Professor Emerita of French
Geneviève (Stahl) Delattre (1920–1993) was born in La Tronche (Isère), France. She earned her Licence ès Lettres from the Université de Grenoble in 1947 before coming to the United States to teach French at Mount Holyoke College, where she earned her M.A. degree (1950). For many summers she also taught intensive immersive French at the Middlebury French Summer School, where she met and, in 1953, married Pierre Delattre (1903–1969), a noted phonetician and scholar of French language and pedagogy. That same year the couple joined the faculty at the University of Colorado. As a candidate in absentia, Geneviève pursued her graduate studies at Columbia University and received her Ph.D in 1960. Her dissertation, Les Opinions littéraires de Balzac, represented the first study of Honoré de Balzac's entire literary corpus, La Comédie Humaine. In her thesis, Geneviève demonstrated through meticulous documentation how Balzac integrated earlier literary and cultural sources into his own project. It was published in 1961 at one of the most prestigious French publishing houses, Presses Universitaires de France.
In 1964 Geneviève, or Ginette, as she was known to her family and friends, came to UCSB alongside her husband. Because of nepotism rules that precluded spouses holding appointments in the same department, she served officially as a member of the Graduate School of Education, where she taught language teaching methodology classes and supervised the teaching practice of students in the credential program. Soon after Pierre's death, she became a full-fledged member of the French and Italian Department (1972).
Even before she began her career at UCSB, Geneviève had already acquired an international reputation as a prominent specialist of the works of Balzac, with influential, often-cited publications such as “L'imagination balzacienne au travail: la lecture créatrice” (1963). As one of the most eminent specialists of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Geneviève is renowned for the many original, in-depth literary analyses she published in L'Année balzacienne, bringing to light Balzac’s literary philosophy, intertextuality, narrative technique of retrospection and structural flashback, deployment of oppositions and synergies (“De Séraphîta à La Fille aux yeux d'or: Conjonction et disjonction des contraires,” 1970) and elucidation of the figure of the artist (“Andrea Marcosini et les tribulations du romancier dans Gambara,” 1984). In October 1994, UCSB hosted the 20th Annual Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, which was formally dedicated to Geneviève’s memory by the University and her Departmental colleagues.
Her heart, however, was always first and foremost in her teaching. Strict, demanding, but always caring, Geneviève attracted students at all levels with her 19th-century French literature courses, invariably winning their enduring respect, love, and gratitude. Indeed, for many of her colleagues, Geneviève was a model teacher. She was the one who not only trained many of Santa Barbara's local high school teachers but established the general direction that language preparation in French would take on this campus for over thirty years. The fact that the curriculum in the French and Italian Department has always been based on a continuum between language and literature is due in large part to her example and principles. In 1983 she won UCSB's Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award, a well-earned honor that was among those she prized the most. Just before retirement, Geneviève rewrote her entire seminar on Balzac in light of the latest schools of criticism, strictly for the benefit of her students. And although she retired in 1986, Geneviève was recalled a few years later to teach a graduate seminar on Victor Hugo. She remained a vibrant presence and an active participant in the intellectual life of the French and Italian Department until her death.
Geneviève served on numerous Departmental and University committees during her years at UCSB, but she is probably most remembered for the contribution she made as Graduate Advisor in the French program from 1971 to 1980. Her commitment to the Education Abroad Program was significant as well. She participated annually in the interviews of EAP candidates, served as the first director of the University of California's Study Center in Paris (1969–70), and, toward the end of her career, returned to France to direct the academic programs of UC students in Grenoble, Marseille, and Montpellier (1983–85). Her service on the French Literature Committee of the College Entrance Examination Board (1975–80) and on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (1973–77) reflected the fact that her reputation extended well beyond the UC system.
The Pierre and Geneviève Delattre Memorial Library in the French and Italian Department and the Pierre and Geneviève Delattre Fellowship, an endowed graduate award instituted in 1994 to provide perpetual financial support for incoming and continuing graduate scholars in French, represent additional ways that Geneviève's memory remains a living force at UCSB.