Tuesday 6th February

5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Louise Ferris (Magdalen College) - 'To Infinity and Beyond: Time and Involuntary Memory in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27)'

At the end of À la recherche du temps perdu, time lost explicitly becomes time that is ‘retrouvé’ through salvation-based involuntary memory moments transcendentally regaining lost paradises of the past, defeating time by moving into a realm outside of time. Yet whilst such extra-temporal moments are announced to be the foundations of the ideal novel, Proust’s narration throughout the Recherche nevertheless seems to be tied to time, to the careful depiction of transient time. Adorno first highlighted this problem in his essay ‘Short Commentaries on Proust’ (1958), which is picked up by Bowie in Proust Among the Stars (1998), and which I have developed further through the ways in which sentences representing both the protagonist and narrator progress towards the future and extend back through the past. This suggests that Proust’s concluding conception of the ideal novel cannot be used to interpret his own novel; a view advocated to at least some extent by both Adorno and Bowie. However, I feel this potential incoherence lies in our traditional understanding of Proust’s involuntary memory moments and the related temporal status of his narrator and protagonist. I argue that we should reassess these well-known Proustian notions in favour of a past-future exchange resembling the infinity symbol; allowing for eternal infinite time to emerge from time itself, and thus for us to uncover the hidden unity of Proust’s temporal masterpiece. 

Béatrice Rea (Lady Margaret Hall) - '“Je m’ai fait mal quand j’ai tombé”: A Real- and Apparent-time Study of Auxiliary Alternation in Intransitive and Pronominal Verbs in Spoken Montréal French (1971-2016)'

My paper investigates the auxiliary alternation in spoken Montréal French between avoir “have” and être “be” with the twenty or so verbs prescriptively requiring the latter, as in (1):

(1)     J’ai tombé (AVOIR) vs Je suis tombé (ÊTRE): “I fell/have fallen”

literally “I have fallen” vs “I am fallen”

This variability has been documented in virtually all the French-speaking communities of North America and in some varieties of popular European French (Ledgeway 2012). After analysing the Sankoff-Cedergren Montréal Corpus (1971), Sankoff & Thibault (1977) record avoir-levelling in 34% of their tokens. Since the linguistic landscape of Montréal has greatly changed in the last 45 years, I attempt to determine, with 48 sociolinguistic interviews, whether there has been a change in the social and linguistic distribution of this variable, and also explore such variation within pronominal constructions, as in (2):

(2)     Je m’ai fait mal (AVOIR) vs Je me suis fait mal (ÊTRE): “I (have) hurt myself”

literally “I have done harm to myself” vs “I am done harm to myself”

My preliminary results (2014) reveal that the auxiliary alternation observed in intransitive verbs has overall significantly decreased since 1971 and that avoir-generalisation in pronominal verbs is highly socially marked. This alignment with Standard French appears to evolve in the opposite direction of a trend displayed by many Romance varieties to use a single auxiliary, namely “have” (Loporcaro 2016).