Faculty Profile

Adrianna Paliyenko

e-mail: ampaliye@colby.edu
tel.: 872-3128
office: Lovejoy 325c
homepage: http://www.colby.edu/~ampaliye/index.html

Since coming to Colby in 1989, Adrianna Paliyenko has shared her passion for teaching with students in beginning, intermediate and advanced French classes. She draws broadly from literature, the visual arts, and medicine and integrates technology to engage students in the collaborative study of French culture and the Francophone world of Guadeloupe.

Poetry, one of her other passions, inspires much of her scholarship on literary history and the poetics of influence, literary and medical theories of creative genius, and women's poetic production in the nineteenth century. Paliyenko has a book entitled Mis-reading the Creative Impulse: The Poetic Subject in Rimbaud and Claudel, Restaged (Southern Illinois UP). She has also published articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century French psychiatry, 20th-century poets Apollinaire and Breton, Paris Dada, Descartes and Lacan, and most recently, a series of essays on nineteenth-century French women poets Louise Ackermann, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Marie Krysinska, and Louisa Siefert.

Her current project, with the working title Genius Envy: Anatomies of Exceptional Creativity in 19th-Century France, draws on critical reception, physiology, and psychology to examine how nineteenth-century French women developed their relation to poetic genius in response to literary and medical constructions of a putative lack of genius in women. Paliyenko also has a forthcoming critical edition of Anaïs Ségalas's 1885 provocative novel on the French Antilles after the abolition of slavery, Récits des Antilles: le Bois de la Soufrière, suivis d'un choix de poèmes (l'Harmattan).