In "Returning to Reims," French author Didier Eribon reflects upon his father, his hometown, and the working-class world he left behind 30 years ago to carve out his identity as an urban intellectual, and as a gay man. “On thinking the matter," he wrote, "it doesn’t seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet.”
Eribon, now a professor at the University of Amiens in France, will talk about this book at MIT on Monday, April 28 at 5 p.m. in Building 4-231. He will converse with Michael Lucey, who translated the book from the French, and is a professor at University of California at Berkeley.
Eribon is perhaps best known for his biography, "Michel Foucault," first published in 1989. He is also the author of "Insult and the Making of the Gay Self" (1999), as well as numerous other books of critical theory.
The event is free and open to the public and is presented by the MIT Research Seminar in French and Francophone Studies and MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures. The talk will be in English.
