Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

Tuesday 24^th May, 5-6.30pm

‘The Dramatic Quality of Verse in Translations of Molière's Comedies’

Cédric Ploix (St Hugh’s, Oxford)

Many seventeenth-century French drama critics and practitioners have defended the alexandrine for its ‘musical’ dimension and held verse superior to prose, mostly on account of a pure ‘formal pleasure’. The fact that the practice remained generally unquestioned resulted in the absence of any comprehensive theoretical reflection on the aesthetic and dramatic use of versification on stage. Surprisingly, even now, the dramatic qualities of the alexandrine have been the object of little attention in critical studies on Molière. When critics do reflect on Molière’s verse, they usually limit their remarks to reproaching the dramatist with often poor and awkward versification. Thoroughly reflecting on the dramatic quality of verse forms seems relevant inasmuch as verse is often regarded as a major constraint in modern productions. 

My paper attempts to reassess the value of prosody and rhyme and their contribution to the dramatic text. Not to dismiss prose as a valid and efficient dramatic medium, I will argue that Le Misanthrope, l’Ecole des femmes, Tartuffe and Les Femmes savantes would lose many qualities if they were not written in alexandrines. Among others things, the alexandrine plays a great role in creating a self-conscious language conducive to comic effects, parodying tragic tone, buttressing argumentation, setting a hypocritical tone, building up dramatic tension and dynamising conflicts.

‘'Ça craint, ça fait trop retour aux sources': Immigrant Writers and the (Impossible?) Quest for Origins’

Jordan Phillips (Oriel, Oxford)

This paper will give a general overview of what one might call francophone immigrant literature. The tentative approach to this categorization is deliberate: indeed, my broad aim is to examine the extent to which ‘immigrant literature’ can be considered a viable category, by looking for common issues which could bind texts and authors together.

One obvious issue is that of origins: the very term ‘immigrant’ seems to presuppose multiple (perhaps even conflicting) sites of home. More specifically, then, this paper will analyse how a reconciliation with origins is configured in three fairly recent novels written in French. L’Exil selon Julia (1996) by Gisèle Pineau, Garçon Manqué (2000) by Nina Bouraoui and Black Bazar (2009) by Alain Mabanckou approach this problematic through various prisms, be it the notion of return, coming to terms with a dual heritage, or building a new life in a multi-cultural city. Engaging with theories of nomadism and exile, as well as sociological data, I argue that while these prisms represent powerful concepts and literary devices, an emphasis on origins is missing the point. Once we recontextualize the texts into the particular socio-politcal landscape of contemporary France, they read as a challenge to the constant judgement as to the ‘Frenchness’ (or otherwise) of immigrants. Faced with an overwhelming discourse of mistrust, telling one’s story, in all its incoherency and confusion, becomes an act of resistance.

French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday 10th May 5 - 6.30pm

All Souls College (Hovenden Room) 

Walking Into Walls, or, What You Can't See on the Map of Paris

Macs Smith (Princeton University)

Since its pioneering by Nadar, aerial photography has grown as a tool for city planning. Beginning in the 1950’s, however, Situationist International expressed dissatisfaction with aerial views, arguing that by stripping out the chaos and traffic of the city, they made invisible the very thing they hoped to capture: the nature of urban life. SI argued instead for maps drawn from the perspective of the pedestrian. They valued randomness and subjectivity over the clean geometry of aerial views. In the process, SI conceded the basic validity of the map as a tool for knowing the city. In recent years several projects have interrogated both the epistemological role of the pedestrian and the aptitude of maps to represent the city. These projects differ from SI’s primarily in their dismissal of randomness as a methodology. They instead adopt algorithmic or geometric trajectories. I provide a brief overview of these projects before examining Philippe Vasset’s 2007 book, Un livre blanc. Vasset visits on foot every blank area in the official map of Paris. His compulsory trajectory forces him to challenge legal, social, and psychological barriers. In the process he reveals power structures inherent to mapping, including the effacement of certain populations. Vasset’s failed attempt to compensate these lacunae through other media demonstrates the difficulty of transforming the pedestrian’s subjective experience into a totalizing representation of the city. I argue, however, that by embracing forms of hypermediatic representation, the programmatic walk maintains a contagious potential that leaves open SI’s dream of collective, unitary urbanism. 

The Interface Between Literature and History in the Late Writing of Marguerite Yourcenar

Rodney Mearns (St Cross, Oxford)

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 – 1987) was already an established author when the Second World War broke out.  She had had a number of novels published as well as a range of verse, many essays, short stories, translations and numerous experimental pieces.  As the war approached she was invited by Grace Frick to settle with her in Petite Plaisance, a small property on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. Frick was to take over the management of their affairs and also set about supporting the Yourcenar writing project in every possible way.

In 1951 Yourcenar published Mémoires d’Hadrien.  Her imaginative recreation of the life of one of the last great emperors made her an international writing celebrity.  In 1968 she published L’Oeuvre au noir, a second major work which explores the complexities and tensions of the sixteenth century and the birth of modern science.  On 27 March, 1971, MY was elected to membership of L’Académie Royale de Belgique and on 3 March 1980 to the Académie française, the first woman to be so.  In 1974 the first volume of her Mémoires, Souvenirs pieux, appeared.  Archives du Nord, was published in 1977; Quoi? L’Éternité, was published the year after her death.

Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Oeuvre au noir carry detailed bibliographical notes.  The first two volumes of the Mémoires carry similar short explanations of source material.  This concern with the historical record, with the verificational and the veredictional is a core concern of her writing, an aspect this paper will seek to highlight and discuss.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

26th April 5-6.30pm

Questions of Duration and Ethics in New Extreme Cinema

Oliver Kenny (QMUL)

Long takes and long sequences are common elements in films which have been associated with new extreme cinema, a loose grouping of films from the last two decades which challenge and provoke the spectator in radical, disturbing and often problematic ways. The final chapter of my thesis, from which the ideas of this paper are drawn, seeks to interrogate the links between duration and extremity as well as duration and ethics in French films such as Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), À ma sœur! (Catherine Breillat, 2001), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001), Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002), Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003) and We Fuck Alone (Gaspar Noé, 2006) as well as some from outside France such as The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, 2003), Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005), Free Will (Matthias Glasner, 2006), Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), and The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, 2014). 

This paper will propose that the durative qualities of many scenes from these films are able to create a confrontational realism by bringing us into a relation with the qualitative and processive – rather than quantitative and unitary – aspects of ‘extreme’ events such as murder, rape and bodily mutilation. This exploratory claim will be made by examining some intersections of Henri Bergson’s durée, Gilles Deleuze’s time-image and Stanley Keeling’s concepts of processive and unitary duration. In doing so, I aim to provide a basis for considering why new extreme films turn so frequently to the long take and drawing on examples from the films of Breillat, Dumont and Noé I hope to show that spectatorial engagement with the qualities and processes of violence can be ethically powerful in its disturbing, challenging address to the spectator. 

‘Does Madness Represent a Threat in a Deterministic Universe? Diderot and d’Holbach answer’    

Ruggero Sciuto (Merton College, Oxford) 

In my thesis I argue that both Diderot and d'Holbach should be regarded as endorsing determinism. I reach this conclusion by examining their treatment of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the laws of Nature, and causal necessitation.

Diderot's works, however, are teeming with references to madness and mad characters. This might seem to indicate that Diderot's philosophy ought not be taken as deterministic after all. Indeed, in the eighteenth century madness and determinism were perceived as being at odds: we see this, for example, in the Réflexions philosophiques sur le Système de la Nature of the Abbé Holland, as well as in the parallelism between madness and dreaming, which is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century French texts. Significantly, the latter parallelism between madness and dreaming can be found in the works of Diderot, too.

In my paper I shall demonstrate that neither madness nor dreaming represent a threat for Diderot and d'Holbach's determinism. In accordance with the Leibnizian principle of continuity, in fact, d'Holbach and Diderot obliterate all distinctions between mad- and non-mad people – as well as between sleep and wakefulness, for that matter. They consistently insist that madness derives from physical causes, and prove that mad people's actions are just as necessary as anyone else's.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

8th March 5-6.30pm

Performing and Exploring Gender in the Plays of French Caribbean Women Writers

Vanessa Lee (St Edmund Hall, Oxford)

My thesis research focuses on the theatrical works by French Caribbean women writers; Ina Césaire, Michèle Césaire and Suzanne Dracius, from Martinique; and Maryse Condé and Gerty Dambury, from Guadeloupe. Martinique and Guadeloupe are French départements, however the islands have produced many writers and theorists whose writings form the kernel of postcolonial and anticolonial thought. French Caribbean writers are often marginalized by metropolitan French literary and artistic culture, and have only become the focus of Francophone postcolonial studies over the past thirty years.

Theatre constitutes an under-researched domain within Francophone postcolonial studies, and I aim to demonstrate how the analysis of Caribbean performance cultures enhances our understanding of the fragmentary and multicultural socio-historical realities of the region.  The works of women writers in French theatre is even more under-researched, despite the exceptional concentration of female playwrights within the same generation, a phenomenon that demands more extensive study.

This paper will analyse the representation and exploration of gender constructs and relations in the plays Mémoires d’îles (1983) by Ina Césaire, Comme deux frères (2007) by Maryse Condé and Lettres indiennes (1993) by Gerty Dambury.The artificiality of theatre questions and problematizes gender signifiers and constructs, and offers multiple frames within which to explore gender relations in Antillean society. Using postcolonial, theatrical and spatial theories of gender, I shall analyse how the plays tackle issues of motherhood, domesticity and male-female relations.

The (dis)appearance of nothing in Beckett’s L’Innommable

Amy Steinepreis (Merton College, Oxford)

This paper focuses on the trope of self-erasure in Samuel Beckett, epitomised by L’Innommable’s: ‘Et si je parlais pour ne rien dire, mais vraiment rien?’ I return to Jacques Derrida’s writings on the inevitable doubling of presence and absence in literature to ask whether it is ever possible for a narrator to say nothing without leaving behind a remnant of the act of saying. Citing Gustave Flaubert’s dream of a ‘livre sur rien’, Derrida’s essay ‘Force et Signification’ posits the critic’s object as ‘la façon dont ce rien lui-mêmese détermine en se perdant’: in other words, we should scrutinise the disappearing act of nothing.

Our question becomes: if nothing leaves a wake behind it to thwart the Flaubertian dream in its pure form, in what way does the disappearance of this ‘rien’ itself appear in Beckett’s text? Engaging with Hegel, Blanchot, Derrida, and Levinas, I investigate the ‘trace’ or ‘remainder’ (Derrida) that self-cancelling narration leaves in L’Innommable. Having considered what kind of surplus might inhere in Beckett’s work despite narrative processes of self-negation, I test the argument that Beckett’s ‘signature’ persists after what Derrida terms the exhaustion of this author’s ‘thematics’.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

23^rd February 5-6.30pm

Textbook Structure and the Framing of Descartes’ Arguments

Jon Templeman (St John’s College, Oxford)

It's common to find Descartes presenting the same argument in a variety of formal settings. The paper argues that formal variation in Descartes' work tracks, in part, his shifting attitude towards teaching. In particular, it tracks the varying influence of contemporary textbook styles on Descartes' own methods of presentation. I look briefly at four projects: the /Discours de la méthode/, the proposed Eustachius commentary, the /Principia philosophiae/, and Henri Regius's /Fundamenta physices/. The first three projects seem to describe a gradual simplification in Descartes' style of presentation, and an increasing conformity to late scholastic academic norms. I think that is right, with heavy qualification. To develop that qualification, I compare the /Principia/ with Regius's text, which is from the same period but is substantially less daring both in terms of form and argument. That brings out the distance that remains, at the end of Descartes' career, between his style and that of more conventional textbook-writers.

A DPhil ‘through the ages’

Emma Claussen, Olivia Madin, Cameron Quinn & Gemma Tidman

In this session, four graduate students at varying stages in their DPhil research will talk briefly about their experiences of DPhil life – applications, challenges, strategies, methods etc. There will then be an open discussion during which people are invited to ask questions and to share their own experiences and thoughts. We hope that this will provide an opportunity for people who are already doing a DPhil or are thinking about applying to do a DPhil, to talk about research in a relatively informal and constructive environment.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls’ College (Hovenden Room)

Tuesday 9^th February, 5-6.30pm

The Body of Ourika: The Doctor, the Patient and the Text

Sarah Jones (Oriel College, Oxford)

Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) is a powerful exploration of the psychological effects of social exclusion upon the novella’s eponymous heroine. This exclusion is justified with reference to Ourika’s body and the ways in which it is coded and deciphered by society: Ourika’s blackness debars her from fulfilling her supposedly natural role of maternal reproduction. Against this background of the body’s primacy, it is surprising that limited critical attention should have been paid to the frame-narrator of Ourika, the young doctor who encounters the protagonist on her death-bed and procures her story from her. My paper will argue that the body of the text and the body of the heroine are intimately linked, and that this connection brings the role of the doctor to the fore. I shall suggest that medical narratives of the body, and the characters who incarnate them, form an ideology which must perpetually be negotiated within the social relations that encircle and engender it. The doctor shows remarkable sympathy for Ourika which draws him into the nexus of social forces that centre on Ourika’s body. This demonstrates a complex web of relations between his sympathetic attitude towards his patient, the permutations of his medical discourse within Ourika’s narrative, and the ways in which Ourika can use her body, the instrument of her own marginalization and source of the doctor’s sympathy, to resist attempts to subject her narrative to the authority of the doctor’s.

Points de re-père: Paternal Hauntings in Marie Nimier’s Works

Adina Stroia (KCL)

At the age of five, Marie Nimier loses her father, writer Roger Nimier, in a tragic car accident. Nimier’s mourning process is problematized and deferred by the ontological uncertainty of the paternal figure who was ‘ni vraiment là quand il était présent, ni vraiment absent quand il nous quitta’ (Reine du Silence, 37) and is thus (dis)placed outside of a Freudian understanding of Trauerarbeit as finite. The ghostly materiality of the father as a figure of the entre-deux haunts Nimier’s writing through the point de re-père, a term the author advances in her debut novel, Sirène (1987), whose manifestations take the shape of a series of paternal avatars and attributes woven throughout the textual fabric of her corpus. I argue that the point de re-père is coherent with Derrida’s logic of spectrality through its dispersive qualities and repetitive structure. This paper will analyse the means through which the paternal hauntology refracts and insinuates itself in the interstices of the narrative in two autobiographically inflected works, Sirène and La Reine du silence (2004). I will trace the disorienting effects of the temporal shifts and of the gestures of material dislocation and analyse the means through which the spectral paternal configurations in the form of the re-père contaminate Nimier’s narrative and linguistic practices, installing a presence/absence aporia which traverses the author’s œuvre.

As you know, we are holding our French Graduate Seminars this year in conjunction with the IMLR. Check out details of their events in London by following this link:

https://www.fabula.org/actualites/the-french-postgraduate-seminar-series-at-the-imlr-london_72196.php