Tuesday 5th November 2024, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College
Sabrina Hogan (Christ Church): States of attention in Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine and Scève’s Délie
This paper will consider the themes of
attention and distraction in Guillaume Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine (1578) and Maurice Scève’s Délie
(1544), two texts which form part of the corpus in my wider poetic project on
states of attention in sixteenth-century French poetry. The theme of attention
in its various forms permeates a wide spectrum of poetic genres of period,
notably devotional poetry, love poetry and creation poetry. A sustained form of
attentiveness, vigilance, has a special place in the sixteenth century, a time
of poetic vigils and devotional culture privileging the contemplative life, and
an age when apocalyptic and prophetic discourses acquired renewed vigour amid
the Wars of Religion. I will consider how in his epic creation poem, La
Sepmaine (1578), Du Bartas reflects upon the reach and limitations of his
ability to recreate the wonder of divine creation revealed in
Genesis 1-2. The poet’s depiction of his own attentive
state as writer probes the rhetorical figure of copia – popularised in the sixteenth century, notably by
Erasmus’ De copia (1512). Scève’s Délie is hailed as the
first French canzoniere, displaying the impact of Petrarch's Rime in
France in a series of 449 love poems (dizains) addressed to the poet's
mysterious object of desire, Délie. States of attentiveness and wakefulness are
central to exploring Scève’s evocative sensorial depictions and the staging of
the poet’s innamoramento.
Beverly Adrian (Wadham):
Charles Nodier and the eternal recurrence of the merveilleux
This paper explores how Charles Nodier’s
1830 essay ‘Du fantastique en littérature’ makes the case for a renewed
interest in supernatural fiction in the early half of the nineteenth century.
Nodier’s essay will be examined in light of Louis de Bonald’s remarks in ‘Du
Style et de la littérature’ (1806), in which the latter suggests that ‘la
littérature est l’expression de la société’, establishing a hierarchy of
literary forms, and traces the development and perceived decadence of French
letters up until the revolution, when literature took a philosophical turn.
Almost twenty-five years after Bonald, Nodier observes that the merveilleux
or rather its offshoot, the fantastique, fulfills society’s aching need
for transcendence in a decadent age of scepticism and positivism. Nodier
suggests that emphasis on imagination in storytelling should supplant literary
classicism, in order to rejuvenate the human spirit, thereby paving the way for
a newfound age of innocence which favors illusion over doubt. My paper will
consider the tensions between the merveilleux and the fantastique,
as envisaged by Nodier, alongside questions of genre and canonicity. I will
highlight the ways in which Nodier’s propositions correspond with an upsurge in
ideas of spiritual regeneration in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
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