Tuesday 6th May 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Oriane Guiziou-Lamour (University of Virginia): ‘Sex Under the Guillotine: Women, Sexuality, Prison, and the French Revolution’

The literary genre of récits d’emprisonnements flourished in France during the Terror of 1793–1794, giving rise to a form of writing that, less than ten years after 1789, was already negotiating its relationship with the legacy of the French Revolution. Prisons during the Terror held particular appeal for writers of sentimental and erotico-sentimental fiction, as they offered a space to explore the intersections of imprisonment, community, and sexuality. This paper examines how the French Revolution shaped representations of imprisonment and women’s sexuality in works by Giroust de Morency, Choiseul-Meuse, and Guénard de Méré, published between 1797 and 1800: Coralie, ou le danger de se fier à soi-même (1797), Irma, ou les malheurs d’une jeune orpheline (1799), and Illyrine ou l’Écueil de l’inexpérience (1799–1800). The heroines’ experiences of sexuality amid the turmoil of the Terror differ markedly from the sexual norms of the ancien régime. While one might rightly assume that these upheavals led to increased sexual violence against women, these texts also—perhaps unexpectedly—present prison as a space where female desire can be expressed and liberated. The creation of utopian communities, sealed off from the chaos of revolutionary France, becomes a means not only of enacting the ideals of liberté and fraternité, but also of engaging in a collective reflection on time, trauma, and healing.

 

Stéphanie Arc (CY Cergy Paris Université): ‘Between ethics and poetics: the challenges of writing documentary fiction’

‘Documentary novels’ are narratives based upon an investigation (in Emmanuelle Pireyre’s case, on the Internet, in Olivia Rosenthal and Cloé Korman’s cases, in real life). They might be ‘non-fiction novels’ or ‘documentary fictions’. The latter (‘fiction documentaire’ as Pireyre named them after Jacques Rancière) is defined as a combination of fiction and non-fiction, creating a blurry mix where readers can not tell the difference between what is ‘true/factual’ and what has been invented by the author. Each kind of ‘documentary novel’ raises specific ethical questions throughout the creative process.

Having completed the practical part of my thesis in creative writing, a documentary fiction entitled ‘Paillages’ (‘Mulch’), I will propose some reflections towards an ethics of writing such a narrative, which I call an ‘approximative’ or ‘fuzzy ethics’. Based on my own experience of carrying out a series of interviews for my novel and fusing them with fictional events in the process of writing, as well as Olivia Rosenthal, Joy Sorman and Cloé Korman's accounts of their own research and writing process, I will define ‘approximative ethics’ as a third way between strict censorship (principles strictly defined and applied from a superior/external point of view) and the idea that fiction writers would be above all ethical considerations. An ethics led by tact (for Roland Barthes), aiming at ‘justesse’ (rather than ‘justice’, according to Arno Bertina), which requires ‘le sens des situations’ (as described by the French ethnologist Jeanne Favret-Saada, for example), would respect both the freedom that fiction writers need to create their work and the people whose lives and words they cite or rewrite.