Many years ago, while still in graduate school, I was helping a group of undergraduates understand a scholarly essay about translation, when one student asked me (with all good intentions): “Why do we need to know this?” Though I bumbled through a response at the time, I’ve consistently returned to this question in designing syllabi for the college classroom and in thinking about how, and how much, to integrate scholarship. While I do not expect most of my French majors and minors to pursue PhDs, students in my courses learn that studying French is not just a bid for language fluency but an opportunity to grapple with the pressing questions that fuel humanities research, past and present. I have routinely turned to PMLA articles to help me make this case, either to enliven the literary readings we study or to think about broader questions of form and craft.

In seminar classes, scholarly articles anchor our discussions of texts and help students develop end-of-semester research projects. For instance, in Introduction to Francophone Studies, a course that I taught for many years at Trinity College, we read Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (Houseboy) in conjunction with David Chioni Moore’s introduction to a 2013 Theories and Methodologies section dedicated to the novel. Moore’s essay framed Oyono’s novel in a world literary network and opened up rich class discussions about the ways that Une vie de boy problematizes questions about translation, both within the novel and in its publication history. Many students developed final papers on Une vie de boy, and those who worked with other languages in addition to French and English could integrate other articles in the Theories and Methodologies section to connect the novel to other languages and literary traditions.

For seniors writing undergraduate theses in French, PMLA articles serve as crucial models for academic writing. When I have taught advanced seminars for thesis writing, we focus on workshopping scholarly essays so that students can develop substantial research questions, find examples of a writing voice and style that they would hope to emulate, and historicize scholarship on a particular subject. I’ve had students turn to articles in the PMLA archive for their in-class workshops, including F. W. J. Hemmings’s 1958 article on Zola, Manet, and Impressionism, or Sister Lucy’s 1960 article on Joris-Karl Huysmans. For my students interested in translation studies, the recent PMLA special issue on translation, edited by A. E. B. Coldiron, has been a crucial touchstone, with essays that not only span languages and literary traditions but offer alternative models for academic writing, such as Karen Emmerich’s call to action on language justice in higher education. Articles like these have led to productive discussions about how scholarship has evolved over time and how students in the early twenty-first century might articulate arguments on similar topics.

Regardless of the career paths students ultimately pursue, I hope that they take from their reading of PMLA articles not just a deeper knowledge of content but a sense of how to read for form, so that when they produce a piece of writing—in any field—it aligns with the expectations and possibilities of that particular genre.

Links to the PMLA archive:

Coldiron, A. E. B., guest editor. Translation. Special issue of PMLA, vol. 138, no. 3, May 2023.

Emmerich, Karen. “Translating for Language Justice, across the Disciplines.” PMLA, vol. 138, no. 3, May 2023, pp. 682–97.

Hemmings, F. W. J. “Zola, Manet, and the Impressionists (1875–80).” PMLA, vol. 73, no. 4, pt. 1, Sept. 1958, pp. 407–17.  

Moore, David Chioni. “An African Classic in Fourteen Translations: Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy on the World Literary Stage.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 101–11.

Sister Lucy. “The Naturalistic Spirituality of Joris-Karl Huysmans.” PMLA, vol. 75, no. 4, pt. 1, Sept. 1960, pp. 424–31.

Sara Kippur is associate professor of French and francophone studies at Wellesley College and author of New York Nouveau: How Postwar French Literature Became American (forthcoming from Stanford UP, 2025).