Micheline Bourbeau-Walker

I am a retired university teacher with a PhD in French Literature. My doctoral dissertation was a study of the pharmakos, the scapegoat, in six of Molière's plays, including Dom Juan (1664), Tartuffe (1664-1669) and Le Misanthrope (1666). The French language is often referred to as "la langue de Molière," Molière's language. Our dramatist was born in 1622 and died in 1673. Although I taught seventeenth-century French literature repeatedly during my career, between 1976 and 1979, my teaching load included a course on Applied Linguistics: second-language teaching. During my tenure at Saint Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, I also taught French-Canadian Literature and prepared material for my university's Language Lab. At StFX. I was also required to prepare a course on Animals in Literature during a sabbatical I intended to devote to publishing my book on French dramatist, Molière. Animals in Literature is a fascinating area of world literature, but it is an immense subject matter. Preparing this course was an unexpected and demanding assignment. Although my posts reflect my interests as a university teacher, they reveal my love of history, music, and the fine arts. They also show a genuine awareness of current events. My future posts will be new, but many will be related to former articles, such as posts on French dramatist Molière (1622-1673) and fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695). Bourbeau is my mother's name, but it reflects my known ancestry. I have been borrowing it for decades.