On June 12nd, the National Academic Forum for Undergraduates Majoring in French was held at Zhejiang University. Liang Shunyi, a student from the French Department of our college participated in the forum with her graduation thesis named Rebirth in the works of Andre Gide (instructed by Liu Jiping). With her outstanding performance, she won the second place in her group and the second prize of this forum.
The National Academic Forum for Undergraduates Majoring in French is sponsored by the Institute of French Language and Culture of Zhejiang University. Nearly 100 theses of undergraduate from 40 universities across the country participated in the selection. More than 60 papers from top universities in China, such as Peking University, Nanjing University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Shandong University, Sun Yat-sen University, Shanghai International Studies University, and Renmin University of China, were shortlisted for the forum. The members of the jury have gathered top domestic experts and scholars who have expertise in French literature, linguistics, translation studies and region & country studies.
The Jury with Brilliant Experts
Among the nearly one hundred students enrolling in the forum, the French theses of Liang Shunyi and Zha Liuxiang from the French department were accepted by the forum and they participated in the academic report of the literature group. Liang Shunyi and Zha Liuxiang respectively delivered a speech themed Rebirth (Naître à neuf» chez André Gide) in the works of André Gide and From hymn to elegy: the theme of youth in Musset's works (De l'hymne à l'élégie: la jeunesse chez Musset)” , and Liang Shunyi's thesis won the prize.
Gide is one of the representative writers in the French cultural circumstances of the 20th century. He has worked hard all his life and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. In the speech, Liang Shunyi explored the different meanings of rebirth in Gide's works, discovered the inner connection between the writer's self-writing and portrait of human nature, and clarified the basic context of the author's mental change. In the Q&A session, the judges and professors asked questions about the connection between Gide and Christian morality, and the relation between Gide's thought and the deductive method in Descartes' philosophy. With a lot of reading and solid knowledge accumulation in the early stage, Liang Shunyi's answers acquired praise from the judges, and eventually won the second prize of the forum.
According to Liu Jiping, the thesis supervisor, before writing the graduation thesis, Liang Shunyi had read and digested a large number of original French documents for two years, including Gide’s diaries, travel notes, collections of literary criticism, collections of letters, novels, and important documents about the criticism of Gide in French and Gide’s obsessive Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet and other classical French texts, which contain thousands of pages. She took hundreds of pages of reading notes, and her graduation thesis was based on these materials. What's more gratifying than winning a national award is that Liang Shunyi's understanding of Gide demonstrates the ideological integration between her and this celebrated writer; although her style of writing in french is callow, there is something similar to Gide’s writing style between the lines. This seems to be the most valuable point, the instructor commented.
