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.

  

Tuesday 22nd October 2024, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Carrie Heusinkveld (St John’s, Cambridge): ‘“Avez-vous dans les airs entendu quelque bruit?” Sound and Air in Racine’s Theatre’

Jean Racine has often been regarded as the great psychological dramatist of the seventeenth-century. With their emphasis on emotional interiority and spatial and narrative simplicity, his plays have been said to take place primarily in the characters' minds, while the observable action is limited to a single, nondescript chamber from which the wider world is largely excluded. While significant critical stress has been placed on their psychological and emotional complexity, little attention has been paid to the wider material and environmental contexts of his tragedies. This reception is perhaps reflective of a widespread and longstanding strand of critical thought, which has perceived the seventeenth century – a period frequently associated with the consolidation of a modern scientific mentality - as the mainspring of an increasing alienation of the natural from the human. Early modern French theatre, widely regarded as one of the critical paradigms of knowledge during this period, has been interpreted as a crystallisation of this apparent human-nonhuman binary, modelling a wider impulse to separate the material world from the thinking mind. However, ecocritical theory and environmental history have recently started to reframe early modern conceptions of nature-human relationships as more complex and entangled than previously recognised. I will give further impetus to this reappraisal by extending this line of inquiry to early modern theatre. In examining representations of sound and air in Racine’s theatre, I will show that it is possible to discern in seventeenth-century tragedy an awareness of the imbrication of the human with the nonhuman. 

Lynn Ngyugen (St John’s): ‘Migrations in language’

What does it mean to choose another language to be your own? Can it ever be your own? This talk explores several Francophone writers’ relationships to French, a language that they have adopted and/or one that they have actively chosen over their langue maternelle to write their literary works. Reading selections from texts by Nancy Huston, Assia Djebar, Anna Moï, and Alice Kaplan, among others, I will consider what significance French specifically holds for these writers as a language of literary self-fashioning, as well as examine the complex experience of inhabiting the language more broadly—either as a total outsider or from a postcolonial influence—and of grappling with the contradictions of identity that the language might bring.

  

Tuesday 28th May 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Cambridge FGRS Exchange

Maddison Sumner (Robinson College, Cambridge): 'A Glitch in the Matrix? Transclasse Confrontations of Meritocracy'

Nesrine Slaoui has, ostensibly, succeeded in her aspirations to become a legitimate journalist and public figure. She achieved excellent grades in school, gained entry into a classe préparatoire in order to obtain her licence from SciencesPo Grenoble, and went on to graduate with a master’s in journalism from SciencesPo Paris. She is a published author, has directed documentaries with Arte, and even made a cameo in the Oscar-winning film Anatomie d’une chute. However, her autobiography, published in 2021, is entitled Illégitimes, and her podcast, Légitimes, pivots around a central question that she poses to all of her guests: ‘est-ce que tu te sens légitime?’ Why, then, is legitimacy such a central question to her work? In this paper, I start to answer this question, first by moving through a general definition of what Slaoui is referring to when she talks about legitimacy, and introducing my reading – inspired by bell hooks’ ideas on marginality and revolution – of Slaoui as a writer who is engaging in ‘counter-legitimation’. I will then move more closely into a consideration of one of the main vehicles with which Slaoui operates this exercise of counter-legitimation in her autobiography: a laying bare of the deceptive mechanisms of meritocracy which operate in France, particularly through a criticism, informed by Bourdieu’s sociology, of meritocracy’s function as a machine of social reproduction. 

Toby Barnett (Robinson College, Cambridge): 'La Pathologie positive: Broussais, Algeria, and the Problem of Conditionability'

During the 1810s, François-Joseph-Victor Broussais (1772-1838) began to develop a medical theory that would install him as one of France’s most influential – and controversial – physicians. Consolidating Enlightenment materialism, vitalism and republican politics, ‘physiological’ medicine claimed that human life is produced by interactions between the body and its environment. Behind this conclusion was the broader principle that adaptability to the milieu was the primary driver behind human health and disease. In his seminal work Le normal et le pathologique (1943; 1966), written some thirty-five years before Michel Foucault coined the term ‘biopolitics’, historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem would reiterate the significance of the Broussaisian system, conceived as a cornerstone of science’s normative politics in the modern period. As Canguilhem set out, the physician’s ideas ran counter to scientific reality while denying the responsibility, proper to scientific practice, to do justice to human diversity. First composed at the University of Strasbourg during German occupation, Canguilhem’s analyses of Broussais’s ‘positive pathology’ offered a coded rebuke to the biological projects of Nazism. Taking Canguilhem’s commentaries as its point of departure, this paper re-examines Broussaisian thought in the context of another political conjuncture to which it bears a close – if overlooked - relation: namely, the beginning of the second French colonial empire. Focusing on the colonial reception and deployment of Broussaisian thought during the 1830s and 40s, I seek to establish the impact of the French invasion of Algiers (1830) on positive pathological discourses concerning race, anthropogeography and adaptability.

Duarte Bénard da Costa (Peterhouse, Cambridge): 'On Origins: Julia Kristeva'

In the late 1960s, Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva coins the term intertextuality, describing it as the transposition of one or several systems of signs into another. Her understanding of ‘signifying practice’ includes the idea that certain practices comprehend certain transposed systems. Here, I seek to look into concepts such as «revolution», «intrusion» and «subversion» in reference to Kristeva’s texts and to texts criticizing her theory of intertextuality. The politically charged notion of origin stems from interpretive questions beginning with «who», «when», «where». Revisiting Kristeva’s reading of Marcel Proust will expand the notion of origin as a source of ontological instability, rather than stability, which is key to understanding the tension between textual surfaces and subjective agency.

Tuesday 14th May 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

In the first half of the session, Mathieu Farizier (Jesus College, Oxford) gave a paper entitled "'Quels sont les moyens de rendre plus politique un texte qui ne l'est pas assez ?' Quintane’s poetic propaganda, the Marxian revolution as a playful double-bind."

The second half of the session consisted in a 'Masters showcase,' with brief presentations of ongoing MSt dissertations from James Hughes (Magdalen College, Oxford), Gaya Krishna (Pembroke College, Oxford), Imogen Lewis (St Cross College, Oxford), Kate Dorkins (Somerville College, Oxford), and Sophie Benbelaid (New College, Oxford). This provided an opportunity to give informal feedback and advice, and to make enriching links across different levels and areas of postgraduate research.

Tuesday 30th April 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Claire Leibovich (Durham University): 'The Semite's Body and the Limits of Theory in Denis Guénoun's Writing on the Algerian War'

Denis Guénoun’s Un sémite (2002) has often been read in two seemingly conflicting ways. On one hand, it is presented as a straightforward memoir on the author’s Algerian Jewish family, his childhood in Oran, and the family’s departure for France in the wake of the Algerian independence in 1962. On the other hand, Un sémite has received a deconstructive reading from scholars such as Gil Anidjar and Judith Butler. These scholars underline the text’s undermining of racial discourses on Jews and Arabs in the colonial context in Algeria. They focus on the text’s reappropriation of the racial term “semite” into a political proposition renegotiating the relationship between Jews and Arabs. Through a close reading of Un sémite, my paper explores the tensions it presents between a deconstructive theoretical discourse and the staging of embodied experience and memory. First, I investigate the literary strategies through which the text highlights the fictional dimension of its own historical and biographical narratives, but also of its political discourse. Secondly, I examine how, through the staging of the semite’s body and the dissonance it presents between discourse and the body, Un sémite probes the limits of theory. Ultimately, I show that the two common ways of reading Un sémite – as a deconstructive essay and as a memoir – are not conflicting. Rather, I argue that they are representative of the tensions – between embodied memory and narrative reconstruction, and deconstruction – at the heart of traumatic memories of the Algerian War. 

Lucien Dugaz (Université de Lausanne): 'Dead Poet Society: Chasing a Medieval French Poet in Oxford'

The difficulty of attributing texts to an author is inversely proportional to his fame. Octovien de Saint-Gelais (1468-1502) was one of the most appreciated and admired poets of his time. Today, he is little known and very little read. This may be because he was unable to grasp the printed medium that was developing at the end of the 15th century, or because he fell victim to fashion, his marginal geographical location in Angoulême or the whims of the sovereigns who employed him. 

I will focus on the critical edition of 22 previously unpublished rondeaux, which we are not sure were written by Octovien. Kathleen Chesney (1899-1976), Vice-Principal of St Hilda's College, was a pioneer in planning a critical edition of Saint-Gelais's lyric, alas unfinished, but a draft of which is now in the Taylor Institution Library. She also carefully examined these rondeaux for her catalogue More Poèmes de transition (1965), based on the Taylor Institute manuscript Arch. I. d 22. I will use several philological and linguistic clues to try to identify the pieces among these rondeaux that can be attributed with certainty to Saint-Gelais. I hope to be able to understand when and for whom Octovien composed these texts which, 'in the memory of his youth gone forever, breathe a penetrating melancholy', as his first biographer, the witty Abbé Molinier (1910: 250), wrote.

Tuesday 20th February 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Liam Johnston-McCondach (New College, Oxford): 'Reading Postcritically with Roland Barthes'

In their influential surveys of the field, Rita Felski (The Limits of Critique, 2015) and Joseph North (Literary Criticism, 2017) affirm the need to look beyond contextual, historicist approaches to literary criticism and towards ways of reading that consider the aesthetic, affective responses of the reader. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that Felski and North do not propose the complete abandonment of socio-political criticism but instead recommend fusing it more thoroughly with formal and stylistic analysis. Taking this insight as my starting point, I will return to the early work of Roland Barthes to consider contemporary debates on literary criticism from a different perspective. Across texts such as Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) and Mythologies (1957), Barthes engaged deeply with questions surrounding aesthetic form, political ideology, and the possible relation between the two. I will consider how Barthes might help us to challenge assumptions around the political relevance of literature and reframe the terms of ongoing discussions in literary theory. 

Kate Sligo (New College, Oxford): 'Liberté, fidélité, curiosité: reading la diversité through the lens of France's oldest publishing house'

Éditions Stock is France’s oldest publishing house, founded in 1708. In June 2023, the director of Stock, Manuel Carcassonne, decided to hold Stock’s rentrée littéraire in the Metaverse. This interplay between past and future, conservatism and innovation, homogeneity and heterogeneity captures the diverse motivations of the house. This thesis focuses on the concept of diversity via the books published by Stock in the 21st century. 

A brief history of the publishing house first evidences Stock’s continual impulse to challenge established standards. For example, in 1894, the then-director of Stock, Pierre-Victor Stock, became the editor for the Dreyfus Affair on the side of the accused despite the intense atmosphere of antisemitism in France at the time. Today, Stock specialises in foreign literature, but this was not always the case. The house turned towards foreign literature or ‘la Bibliothèque cosmopolite’ in 1921. Through applying a quantitative analysis to the translation trends of Stock since the late 20th century, it becomes apparent that Stock’s foreign collection is delicately poised between English-language hegemony and a strong desire to publish voices from diverse languages and backgrounds. Stock’s French collection, distinguishable by its midnight blue cover, will also provide a case study for diversity. La bleue tends to do away with genre and concentrates primarily on autofiction. Autofiction often raises themes of exile and displacement, blurring identities and the space between fiction and reality. Stock also publishes non-fiction and essays. Other areas of potential exploration include the emerging space of live literature, ‘la crise de la littérature,’ and Stock’s foray into the digital. This project aims to combine a quantitative, sociological approach to literature with qualitative analysis and interviews to argue that ‘le métier de Stock consiste à aider la diversité’.

Tuesday 6th February 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Marie Martine (Hertford College, Oxford): 'Unhinged Women: Violence and Gender in Rachilde's La Marquise de Sade and Eliza Clark's Boy Parts'

In the last decade, representations of ‘female rage’ have taken over our social media, cinema, and literature. The fictional depiction of women’s use of violence is not as radically new as it seems, as the 1887 French novel La Marquise de Sade, by Rachilde, reflects. This paper will compare it to a more recent text, Boy Parts (2020) by Eliza Clark, to uncover how our current literary production shares similar concerns with nineteenth-century society, particularly our ambivalent responses to violence enacted by women. Both authors portray sadistic female protagonists who take pleasure in dominating and torturing men in a society that dismisses the possibility of women acting violently and attempting to reverse gender power dynamics. However, both authors challenge any fictional idealisation of ‘female rage’ by showing how their protagonists act out because of their traumatic past and are ultimately unable to bring about systemic change.

Alyssa Ollivier-Tabukashvili (Wolfson College, Oxford): '"Il y en avait deux" : Writing and Translating Algeria into the World Literature Canon'

‘The most notorious literary killing of the 20th century takes place on a deserted beach near Algiers, at two o’clock in the afternoon.’ Such is the opening of an Observer review of Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2013, 2014): it immediately situates the novel within the French literary canon, reminding many readers of their first exposure to francophone literature, Albert Camus’ L’Etranger (1942). However, whilst the review naively describes Meursault, contre-enquête as an ‘homage to Camus’, scholars of postcolonial and world literature studies will recognise Daoud’s novel as an example of ‘writing back’, contributing to a tradition of responding to, or re-placing, literature through a post-colonial lens.