Professor Celia Britton
It is with immense sadness that we learned of the sudden death recently at the age of 78 of Professor Celia Britton, a towering figure in French and Francophone Studies, and one of the most distinguished past presidents of the Society for French Studies from 1996 to 1998. Those of us old enough and fortunate enough to attend will remember the exceptional fiftieth anniversary conference she organised at the Sorbonne in September 1997, with keynotes by Julia Kristeva, Régis Debray and Geoffrey Bennington. She served as chair of the RAE French Panel in 2001, and after her election to the British Academy in 2000, as chair of her section. She was awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Government in 2003.
Celia quickly established a reputation in her early years as a leading critic of the avant-garde, and of the experimental fiction of nouveau roman writers such as Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. Her Claude Simon: Writing the Visible (1987) is still one of the best studies of Simon’s work. A subsequent book, The Nouveau Roman: Fiction, Theory and Politics from 1992, confirmed Celia’s reputation as one of the most subtle and insightful readers of contemporary French fiction, as well as French cinema and literary theory. By the mid-1990s her focus shifted to the French Caribbean, and over the next three decades she became one of the leading critics of French Caribbean literature, most notably that of Edouard Glissant, with whom she developed a close friendship. Her groundbreaking publications included Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (1999) and Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French-Caribbean Thought (2002). In these, and other volumes, she brought a sharper analytical rigour to the field of Francophone studies, and opened it up to postcolonial theory, which to that point has been largely Anglo-centric in focus. Two further volumes, The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (2008) and Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing (2014), extended the breadth of her interest to Maryse Condé and other writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe. In latter years she was heavily involved in the Glissant Translation project, for which her Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity and Treatise on the Whole-World appeared in 2020. Her English-language version of Glissant’s La Cohée du Lamentin, completed shortly before her death, will be published posthumously.
Celia taught at King’s College London, and for many years at the University of Reading, before being appointed in 1991 to the Carnegie professorship at the University of Aberdeen, where she stayed until 2002. Under her leadership it became one of the most outstanding departments for French studies in the UK, achieving the highest score of 5*A in ‘old currency’ in successive Research Assessment Exercises. She moved subsequently to University College London from 2003 and 2011, where she continued to hold a post as Emeritus Professor upon retirement.
As a colleague and dear friend at Aberdeen where our own professional trajectories merged, it was one of the greatest privileges of my own career to collaborate with Celia on many projects, to have her close at hand as one of the best possible rôle models an up and coming researcher could hope for, and to co-teach with her on our Francophone Honours courses, in which Aberdeen also led the way many years before ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ became a buzzword. She brought the same ethical integrity, sensitivity and attention to detail, conceptual rigour, and penetrating intelligence to her teaching, and to her care for her students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, as she did to her brilliant research.
She will be deeply missed by all who knew her and her work. A fuller tribute to Celia and more substantial appreciation of her work will appear in French Studies in due course.
Michael Syrotinski, University of Glasgow