Dr Patrick Levačić will give a lecture at 6.30 p.m. on December 11 in the premises of the Studia Mediterranea Centre of the Split Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (Poljana kraljice Jelene 3, Split). This lecture is thematically related to this project and has been organized in conjunction with the several-years-long programme of public lectures in the Cvito Fisković Centre of the Institute of Art History, Split.
The lecture will consider French travelogue impressions of Dalmatia in the 19th century. At the beginning we shall refer briefly to the travelogue as genre and to the chronological development of the image of Dalmatia before the 19th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, because of the new French rule and the French translation of Alberto Fortis’ Viaggio in Dalmazia, numerous French travellers appeared in the province.
The main focus of the lecture is how Dalmatia was described, and what it was that determined the creation of an image of Dalmatia among French writers. The problem area is approached through the viewpoints of imagology and comparative literature. Thus French travel writing discourses in the periods of Classicism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Realism will be compared; and the four main 19th century cultural and geographical concepts within the framework of which Dalmatia was located, the Orient, the Balkans, the Illyrian Provinces and the Mediterranean, will be discussed. These literary periods and cultural determinants will be presented in terms of theory and via characteristic texts from the travelogues.
Dr Patrick Levačić was born on June 8, 1971, in Cannes, France, where he lived until he was seven. He completed elementary and secondary education in Zadar, and subsequently a degree course in French and Russian language and literature. He took his bachelor’s degree in 2000, with a dissertation on The Petersburg Worlds of Andrei Bely. With his degree in French and Russian, he worked for a short time in the Zadar Private High School and in the Archiepiscopal Classics High School in Zadar. In 2002 he joined the research project “Contrastive analysis of dualist texts, Heresy, Spells, the Grail”, headed by Dr Slavomir Sambunjak. In 2006 he gained a master’s degree with a dissertation on “The myth of the grail in medieval French and Russian literature”. In the same year he was employed as assistant in the University’s department of French, where he teaches introduction to French literature, French civilisation and French travel writing. In 2011 he took a doctorate on the basis of the dissertation Dalmatia in French Travelogues (1806-1914). He is married, has two children, and lives in Zadar.