Gural–Migdal, Anna 1955-

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Gural-Migdal, Anna 1955-

PERSONAL:

Born June 11, 1955, in Fontainebleau, France; Canadian citizen; daughter of Nicolas and Anna Gural; married Andrew Migdal (an engineer and operations manager), June 9, 1984; children: Frédéric Nicolas, Alexandre Simon. Education: Sorbonne, University of Paris IV, graduated, 1975; University of Montreal, B.A., 1977, M.A., 1982, Ph.D., 1990.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Office—Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, 200 Arts Bldg., Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E6, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, lecturer in Italian, 1986-90; York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, assistant professor of French, 1991-95; University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, assistant professor, 1996-99, associate professor, 1999-2005, professor of French and Italian, 2005—, Winspear-Sheila Watson fellow, 1996. University of Calgary, guest instructor, 2000-01; guest lecturer at other universities around the world, including University of Queensland, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, University of Jaen, University of Warsaw, and University of California, San Diego; guest on Canadian and European media programs; conference participant and organizer.

MEMBER:

International Association for Multidisciplinary Approaches and Comparative Studies related to Emile Zola and his time, Naturalism, Naturalist Writers and Artists, Naturalism and the Cinema around the World (president, 1999—).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Grants from various agencies and institutions, including Multiculturalism and Citizenship Canada, 1997, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2000.

WRITINGS:

(With Filippo Salvatore) Le Cinéma de Paul Tana: Parcours critiques, Balzac (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1997.

(Editor and author of introduction) L'Écriture du féminin chez Zola et dans la fiction naturaliste/Writing the Feminine in Zola and Naturalist Fiction, Peter Lang (Berne, Switzerland), 2003, 2nd edition, 2004.

(Editor, with Robert Singer, and contributor) Zola and Film: Essays in the Art of Adaptation, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 2005.

(Editor, with Carolyn Snipes-Hoyt, and contributor) Émile Zola et le naturalisme en Europe et aux Amériques: Généricité, intertextualité et influences, Edwin Mellen Press (Lewiston, NY), 2006.

Contributor to books, including 20th Century Iconosphere in European Literatures, edited by Bozena Tokarz, University Press of Silesia (Katowice, Poland), 2001. Correspondent, Nuevo Cinema Europeo, 1981-82. Contributor to periodicals in English and other languages, including Vice Versa and Women in French Studies. AIZEN Bulletin, coeditor, 1993-98, editor, 1999—; editor in chief, 24 Images, 1982-83, and Excavatio: International Review for Multidisciplinary Approaches and Comparative Studies related to Emile Zola and his time, Naturalism, Naturalist Writers and Artists, Naturalism and the Cinema around the World, 1999—; guest editor of special CD-ROM issue, Cadernos Neolatinos, spring, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anna Gural-Migdal told CA: "My writing is based on two major themes. On the one hand, my research focuses on exploring Emile Zola's fictional and naturalist work in light of new theories or according to new parameters. The emphasis includes interdisciplinary approaches, which lead, in my case, to the analysis of the visual aspect of Zola's text with relation to cinema, photography, painting, video, and television. On the other hand, my research deals with cinema, particularly contemporary French and Italian cinema, which I analyze from a perspective that is simultaneously socio-historical, aesthetic, and cultural.

"In 2005 I published a collection of essays, Zola and Film: Essays in the Art of Adaptation. This book is made up of thirteen articles that explore the dynamic relationship between Zola's fiction and its film adaptations, examining critically significant cinematic transformation of Zola's novels from a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection of essays is unique since not a single text, in any language, exists on that topic. There is a comprehensive introduction that examines the historical and artistic relationship between Zola's novels and these films. This work also includes a foreword by Dr. Brigitte-Emile Zola, the great-granddaughter of the writer.

"In 2006 I published another collection of essays titled Émile Zola et le naturalisme en Europe et aux Amériques: Généricité, intertextualité et influences. This book is divided into two parts, each one containing eight essays, and includes an introduction. If the naturalist novel, as theorized in the 1880 work Le Roman experimental, was to break with earlier literary traditions in its emphasis on modern scientific methods and the depiction of contemporary society, were traditional genres and literary devices to disappear entirely? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this and other questions by identifying traces of earlier genres and sub-genres and other discourses that interfere and interact with the mimetic intention of these works. The hypothetical nature of Zola's theoretical basis allows for infinite variations and complexity in the texts created, which could be classified in a number of genres themselves, requiring interdisciplinary approaches to untangle their meanings.

"Soon I plan to complete a poetry book and to write the last chapters and conclusion to a monograph titled Visual Aspects of Zola's Rougon-Macquart. This work proposes to explore the iconic dimension of the writing in three novels by Zola: Le Ventre de Paris, Nana, and Germinal, in relation to cinema, painting, photography, video, and television. This book is original and innovative because of its interdisciplinary perspective and due to the fact that there is no in-depth study on the role of iconicity in the Zolian novel.

"I hope that my books in the areas of Zola and naturalism, including naturalist cinema, will contribute to reconstituting the nature of these two major fields. My main goal is the study of iconicity in the Zolian text, the ‘Rougon-Macquart’ in particular. Taking as a point of departure Zola's interest in the new technology of photography, I wish to show how this quality of image has penetrated the novelist's discourse on a number of levels, even anticipating the cinematic genre that would take over, in the twentieth century, the dominance that the novel had enjoyed in the cultural field during the nineteenth. Conversely, a current early cinema styled itself on is Zolian naturalist aesthetics, that had included theater practically at its inception.

"Furthermore, I would like to mention that since 1999 I have served as editor-in-chief of Excavatio, a highly regarded international review devoted to Zola and naturalism. Its mandate is the prompt dissemination of recent, cutting-edge research promoting interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to Zola, his time, naturalism, and its influence around the world into the twentieth century and beyond, in its various cultural manifestations. Not only are scholars of great renown, from as far away as Rio de Janeiro or Moscow, published in this journal, but also the work in progress of doctoral candidates from the best universities in North America and Europe.

"My introductions to each issue of Excavatio and those that preface my collections of essays have the objective of elucidating readers on the main currents of cultural production in the areas of literary and cinematic realism and naturalism, the representation of women, issues involved in adaptation and translation, and the generic and intertextual dynamics that structure cultural objects. I hope that my expansive insights into ‘texts’ of modernity will color the ways other researchers in the field, both in North America and abroad, view cultural production of the last 150 years."