Hommage à Roland

Hommage à Roland Julie LeBlanc Roland Le Huenen was a friend, colleague, and mentor who made his first impressions on me as a doctoral student in the late 1980s, and for the past 26 years I have received the great privilege of his support as a close friend and colleague at the University of Toronto, Victoria University, the Department of French, and the Centre for Comparative Literature. Confirmation of Roland’s large academic footprint is reflected in the beautiful homages recently written by friends and colleagues throughout France and Canada. Roland exemplified the rare ability in academia to excel not only in his many fields of research but equally in administrative leadership and dedication to an endless lineup of doctoral thesis directions while always having time to care for close relationships with so many colleagues. His notoriety at the University of Toronto as a scholar and gifted pedagogue attracted the attention of numerous International institutions (Paris 7, la Sorbonne, Tel Aviv University, Université de la Réunion, etc.) and Canadian universities who solicited him as visiting professor and guest-lecturer. For almost a decade he held the Distinguished M.E. Jones Chair of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of New York in Buffalo. Roland had a rich world: his French academic family, his close colleagues in France, nineteenth-century specialists, his collaboration with the Société des études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes, the “Groupe international d’études balzaciennes,” his world-renowned publications in prestigious French venues on travel narratives (PU Paris-Sorbonne, Presses de Rouen, PU d’Angers, etc.), his publications in collections of essays and numerous academic journals published in France. At the University of Toronto, where his scholarly achievements and international reputation were recognized by all who knew him, other facets of his academic life came to life: his role as a dedicated professor, thesis director, and gifted administrator that touched the lives of so many. [End Page 365] Honouring Roland in the journal of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association is fitting, as his last administrative position at the University of Toronto was as Chair of the Centre for Comparative Literature. Roland was passionate about the responsibilities that had been entrusted to him by the Faculty and was relentless in his dedication to the Centre, its many colleagues, graduate students, and long-serving administrators. My homage to Roland will hopefully accentuate some of his admirable accomplishments as an academic at the University of Toronto. He was an indescribably adept academic researcher and professor in so many fields of inquiry such as nineteenth-century literature, Balzac, travel narratives, and literary theory, a dedicated thesis advisor to numerous PhD students, and an effective administrator, as Graduate Chair in the Department of French and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature for two terms. Roland completed all of his academic duties with the same degree of dedication, intensity, and ease, demonstrating total comfort and confidence. Through our many collaborations over the years including thesis directions and research endeavours, Roland was reliably generous, selfless, and kind, and naturally became a close friend and a mentor. I feel extremely privileged to have known him in these different capacities as he was a uniquely genuine person, a brilliant academic, a kind and compassionate person, whose human qualities will never be forgotten. Although we worked in different fields of inquiry, our intellectual paths crossed with our passions for autobiographical and travel narratives, literary theory, and genetic criticism, as well as our interest in visual art as it pertained to our interest in life-writing and Comparative Literature. These areas of expertise transpired into the co-direction of numerous doctoral theses focussed on a vast range of topics, and the creation of an international research group dedicated to the interdisciplinary and cultural interplay of word and image interactions in literary and theoretical contexts. In keeping with Roland’s pedagogical values, our mandate was not only to foster the interdisciplinarity of word and image studies through thought-provoking research, but also to promote teaching in this field of inquiry and directly involve students from the University of Toronto and other institutions of higher education within Canada, Europe, and the United States. Scholars from France, England...

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