What do we gain from hoaxes? Why do writers, artists and film-makers often set out to trick us? What is the precise nature of the relationship between seduction, deception and art? These are the kind of questions that will be tackled by some fifty international speakers at a bilingual French-English conference to take place in NUI Galway on the 16 and 17 April 2004.

Members of the public are invited to attend the two keynote lectures of the conference, organised by the Department of French of the University. Both lectures will take place in Lecture Theatre IT-125, Information Technology Building.

On Friday (April 16 at 9.30 a.m.), Jean-François Jeandillou, France's leading expert on literary hoaxes, will present a keynote lecture, 'La Supercherie littéraire en images', on the way in which fake portraits — paintings, photographs, even statues — have served, in the past, as supposed proofs of the existence of imaginary authors. Jeandillou also claims to be in the process of translating the Songs of Ossian into Swahili and to have been awarded the prestigious title of Honorary President of the International Association of Trickery Studies. However, conference organisers are reluctant either to confirm or deny these impressive assertions.

The second keynote lecture will be delivered on Saturday (April 17th at 1.30 p.m.), by Malcolm Bowie, internationally renowned for his numerous publications on, among others, Lacan, Proust and Mallarmé. Bowie was awarded the Truman Capote prize for Literary Criticism in 2001 for his book Proust among the Stars (Cambridge University Press, 2001). The title of Bowie's paper will be 'Mallarmé, Psychoanalysis and "Mystery in Literature"'.

Further details of the conference are available on the French Department's web site at (http://www.nuigalway.ie/french/trickery).

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