Wednesday 14 November: Rebecca Loxton (Keble) and Emma Paucefort (UCL)

Joint Session
Fitzjames I, Merton
17:00 - 18:30
Drinks and nibbles provided

Rebecca Loxton (Keble)
The representation of the foreigner in panoramic literature of the long nineteenth century

Abstract
Panoramic literature was a term devised by Walter Benjamin to define the different types of literature produced in the 19th century, the objective of which was to survey the modern city and its different social types. Examples of panoramic literature published during this period include guidebooks, physiolgoies and encyclopedias. There was a proliferation of guidebooks published during the 19th century, aimed at foreigners and provincials visiting Paris during this period which saw the expansion of European travel, and in the mid-century there was a sudden explosion of physiologies, books which claimed to be able to identify the recognisable characteristics of different social types, 'the foreigner' being one of these. Some texts are accompanied by caricaturial images, which often provide an interesting addition to the text. My research will look at many different examples of panoramic literature in order to determine how the foreigner (and to a lesser extent, the provincial) is represented in texts of this time and to evaluate whether this representation changed over time, or from one text to another.

Rebecca Loxton read for an undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at the University of Sussex before coming to Oxford. She now reading for an MPhil in Modern Languages at Keble, and is in the early stages of writing her thesis.

Emma Pauncefort (UCL)
Béat Louis de Muralt’s Lettres sur les Anglois et les Francois et sur les Voïages: a literary progenitor for Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques

Abstract
In 1693, Colsoni published his Guide de Londres Pour les Estrangers dedié & offert aux voyageurs Allemands et François, offering short tours of the capital which might permit the traveller to appreciate its physical landmarks. Such a work complimented earlier ‘travel literature’ on England which predominantly sought to relate a topographical description of the country, reserving comment on the English character for the purpose of rehearsing the hackneyed and entrenched negative stereotype of English depravity and even barbarism. At the hands of the Swiss traveller Muralt, French ‘travel literature’ on England was, however, about to take a dramatically new direction. The letters written during and following his sojourn in England in 1694 and first published fully in 1725, respond and vie with both the literary and thematic traditions of the travel account. Muralt does not just eschew topography and the reiteration of unchallenged stereotypes, but demonstrates how the rélation can evidence literary flair in tackling its renewed subject matter. This paper will seek to show how exactly Muralt does this, and in turn advocate his work as a vital literary progenitor of the Voltaire’s later Lettres Philosophiques which have hitherto dominated scholarly attention.

Emma Pauncefort is currently in the first year of a PhD under the supervision of Dr Isabelle Moreau in the French department at University College London. An interest from undergraduate level in the fascination with ‘Englishness’ in eighteenth-century France revealed the absence of scholarship seeking to understand this phenomenon in relation to the accounts of those who actually travelled to England. Through the course of the PhD, it is her hope to thicken the context of Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques which are often attributed with sparking Anglomania in France, and bring ‘travel literature’, the most read genre after the novel in the eighteenth century, to the forefront. In so doing, she also seeks to supplement existing empirical studies of travel accounts by subjecting little-read texts to extended literary analysis.

Wednesday 31 October - Diana Greenwald (Wadham) and Jamie Steele (Exeter University)

JOINT SESSION
17:00 - 18:30
Fitzjames Room I, Merton College
Drinks and nibbles provided  

Diana Greenwald (Wadham)

Painting the Provincial: A Statistical Analysis of Rural Imagery at the Paris Salons, 1790-1881

 

 Millet, The Angelus, 1859

Abstract

During the 19th century, educated urban Frenchmen created thousands of books, articles and images depicting and analyzing rural France and its inhabitants. Academic analyses of this fascination and its motivation have been couched in anecdotal terms. Using quantitative methods and a previously untapped data set—catalogues of the roughly 130,000 paintings displayed at the Paris Salon between 1790 and 1881—this project charts how images of rural life developed over the course of the century. It also explores how this development related to the economic and social modernization of France.  

Diana Greenwald is a second year M.Phil. candidate in Economic & Social History at Oxford. Her dissertation applies statistical methods to the study of 19th century French art. For her undergraduate degree, she studied Art History and Economics at Columbia University.

Jamie Steele (Exeter University)

Imag(in)ed Space of the Regions: the creation of a regional cinema aesthetic in the works of the Dardenne Brothers and Bouli Lanners

 

Still from La Promesse (1996)

Abstract:

The current state of Europe is changing, as it re-discovers its roots and its regions. This is neatly exemplified by the European Union’s ‘Europe of the Regions’ mantra, which has promoted the conflicting ideals of sub-state and supra-national notions of identity. This paper therefore aims to open up the possibility of categorizing cinemas regionally, by utilizing the federal state of Belgium as a paradigmatic case study. In Belgium, the recent regionalization of film funding institutions has redrawn the cultural cartography, and has clearly signaled that the national exposition of identities is no longer relevant to the denizens of the federal state. I will hence engage with the spatial discourse of the Walloon region as a relational space of flows (i.e its relations with France, use of the French language and migration) and its effects upon the filmic opuses produced in the region. I will explore to what extent the Belgian/ Walloon culture of self-doubt and identity crisis, which is oft perceived in relation to their position under a French cultural model and the creation of a monoculture, is actually re-produced on screen. In order to nuance the notion of a Walloon regional screen culture, I will consider the alternate approaches to the region, its peoples and its landscapes by the Walloon filmmakers the Dardenne Brothers (in particular Rosetta, 1999) and Bouli Lanners (El Dorado, 2008). 

Jamie Steele is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. His area of study is interdisciplinary, blending together French language studies, and ‘La Francophonie’, with Film Studies. His PhD research focuses upon the national film production
 of Belgium to explore the transnational connections forged between nation-states in Europe predicated upon a linguistic allegiance. At Undergraduate level, he studied French at Exeter University. He was recently published in the Spring Edition of the Trespassing
 Journal, with the article entitled ‘A Cinema without Borders: exploring the notions of culture and identity in the cinema of the Dardenne Brothers’.

Wednesday 17th October - Vincent Robert-Nicoud (Lincoln College) and Jennifer Oliver (St John's College)

JOINT SESSION
17:00 - 18:30
Fitzjames Room I, Merton College
Drinks and nibbles provided

Vincent Robert-Nicoud (Lincoln College)

Turning Montaigne Upside-Down: Topsy-turvy Rhetoric in the Apologie de Raymond Sebond

Michel de Montaigne, 1532-1559 

Abstract

The importance of the theme of the world upside-down for sixteenth-century art and literature is difficult to overemphasize. The complete reversal of the world seems to be a constant source of inspiration and concern for poets, painters, writers, polemicists and philosophers. At the centre of this tradition, authors such as Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, François Rabelais and Michel de Montaigne play a difficult game in which the versatile notion of inversion bears a crucial part. Their writings, which often contradict themselves, respond and elaborate on each other, offer a fertile ground for the study theme of mundus inversus, the world upside-down from a rhetorical perspective.

This paper will focus on a short passage from Montaigne’s Apologie de Raymond Sebond, the longest and arguably most complex chapter of the Essais. I will show some of the specificities of Montaigne’s discourse of inversion. In this important essay, the topos of the world upside down is not only represented thematically, but also rhetorically and even syntactically. By disentangling Montaigne’s complex prose, this paper will attempt to identify the characteristics of topsy-turvy rhetoric and consider its relevance in Montaigne.

Vincent Robert-Nicoud is a second year DPhil student at Lincoln College. After completing is undergraduate studies at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, he studied Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Richard Scholar, focuses on the theme of the world upside down in relation to the commonplacing tradition during the sixteenth century.

Jennifer Oliver, St John's College

Shipwreck, reconfigured: the journey of a paradigm from Erasmus to Jean de Léry

Illustration from Jean Deperthe’s Histoire des naufrages […] (Paris: Cuchet, 1789)

Abstract

As Hans Blumenberg observes in Shipwreck with Spectator, ‘Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage.’ Central to this notion is the threat of shipwreck. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus’s dialogue Naufragium, a satirical account indicting the superstitious and disingenuous words and deeds of various religious figures aboard a sinking ship, set the tone for Early Modern shipwreck narratives. The influence of this work on later fictional (Rabelais, Shakespeare) and factual accounts has been widely demonstrated, but in my paper I explore the effects produced when one author, Jean de Léry, presents a shipwreck that bears none of the hallmarks of Erasmus’s model, in his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil. When transferred to another hemisphere and culture, the shipwreck functions differently, and the perceived distinctions between Old and New Worlds are articulated through the distance between Léry’s expectations and the reality he discovers. This reconfiguration of the Erasmian model casts it in a new light: rather than simply ‘othering’ the values of Léry’s ‘sauvages’, it reveals the contingent nature of the European travellers’ perspective. Some of the most important classical models of shipwreck occur in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, in which he writes ‘Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive what ills you are free from yourself is pleasant.’ ‘Shipwreck, reconfigured’ explores the implications of this statement with relation to both Erasmus’s and Léry’s shipwrecks.

Jennifer is a third-year DPhil student and the Elizabeth Fallaize Scholar in French at St John's College, Oxford, where she also studied as an undergraduate. Her thesis, provisionally titled ‘Ships of State and Authorship: Exploring national and authorial identity in sixteenth-century France’, maps diverse instances of real, metaphorical and allegorical ships across generic boundaries in the sixteenth century, a time of great technological advancement in the field of shipbuilding.

Call for Papers - Michaelmas 2012!

The French Graduate Seminar is looking for contributors for the academic year 2012-2013. If you are interested in presenting your work in a supportive graduate student environment contact us on the addresses provided on the right. The format of your contribution is up to you, it can be as broad or as narrow as you want, but should be at least 20 minutes long and no more than 45 minutes. You do not have to be at Oxford to take part. 

Wednesday 13th June - Mara van der Lugt (Corpus Christi) and Helena Taylor (St Anne's)

JOINT SESSION
17.00-18.30
Massey Room, Balliol College

Mara van der Lugt (Corpus Christi College)
Of faux savants and faux Philosophes: quarrels and morals in Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) 

Abstract

Even a cursory glance at the history of the production of Pierre Bayle’s famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique will show that the vital years of its initial genesis (1689-1696) ran parallel to the hottest years of controversy between Bayle and his friend-turned-enemy Pierre Jurieu: 1690-1697. This was only partly a coincidence: for although the idea of a dictionary was born independently of the Jurieu-debate, the work itself was deeply influenced by the years of conflict during which it was created, and each of the editions still bears the imprint of these years. Most importantly, before the polemic with Jurieu Bayle had emphasised the irenic side of the Republic of Letters in his scholarly journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres: in the Dictionnaire he reframed the ideal of this Republic in a way that stressed its polemical side while attempting to install an ethics of scholarly debate.

This paper will argue that the polemic with Jurieu, which strongly informed Bayle’s thought on the Republic of Letters and on scholarly ‘warfare’, is a crucial context for the elaboration of the Dictionnaire, and therefore essential for understanding some of its central themes. It will trace the way in which Bayle throughout the Dictionnaire is attempting to construct an ethics for the Republic of Letters through reconstructing its practice in the lives of ancient and modern scholars and philosophers: building morals on the basis of quarrels. Finally, it will examine how this ethical-polemical undertone introduced several tensions into the project of the dictionary that would remain unresolved; and how the ghost of Jurieu came back to haunt the author of the Dictionnaire.

Mara van der Lugt studied Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and as part of the Erasmus Research Master in Early Modern Intellectual History spent 6 months in Oxford to write an extended thesis on the Irish philosopher John Toland's views on religion. Based in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, she is now in the 2nd year of a DPhil in History on the 17th-century French philosopher Pierre Bayle, focusing especially on how to interpret his ‘Dictionnaire Historique et Critique’. She is supervised by Professor Laurence Brockliss (History) and Dr Kate Tunstall (Modern Languages).

Helena Taylor (St Anne's College)
Narratives of the disgraced poet: Ovid, Exile and the Court of Louis XIV

Frontispiece, C. Dassoucy, L’Ovide en belle humeur 

(Paris: Pépingué, 1653) 2nd éd. 

Abstract‘Je fus surpris de me voir si défiguré’ remarks the character, Ovide, in Guéret’s Le Parnasse Réformé (Paris: Jolly, 1669, p25) He is reacting to a burlesque translation of his work, the frontispiece of which is depicted here. This image provides a useful methodological tool: is this a picture of Ovid dressed as a seventeenth-century man, or is it a seventeenth-century man dressed as Ovid? Is this figure looking at a portrait of Ovid or is he looking at his own reflection? In this paper, I want to survey the different ‘défigurements’ of Ovid’s character—the different representations of Ovid’s life—in the second half of the seventeenth century. This was a period of noticeable interest in his poetry. Employing the argument that there was a relationship in the early modern period between how a writer’s life was constructed and the interpretation of their work, I will consider how Ovid is fashioned in the Vies that accompany his translations to suit the aesthetic purposes of his translator. Moving away from this model, I will also consider what Ovid is being used to discuss beyond the contemporary aesthetic, by surveying the representations of his life in versions that are not attached to his poetry—novels and biographical dictionaries. This paper will offer an overview of my thesis, interrogating some of the problems identified in telling Ovid’s story, and examining what these problems might allow early modern writers to discuss.

Helena is in the second year of her DPhil in French at St Anne’s College. Her thesis, provisionally entitled ‘Lives of Ovid in French Writing: 1666-1713’ looks at the representations and uses of Ovid in late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century French writing. She did her BA in Latin and French and her MA in French literature at Worcester College.

Wednesday 30th May - Ruth Bush (Wolfson College)

L’aventure ambiguë: Publishing African literature in the world republic of letters 1945–1970

Respondent: Sarah Puello (Wolfson College)

17.00-18.30
Balliol College, Massey Room

Drinks and nibbles provided

Attendees of the First Congress of Black Artists and Writers, held at the Sorbonne in 1956

Paper and Discussion 

Through a framework informed by Bourdieu’s field theory and Pascale Casanova’s notion of a ‘World Republic of Letters’, Ruth’s paper examined the institutional contexts (artistic, political, mercantile) surrounding the publication of Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s 1961 novel, L’Aventure ambiguë. Drawing on an impressive range of empirical material—interviews conducted with authors and publishers, bibliographies of ‘African’ literature, archival documentation, and a close reading of Kane’s literary output—, Ruth used L’Aventure ambiguë as a test-case to argue for the necessity of a more nuanced and multidirectional history of French publishing than that signaled in Casanova’s République mondiale des lettres.

A slew of questions followed, with discussions ranging from the relationship between ghost-writing and French publishers of ‘African’ novels, the role played by figures such as Gide and Sartre in Présence Africaine (a Paris-based publishing house and journal), the consecratory role of literary prizes and their selection panels, and the role of (self-)censorship in the processes of writing and publishing. 

Abstract


The post-war period witnessed a surge in the publication of fiction and poetry of and on sub-Saharan Africa in the years leading to the independences of 17 African countries in 1960. The vast majority of this publishing in French took place in Paris, arguably the capital of a “world republic of letters” (Pascale Casanova). This paper will consider the contested, often unspoken, rules by which texts entered this field, according to the aesthetic, political, and commercial stakes of authors and publishers. Based on archival research, interviews, paratextual analysis, and close-reading, the publishing trajectory of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s “classic” text, L’aventure ambiguë, will be traced against a cartography of publishers of “African” literature in this period. By evaluating Casanova’s model and the pertinence of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, this paper will argue for a necessarily multidirectional and transnational history of the book in France.


Biography

Ruth is a third year DPhil student at Wolfson. She previously studied at Wadham College,Oxford, Edinburgh University, and the EHESS. Her thesis explores the theoretical implications of a revised history of publishing “African” literature in the period 1945 – 70. She has published an article in the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, and has papers forthcoming in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and in a book entitled Intimate Enemies: Translating Francophone Texts (LUP 2013).

Wednesday 16th May - Huw Grange (University of Kent & University of Oxford)

Monstrous Doubles: Showing & Warning in Medieval French Hagiography

Respondent: Pauline Souleau (Merton College, Oxford) 

17:00-18:30 

Massey Room, Balliol College 

Wine and nibbles provided 

Paper and Discussion

Huw began his paper with a discussion of medieval etymological approaches to monstrosity, exemplified by St Augustine’s observation that ‘monsters are signs by which something is demonstrated’ and Isidore of Seville’s argument for the semiotic provenance of monstrosity (from the Latin root of monstrare, ‘to demonstrate’).Turning to the anthropologist and philosopher René Girard’s more recent work on monsters as social boucs émissaires (scapegoats), Huw evaluated Girard’s thesis that monsters are the outcome of mimetic desire by applying this theory to his own research on the role of monstrosity in late medieval vernacular saints’ lives. Whereas Girard argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition tends towards the renunciation of mimetic desire and an unveiling and unmasking of the bouc émissaire mechanism, Huw’s reading of medieval lives of St Margaret and St George (amongst others) showed that this was far from being the case. He argued instead for the need to recognize the ethical duality of the monster as an externalization which both conceals and reveals the monstrosity that is internal to the crowd.

As respondent, Pauline Souleau noted that the same structures of monstrosity highlighted by Huw can also be seen in non-hagiographical medieval texts (for example, in the Chroniques of Froissart). A flurry of questions followed, ranging from the talismanic use of hagiographies during the period, to the visuality of monstrosity as demonstration, the theatrical staging of hagiographies, and the relevance of the Ovide moralisé. Thanks to Huw for an excellent paper and to all participants for a lively session and discussion.

Abstract

From pestilential dragons to snake-breathing Saracens, the monsters that fascinated audiences
of vernacular saints’ lives in the later centuries of the Middle Ages continue to intrigue to
this day. This paper takes a two-pronged approach to understanding hagiography’s terrifying
antagonists – the medieval etymologist’s account of monsters as creatures that ‘show’ (monstrare)
and ‘warn’ (monere), and René Girard’s theorisation of ‘monstrous doubles’ and the monstrous
scapegoat – investigating common ground between the two. We shall explore several manuscript
versions of the biographies of Sts George and Margaret, including a copy of a George life that
a knight wished to take with him to the battlefield and a copy of a Margaret life that renders the
dragon she fights as peculiarly Jewish. If some hagiographical tales were understood to unveil
scapegoat mechanisms in a bid to put a permanent end to mimetic violence, medieval audiences
could employ the very same tales to justify violent acts against various social cohorts deemed
undesirable, and indeed more than a little monstrous.

Biography

Huw completed his doctoral studies at St John’s College, Cambridge earlier this year, having
submitted a dissertation investigating notions of corporeality in French and Occitan saints’
lives. Since October 2011 he has held a Teaching Fellowship in Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval &
Modern Languages and since February 2012 he has been working on the Elucidarium Project,
based at the University of Kent, tracing the fame and fortune of vernacular versions of a twelfth-
century encyclopaedic text. He has had articles published on medieval hagiography, Occitan lyric,
and the gruesome legend of the Eaten Heart.