Her article, titled “Staging the Structure of Traumatic Experience in Michel Tremblay’s À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou,” examines one of Michel Tremblay’s earliest plays, in order to demonstrate how À toi’s unique theatrical structure opens a space for profound reflections on the nature of psychic reality as it coexists beside objective reality. Defying naturalistic tendencies (despite realistic subject matter and linguistic style), Tremblay’s depiction of the family drama of Marie-Louise, Léopold, Manon and Carmen offers a poignant metaphorical representation of the psychic effects of traumatic events. Through a reading of the play’s text and its scenic structure, it analyzes how Tremblay collapses time on stage in order to establish the theatrical space on another plane of “realism,” demonstrating how the structure of the text itself offers a theory for the functioning of trauma.