Dr. Marla Epp finds excitement in the day-to-day. The associate professor in the Department of Humanities specializes in French literature, and the way that everyday life is depicted within it, specifically when it comes to average people researching historical moments.
“What I was really interested in is the figure of the historical investigator,” Dr. Epp explained on a recent episode of the Office of Research Services Research Recast(ed) podcast.
The term “historical investigator,” she says, refers to a contemporary writer who inserts themselves into their own novel. The narrative is divided between their current life doing archival research, and the moment in history that they’re piecing together.
Dr. Epp says the format gives the reader a guide to follow, not only through the historical moment, but also through the work and effort that goes into research, and how authors choose which details are important enough to include.
In particular, she focuses on French author Christine Montalbetti’s approach. Dr. Epp discovered one of her works, Mon ancêtre Poisson, at a conference. The book primarily deals with a version of Montalbetti researching her ancestor’s work in the Natural Science Museum in Paris, where she’s able to look at the same samples they used and walk the same paths – despite hundreds of years separating them. But Dr. Epp found even more to uncover in that connection across time.
“She has this style where she looks in really close detail at all the things around her,” Dr. Epp explains. “She would imagine the air coming in and then going into, like, the lungs, and then the bronchioles, and then coming back out. And then she would imagine her great grandfather breathing in the same air, and the fact that sort of there's this really deep connection amongst living beings that we don't always pay attention to.”
Dr. Epp says that her research focuses on close reading and paying attention to the use of language like those extreme details in Montalbetti’s work. In the classroom, she encourages her students to take note of how word choices and syntax evoke specific effects so that they’re able to use those skills in their own writing. In the case of Mon ancêtre Poisson, she was able to discuss an excerpt in a 300-level French literature class about depictions of Montreal and Paris, where they found the author’s depictions of gardens within a city to be particularly captivating.
La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses is another of Montalbetti’s works that Dr. Epp has studied, focusing on the author’s research into the Atlantis space shuttle flight using NASA’s archives. The author’s voice is still distinctly a version of Montalbetti herself – she makes it clear that she is a French woman living in France while telling a story of Cape Canaveral in Florida, which gives her a unique perspective on the events she’s studying. That perspective is one of the reasons that Dr. Epp enjoys her studies into French literature, and encourages her students to read in other languages – it helps to introduce them to other cultural outlooks, locations and insights that they might otherwise miss out on.
While detailing life on the space station for the astronauts, Montalbetti also explains life back on Earth with the same attention, celebrating the minute details of life that we often gloss over, according to Dr. Epp. The same thing applies to Montalbetti’s way of setting scenes.
“She gives all this detail about the space launch, and she imagines all the people at Cape Canaveral waiting for the rocket to launch. But in this space in Florida, there [are] all these animals, too – dolphins, trout and manatees, and pelicans and seagulls,” says Dr. Epp.
The shift in perspective away from more common facts about those moments can help the reader see both history and the present in a whole new way.
“Her novel is about changing our focus and thinking about how there are so many different creatures around us, and how we breathe in the same air as all of the living creatures that are around us in the world.”