May 8, 2016 Peter Brooks to Discuss 1871 "Bloody Week" of Paris, June 2

The events of Paris’s “Bloody Week,” May 21 to 28, 1871, the photographs of the ruined city and the aftermath, will be the subject of a lecture by scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks at the Library of Congress on June 2.

The lecture, “1871: The Ruins of Paris,” will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, June 2, in room 119 on the first floor of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not needed.

Brooks is a comparative literature professor now serving as a distinguished visiting scholar at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and the Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

At the Kluge Center, Brooks is researching a book project on novelist Gustave Flaubert and his novel “Sentimental Education,” written on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, which led in turn to the insurgency of the Paris Commune. Flaubert visited the ruins of Paris after the bloody repression of the Commune, the radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. Flaubert claimed that had society understood his novel, published some months earlier, the destruction would never have happened. Brooks will explore the events of 1871, the photographs of the city that were created for tourists, and the role of photography in the historiography of the moment. Representative photographs will illustrate the lecture.

Brooks was the founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. He also held the position of lecturer in the Yale Law School on several occasions. From 2003-2006, he was University Professor at the University of Virginia, teaching in the English Department and its School of Law, where he founded the Program in Law and Humanities. He is the author of several books, including “Henry James Goes to Paris” (2007), winner of the 2008 Christian Gauss Award, “Realist Vision” (2005), “Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature” (2000), and “Reading for the Plot” (1984).

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources, and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.

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