The first thing to know about Professor of French Jeff Rider is the class he teaches: “Days and Knights of the Round Table.” A medievalist scholar who is also the head of the French section within the Romance Languages and Literature Department, Rider specializes in the literature and history of Northern Europe from the mid-11th through the mid-13th centuries. The Argus sat down with Rider to discuss detective novels, European travel, and teaching his children French.

 

The Argus: What is currently on your bookshelf?

Jeff Rider: Well, the things I read for fun most of the time are detective novels, but since I don’t get enough of a chance to speak French here while I’m in the United States, I try to combine a little bit of business with pleasure and read mostly detective novels in French. So I’m pretty much continuously reading. I think I’ve read the entire Maigret series by [Georges] Simenon, but I keep rereading it and rereading it and rereading it. I always have a copy of some Simenon Maigret detective novel by the side of my bed, and that’s what I read the last 15, 20 minutes before I go to sleep every night. But other than that, I read detective novels, Ian Rankin, and the Riga series by [Henning] Mankell, a series which is written in Swedish, but since it’s written in Swedish I might as well read it in French. The guy who wrote the original detective noire novels in French is Léo Malet, and I read those as well, but there’s another one who writes a strange, modern kind of detective novel named Sébastien Japrisot. One of his books is called “A Trap for Cinderella.”

Otherwise, I keep the books by my chair downstairs. I keep a copy of “Walden” by Thoreau, which I read for the first time in high school. That I read periodically, or at least a chapter of it from time to time. Then I’ve recently been reading and thinking about the “Tao Te Ching,”so those are the kinds of things I read for fun.

 

A: Why “Walden”?

JR: I first read “Walden” when I was a sophomore in high school, and I was just really incredibly impressed by it, and I think it was because of the notion of living independently and deciding on your own values for yourself…rather than simply accepting the preconceived ideas that you get from society and from the people around you. That’s always been very attractive to me. Also, trying to live in a way that does as little damage as possible to the environment and doesn’t interfere with the lives of the people around you—that was really interesting to me. So whenever I feel like I’m getting too caught up in administrative matters and things that may not matter, I try to reread chapters of “Walden” to reset my clock, so to speak.

 

A: How did you get into Asian philosophy?

JR: My daughter took some courses in Chinese and Asian philosophy when she was an undergraduate, and I was just wandering around in her room one day, and I picked up a book. I’ve been reading one after another, particularly the “Tao Te Ching” last year when I became head of the department. [I was] trying to figure out how to be a good chair without interfering with other people, so I thought that was very good guidance.

 

A: How long have you been speaking French?

JR: I’ve been speaking French since I was eight. I was in an elementary school that had four third-grade classes; two of them spoke French, and two of them spoke Spanish. I was in a French one, and I’ve just kept with it ever since then. It really came together for me when I finished high school in Brussels, Belgium. I lived with a French-speaking family, and I saw that it wasn’t just a class or a subject that people took but a language that people actually spoke and lived with.

There was one year, my first year of college, [when] I didn’t take French because I thought I was going to be a microbiologist and wasn’t going to need French ever again. After a year, I decided I wasn’t going to be a microbiologist and started French again.

I’ve spoken only French to my kids since they were born, and they’ve been in [French] school because we direct the Wesleyan program in Paris regularly. Also, on sabbatical I go back to Belgium or France as well, so they’ve been in schools in France and Belgium a number of times. And so when they were born I just started speaking only French to them so that when we went over there they wouldn’t be lost. So the only books I read to them as kids were in French, and then my wife read to them in English, so they got both languages.

 

A: What would you say are the major differences between French detective novels and British or American detective novels?

JR: I think the American or British detective novels often are more hard-boiled [with] fighting and guns and things like that and have maybe simpler plots in some ways. I think French detective novels have somewhat more complicated plots, and their characters are often more complex. Sherlock Holmes or Poirot solve their cases by reasoning and intellect and so on, whereas Maigret feels his way to the truth rather than thinking his way to the truth. His famous response when people ask him, “What do you think about this or that?” is, “I don’t think anything,” so he just feels rather than thinking. That’s typical, I think in some ways, of French detective novels. They pay greater attention to the emotional side of their detectives rather than just the intellect.

 

A: So what have you been reading on the academic side of things?

JR: Well, the last couple weeks, I’ve been reading for my classes. But before that, I spent the summer in Belgium and France looking at 12th-century Latin manuscripts. I’m working right now on the earliest history of Flanders, which was written in the late 12th century. We have the author’s own manuscript dating from 1164 to 1168, so that’s always kind of exciting to be working with the original manuscript as a medievalist.

 

A: Where are they?

JR: It’s in a tiny town in Northern France called Saint-Omer, which in the Middle Ages was an extremely important, wealthy town and now is just sort of a very small provincial town where there’s only one café open after 8:00 at night and everything shuts down quite early. It’s a very interesting experience. But northern France had some of the largest and oldest monasteries in all of France, and in the French Revolution, when they closed the monasteries, they took all the manuscripts from these monasteries and just gave them to the local public library. So in Saint-Omer, there are a couple thousand manuscripts that are just magnificent.

The Argus: What is currently on your bookshelf?

Jeff Rider: Well, the things I read for fun most of the time are detective novels, but since I don’t get enough of a chance to speak French here while I’m in the United States, I try to combine a little bit of business with pleasure and read mostly detective novels in French. So I’m pretty much continuously reading. I think I’ve read the entire “Maigret” series by [Georges] Simenon, but I keep rereading it and rereading it and rereading it. I always have a copy of some Simenon Maigret detective novel by the side of my bed, and that’s what I read the last 15, 20 minutes before I go to sleep every night. But other than that, I read detective novels, Ian Rankin, and the “Riga” series by [Henning] Mankell, a series which is written in Swedish, but since it’s written in Swedish I might as well read it in French. The guy who wrote the original detective noire novels in French is Leo Malet, and I read those as well, but there’s another one who writes a strange, modern kind of detective novel named Sébastien Japrisot. One of his books is called “A Trap for Cinderella.”

Otherwise, I keep the books by my chair downstairs. I keep a copy of “Walden” by Thoreau, which I read for the first time in high school. That I read periodically, or at least a chapter of it from time to time. Then I’ve recently been reading and thinking about the Tao Te Ching, so those are the kinds of things I read for fun.

A: Why “Walden”?
JR: I first read “Walden” when I was a sophomore in high school, and I was just really incredibly impressed by it, and I think it was because of the notion of living independently and deciding on your own values for yourself…rather than simply accepting the preconceived ideas that you get from society and from the people around you. That’s always been very attractive to me. Also, trying to live in a way that does as little damage as possible to the environment and doesn’t interfere with the lives of the people around you—that was really interesting to me. So whenever I feel like I’m getting too caught up in administrative matters and things that may not matter, I try to reread chapters of “Walden” to reset my clock, so to speak.

A: How did you get into Asian philosophy?
JR: My daughter took some courses in Chinese and Asian philosophy when she was an undergraduate, and I was just wandering around in her room one day, and I picked up a book. I’ve been reading one after another, particularly the Tao Te Ching last year when I became head of the department. [I was] trying to figure out how to be a good chair without interfering with other people, so I thought that was very good guidance.

A: How long have you been speaking French?
JR: I’ve been speaking French since I was eight. I was in an elementary school that had four third-grade classes; two of them spoke French, and two of them spoke Spanish. I was in a French one, and I’ve just kept with it ever since then. It really came together for me when I finished high school in Brussels, Belgium. I lived with a French-speaking family, and I saw that it wasn’t just a class or a subject that people took but a language that people actually spoke and lived with.

There was one year, my first year of college, [when] I didn’t take French because I thought I was going to be a microbiologist and wasn’t going to need French ever again. After a year, I decided I wasn’t going to be a microbiologist and started French again.

I’ve spoken only French to my kids since they were born, and they’ve been in [French] school because we direct the Wesleyan program in Paris regularly. Also, on Sabbatical I go back to Belgium or France as well, so they’ve been in schools in France and Belgium a number of times. And so when they were born I just started speaking only French to them so that when we went over there they wouldn’t be lost. So the only books I read to them as kids were in French, and then my wife read to them in English, so they got both languages.

A: What would you say are the major differences between French detective novels and British or American detective novels?
JR: I think the American or British detective novels often are more hard-boiled [with] fighting and guns and things like that and have maybe simpler plots in some ways. I think French detective novels have somewhat more complicated plots, and their characters are often more complex. Sherlock Holmes or Poirot solve their cases by reasoning and intellect and so on, whereas Maigret feels his way to the truth rather than thinking his way to the truth. His famous response when people ask him, ‘What do you think about this or that?’ is, ‘I don’t think anything,’ so he just feels rather than thinking. That’s typical, I think in some ways, of French detective novels. They pay greater attention to the emotional side of their detectives rather than just the intellect.

A: So what have you been reading on the academic side of things?
JR: Well, the last couple weeks, I’ve been reading for my classes. But before that, I spent the summer in Belgium and France looking at 12th-century Latin manuscripts. I’m working right now on the earliest history of Flanders, which was written in the late 12th century. We have the author’s own manuscript dating from 1164 to 1168, so that’s always kind of exciting to be working with the original manuscript as a medievalist.

A: Where are they?
JR: It’s in a tiny town in Northern France called Saint-Omer, which in the Middle Ages was an extremely important, wealthy town and now is just sort of a very small provincial town where there’s only one café open after 8:00 at night and everything shuts down quite early. It’s a very interesting experience. But northern France had some of the largest and oldest monasteries in all of France, and in the French Revolution, when they closed the monasteries, they took all the manuscripts from these monasteries and just gave them to the local public library. So in Saint-Omer, there are a couple thousand manuscripts that are just magnificent.