In the wake of the appearance of La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions, ou sentences et maximes morales in 1664, there occurred a thirty-year boom in the writing and publication of worldly maxims.  This talk explores the ways in which those texts were the product of a critically neglected collaborative process: maxims were transmitted by hybrid oral and written means and were “versioned” by a generation of worldly writers.

Erec R. Koch is Professor of French and of Global Early Modern Studies at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. He has served as associate provost at Baruch College, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Hunter College, and Dean of Humanities and the Arts at the City College of New York (CCNY). A specialist in early modern French literature and culture, Dr. Koch has published on Pascal and Jansenism, the history and theory of rhetoric, French Classical theatre, the French moralists, philosophy and the history of ideas, theories of the passions, and the representation of the body. Dr. Koch is the author of Pascal and Rhetoric: Figural and Persuasive Language in the Scientific Treatises, the Provinciales, and the Pensées (1997) and of The Aesthetic Body: Sensibility, Passion, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France (2008) and the editor of Classical Unities: Place, Time, and Action (2002).He is currently working on a study of literary recycling in early-modern France. He has received grants and fellowships from agencies including the ACLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. 

Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program