Incipitque Semper

It is a pleasure to welcome Scott Gottbreht, who joined us in September as the Editorial Assistant for this issue. His energy, fund of ideas, and sustaining good humor have been much appreciated. We are also indebted to our (perforce anonymous) external referees for their generous guidance in assessing contributions. As ever, Myrta Byrum of the Johns Hopkins Press has played a vital role in seeing this issue through production with her customary fidelity, patience, and professional wisdom.

MLN Celebrations

The 2007 French issue has, under the editorship of Jacques Neefs, a lead colloquium dedicated to a 150th birthday celebration for Madame Bovary, whose long gestation and difficult delivery, culminating with the publication of the book in April 1857, were so famously vexed. The title for the essays gathered around this event suggests that it was also a double birthday: "Madame Bovary, le roman comme art moderne."

The Italian graduate students at Hopkins, under the leadership of Igor Candido and Francesco Caruso, are planning another celebratory event, a convegno scheduled for May 2008 to mark the 50th anniversary of John Freccero's completion of his graduate work here. The participants will be drawn largely from the ranks of Freccero's former students and the terrain will thus cover three generations of Dante studies. Some or all of the papers will appear, with the encouragement of Walter Stephens, in the following Italian issue of this journal. Requests for information about the colloquium may be addressed to Igor Candido [igor.candido@jhu.edu].

Christian Delacampagne (1949–2007): Ave atque Vale

With his death in Paris on May 20th the editors mourn the loss of a cherished colleague, co-editor, and friend, Christian Delacampagne. Having joined the French faculty here in 2002, he rapidly became a collegial and animating spirit at Hopkins. In addition to completing three new books while courageously coping with his final illness, he contributed an account of Jacques Derrida's "political itinerary," informed by a personal acquaintance dating back to his own arrival at the ENS in 1969, as part of a local memorial that he helped to initiate; the text appears among other tributes to Derrida in the 2006 French issue of this journal. In the same issue he also published an essay ("Retour sur Nekrassov") that emanated from a 100th birthday colloquium on Sartre convened at Dartmouth the preceding year. Both contributions extend his abiding concern with the vital intersections of literary, philosophic, and political issues in contemporary life. (A prolific author in many registers, for a period of thirty years he had been a regular contributor to Le Monde with columns on human rights and current conflicts.)

Stephen Nichols, chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, in the comment below captures something of this unflagging intellectual and moral engagement in all of Christian's work; he also suggests why he will be so sorely missed by so many:

Christian Delacampagne's many friends throughout the world can attest to his determination not simply to do philosophy but to live it. Whether consciously or not, he followed the dictum of Marcus Aurelius: 'Whoever does not know the world, will never be able to find himself in it. Whoever does not know why he was made, will never know either himself or the world.'

Nichols adds, "Christian's time in the department was tragically brief, but it was long enough to show that he did indeed know the world of Hopkins, his purpose in it, and how he could serve it."

Christian's friends in the Boston area, where he had served as the cultural attaché for the French Foreign Service and taught at Tufts, have scheduled a memorial gathering at the Harvard Center for European Studies on December 11th. To their remembrances of his Boston years we add the memories and gratitude of those who knew him—too briefly—in Baltimore. The 2008 French issue will be dedicated to the enduring presence of his life and work.

The Return of The Hopkins Review

On October 2nd the 'New Series' of The Hopkins Review, a journal from the University's past was inaugurated, after a hiatus of...