Aimée Boutin Interview
Aimée Boutin is a professor of French at Florida State University. She specializes in 19th-century French poetry, women writers, cultural history, gender studies, art history, soundscapes and the city in literature. Her most recent book is City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I grew up in Ottawa, Canada in a bilingual French/English family. I did my entire K-12 schooling in French. Although early on, I fell in love with French poetry, I was encouraged to pursue a scientific track. (I never excelled in music and didn’t play an instrument; I like vocals, but I can’t sing in tune. I love the radio because I’ve always found that listening to the disembodied voice is enthralling). So, in college I started as a biology and French major, but I quickly figured out that was schizophrenic. I decided to pursue a BA in English/French literature then I went on to an MA/PhD in French literature at Cornell U.
At Cornell, as a grad student, I took a seminar with Professor Nelly Furman (she would later be the director of the ADFL) called “le regard et la voix” (the gaze and the voice). This seminar was formative. It used a psychoanalytic framework to analyze and compare the lure of the voice and of the gaze. We read Lacan on the gaze, and Chion on sound in cinema. We read Didier Anzieu on the sound envelope. Cixous on the laugh of the Medusa and Clément who wrote so passionately about the female operatic voice (Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 1979).