Tuesday 28 May, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Nicole Gadras (St. Hugh's) – ‘Painting the Nineteenth-Century City in Baudelaire and Zola’

The flâneur-artiste emerged in the nineteenth century as a specific variation of the flâneur ‘type’, the Parisian stroller and spectator famously classed by Walter Benjamin as the figure emblematic of modernity. With a focus on selected works by Baudelaire and Zola, this paper will explore how the city of Paris is depicted through the eyes of this flâneur-artiste figure as he roams its streets, as the urban topography is painted onto the page with an artist’s focus on light, colour, and form. The analysis of these literary ‘paintings’ of the city is informed by the wide range of art criticism and theory produced by both Baudelaire and Zola, as well as the backdrop of Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris during the 1850s and 60s, which thrust the city into its role as ‘the capital of the nineteenth-century’, and the near-contemporaneous emergence of a new, avant-garde style of painting in the works of Manet and the Impressionists.

Rebecca Short (St. Hilda's) – ‘Le spectateur interieur: Didactic frivolity in the work of Louis-Antoine Caraccioli'

Louis-Antoine Caraccioli is an ambivalent figure in eighteenth-century French literature. Throughout his oeuvre, the ‘moraliste mondain’ reproves the decadence of Enlightenment frivolity all-the-while conceding to its potential spiritual and moral benefits. Writing in the siècle de la légèreté, during which illusion and artifice supersede authenticity and depth, the thought of Caraccioli provides an important insight into a potential ‘middle way’. The author sets out with the explicit aim to ‘rendre la vertu aimable’, employing traditionally frivolous tropes to an overtly didactic end. This paper will consider Caraccioli’s 1757 text La Jouissance de soi-même in light of concurrent debates on the role of the theatre in moral instruction. As the moralist questions the value of pleasure, illusion, and imitation in the cultivation of virtue, he proposes a new form of spectacle which is entirely interior. The individual who develops an ordered memory and a bridled imagination is able to source moral example in the ‘theatre’ of their mind. Through analysis of the interplay between surface and depth, and illusion and reality in this work, this presentation will assess the grounding of this theory and its spiritual and moral significance.