Tuesday 26 February, 5.15-6.30pm

Old Library, All Soul's College

Nupur Patel (Lincoln) – ‘Deconstructing Modesty: The Dames des Roches and the Notion of pudeur in Sixteenth-Century France’

First emerging in his 1542 translation of Juan Luis Vives’ Livre de L’Institution de la Femme Chrestienne, Jean de Changy enforces a strikingly gendered interpretation of pudeur or modesty. Indeed, as an oppressive term that is often deployed by male writers supposedly to protect the modesty of women and their bodies, pudeur, I argue, may be reclaimed differently by women themselves. This paper delves into the implications of pudeur with specific reference to women’s writing in sixteenth-century France. By analyzing varying shifts, tonalities and voices that are heard operating both within dialogic subgenres and in specific places, I will examine how far women’s literary works accompany and counter meanings of pudeur in circulation. Using the mother-daughter duo from Poitiers, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, as a case study, a number of nuanced moves may be unearthed regarding the creation of subcultures of modesty and the ways in which women writers may empower the female body. In their joint works, Les Œuvres, Les Secondes Œuvres and Les Missives, the des Roches women uncover an agency that does not sit neatly with the categories of ‘submissive’ and ‘subversive’, traditionally employed by second-wave feminist scholarship. By using pudeur as a medium of inquiry, we may redefine our understandings of early modern women, taking into account the wide range of positions employed against the backdrop of patriarchal oppression.

Rachel Benoit (Oriel) – ‘Stillborn: the misconceived child in Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner’

In the works of Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner reproductive imagery and bodies are repeatedly doomed to failure. In Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! historical facts and events are either notably absent or farcically spectacularised. Instead, private desires and hypothesized realities drive the narrative reality, destabilizing dominant literary modes of writing History. In both texts, the reader is lead through staged misreadings of actual events as the protagonist and the narrative compulsively revisit desired but unrealized events. Incest, sterility, and imagery of the dead child repeatedly interfere and spawn an obsessive focus on the tense relationships between what is, what was and what could have been. Contextualized by the French 1848 Provisional Government’s failed attempts to unify a splintered peuple with a rhetoric of Bourgeois family values, and the role of the family and ‘breeding’ in the articulation of the paternalistic ‘plantation myth’ during the Antebellum and Reconstruction periods in the American South, Faulkner and Flaubert’s convolution of reproductive imagery will be read as their rejection of, as Baudelaire put it in 1855, ‘la philosophie du progrès’. Reading Flaubert and Faulkner together brings into relief the full breadth of this imagery, and the extent to which their grappling with History unfolds at the syntactical level.

Tuesday 12 February
5.15-6.30pm, Old Library, All Soul's College

Marie Daouda (Oriel) – ‘Baudelaire's desperate prayer - Hoping against Hugo’

Something has gone wrong in 1848. Following the Revolution, the fall of the Second Republkic and the institution of the Second Empire, Victor Hugo is exiled, and poets of the younger generation feel bereft of the revolutionary and the poetical ideal he embodied. Yet, his influence is all the more vivid that he still stood for a humanist ideal, merging a Rousseauist belief in innate human goodness and daring poetic experiments. If Baudelaire strives to emulate Hugo's ability to break the accepted aesthetical codes, his dissent towards the master crystalises around the idea of original sin. 

My aim is to show to what extent Baudelaire's despair faces the problem of evil by admitting it as part of a wider harmony, which he dissociates from Nature, and in which he sees a matchless balance of the opposites. Baudelaire's metaphysics, indebted to Pascal and Joseph de Maistre, admit the pit, the splenetic void, as a space for despair, but in which the poet's desperate prayer enters in a contemplative dialogue with the ideal. 

Jessica Rushton (Oriel) – ‘An exploration of olfaction in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud’

Smells, perfumes, odours and stenches emanate from the works of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Olfaction is an indispensable component in the creation of their poetry. This paper begins with Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s poems which foreground disgusting smells in order to deal with the writing of poetry, society’s corruption and the notions of beauty. It then investigates the poems that deal more explicitly with perfume and its relation to memory and the imagination. This paper will also reveal why the theme of olfaction is rarely the central focus in scholarship devoted to two extensively studied poets, despite Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s unmistakeable foregrounding of olfaction in their poetry.