Helen Solterer – författare

Ranging from France to Russia to America in the throes of world war and revolution, Medieval Roles for Modern Times investigates how critics and creators made medieval culture a part of their modern world through theatrical role-playing. On both the Left and the Right across Europe, partisans used drama to express the ideological struggles dividing them. Helen Solterer explores the case of the Théophiliens, a Parisian youth group in the 1930s and 1940s whose members included Roland Barthes and Alain Resnais. The performances of the troupe—from the Adam Play to the Mystery of the Passion—captured the paradoxes of the French Republic as it was breaking apart. The book focuses on two key figures of the Théophilien troupe: founder Gustave Cohen and actor Moussa Abadi. Under Vichy, Cohen went into exile in America, while Abadi went underground. He established a network for refugee families and taught Jewish children role-playing skills to help them evade detection by the Gestapo. Abadi helped save hundreds of children from deportation, and his story of theater and Jewish resistance has never before been published.

Can words do damage? For medieval culture, the answer was unambiguously yes. And as Helen Solterer contends, in French medieval culture the representation of women exemplified the use of injurious language. Solterer investigates the debates over women between masters and their disciples. Across a broad range of Old French literature to the early modern Querelle des femmes, she shows how the figure of the female respondent became an instrument for disputing the dominant models of representing women. The female respondent exploited the criterion of injurious language that so preoccupied medieval masters, and she charged master poets ethically and legally with libel. Solterer's work thus illuminates an early, decisive chapter in the history of defamation.

An age-old, revolutionary design for keeping time by the moon: the almanach outlines a plan for your day-to-day – commemorating notable events in human history while forecasting others in the natural world. In this novel work of criticism, Helen Solterer adopts the form of the almanach to make the case for fiction as experimental work composed in time. Each entry examines a major fictional form taking shape in French around 1400 and its ensuing transformations and interventions in other epochs and cultures: the political vision of writer-activist Edith Thomas with Christine de Pizan, the personal poetry of Langston Hughes and Pauli Murray with Villon, the theater of Samuel Beckett and Bernard-Marie Koltès with those devising the first mystery plays. Solterer takes us from Turkey where almanachs were assembled, across the European continent, to circumpolar Arctic zones where Inuit Thule hunters incised graphic narrative in ivory that Inuit artists innovate today.These "timely fictions," as Solterer dubs many of them, engage generations of creators at an unpredictable tempo; at any given moment, timely fictions exist as the sum of multiple experiments in time. They are a type of compost. Over years, writers and artists mix materials to fertilize the work they make for various different circumstances. By both unearthing and recycling this model, Solterer composes a wholly inventive natural history of fiction.

An age-old, revolutionary design for keeping time by the moon: the almanach outlines a plan for your day-to-day – commemorating notable events in human history while forecasting others in the natural world. In this novel work of criticism, Helen Solterer adopts the form of the almanach to make the case for fiction as experimental work composed in time. Each entry examines a major fictional form taking shape in French around 1400 and its ensuing transformations and interventions in other epochs and cultures: the political vision of writer-activist Edith Thomas with Christine de Pizan, the personal poetry of Langston Hughes and Pauli Murray with Villon, the theater of Samuel Beckett and Bernard-Marie Koltès with those devising the first mystery plays. Solterer takes us from Turkey where almanachs were assembled, across the European continent, to circumpolar Arctic zones where Inuit Thule hunters incised graphic narrative in ivory that Inuit artists innovate today.These "timely fictions," as Solterer dubs many of them, engage generations of creators at an unpredictable tempo; at any given moment, timely fictions exist as the sum of multiple experiments in time. They are a type of compost. Over years, writers and artists mix materials to fertilize the work they make for various different circumstances. By both unearthing and recycling this model, Solterer composes a wholly inventive natural history of fiction.