David F. Bell (NHC Fellow, 1990–91)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1990–91

David F. Bell finished Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text and translated and edited a series of essays by the French philosopher Clément Rosset entitled Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real, to be published in the Odéon series by Oxford University Press in 1992. He also wrote the introduction to the volume. He lectured on "Chance, Tactic, Strategy" at the University of Colorado and on "La Pensée statistique chez Balzac" at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He delivered the following papers: "Indeterminate Bifurcations: Problems of Differentiation in Zola's Germinal," at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium held at the University of Oklahoma; "Le Cousin Pons: Nar-ration and Superstition" at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference held at the University of Kentucky; and "Transition: From Practice to Convention" at the annual colloquium of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature held in Montreal. He was respondent at the SubStance Interdisciplinary Colloquium on "Knowledge and the City" held at the University of California, Santa Barbara.