Claude Reichler (NHC Fellow, 1997–98)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1997–98

Claude Reichler focused his research on travel writing in French culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He completed work on an anthology of European travelers in Switzerland, which he edited (with Roland Ruffieux), entitled Le Voyage en Suisse: Anthologie des voyageurs français et européens, de la Renaissance au XXe siècle, in the Bouquins series published by R. Laffont in Paris (1998). He gathered a large amount of information in American ethnohistory about northeastern Indians and worked on the accounts by French travelers in New France, particularly the Jesuit relations of the seventeenth century. He drafted the first part of his projected book Ethnographical Mourning, wrote a postface for Etienne Barilier's, Les enfants‑loups (Zoé, 1997), and completed two forthcoming articles: "Draco Helveticus: Scheuchzer et Saussure: du merveilleux à l'étude ethnographique," for Travaux sur la Suisse des Lumières (Geneva, 1998); and "Voyageurs des siècles anciens," for Quarto, Revue des Archives littéraires suisses (Berne, 1998). During a trip to Japan, sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, he delivered a number of lectures including: "Michel Butor and the American Indians," at the Institut franco‑japonais, Tokyo; "Chateaubriand and Romanticism: A New Consciousness of the Past," for the Department of French Language and Literature at the University of Tokyo; "Chateaubriand and the 'Savage World': Mourning and Enchantment," for the French Department at Keio University, the Department of French Language and Literature at the University of Kyoto, and at the University of Hiroshima; "Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Political Ideas and Geneva," for the Faculty of Political Sciences of Waseda University; and "The Spell of an Image: Origin and Evolution of the 'Swiss Myth' in French and European Culture during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," for the University of Foreign Languages at Nagasaki, and at Seinan‑Gakuin University in Fukuoka.