The French Ministry of Education has announced the next English language selections for the “Concours externe de l’agrégation du seconde degré,” a remarkable honor. The complete press release can be accessed here, and a bit more information on the agrégation examination here. Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror will be studied in France by a new generation of English literature graduate students, and no doubt lead to a new supply of Ashbery scholarship out of France. Selections generally remain for two years.
Self-Portrait finds itself in rather good company (the following from the Ministry of Education press release):
ÉCRIT : tronc commun
Littérature
1 – John Webster. The Duchess of Malfi [1613-14]. Edited by Michael Neill. New York, London: W. W. Norton Critical Editions, 2015.
2 – George Eliot. Middlemarch [1871-72]. With an introduction by Felicia Bonaparte and notes by David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.
3 – Herman Melville. The Confidence-Man [1857]. Second edition, Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer, eds. New York, London: W. W. Norton Critical Editions, 2006.
4 – Edward Morgan Forster. Howards End [1910]. Edited by David Lodge. London: Penguin Classics, 2000, reprinted 2012 ; et le film Howards End, réalisé par James Ivory, Merchant Ivory Productions, 1992.
5 – John Ashbery. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror [1975]. London: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2007.
N.B. : Mêmes éditions pour l’écrit et l’oral.