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.

Tuesday 23rd January 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Olivia Russell (St Hugh's College, Oxford): 'Dissecting the Written Body: Gaze, Violation, and Shame in Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Isabelle de Charrière's Lettres écrites de Lausanne'

In letter 12 of Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), young Incan princess Zilia is adorned in French clothing for the first time. When Déterville – the Frenchcaptain who rescued her from Spanish captivity – sees her new appearance, Zilia describes his reaction: “les yeux attachés sur moi, il parcourait toute ma personne avec une attention sérieuse dont j’étais embarrassée, sans en savoir la raison.” His face becomes enflamed and he clasps her hand, before pulling away and throwing himself on a chair at the opposite side of the room. A similarly dramatic scene arises in letter 12 of Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres écrites de Lausanne (1785). Young Cécile is playing chess with a male suitor when, in a moment of passion, he grabs her hand and “sembloit la dévorer des yeux.” She pulls back, hides her face, and then leaves the room. 

In both scenes, Graffigny and Charrière rely on a specific language to make desire and, arguably, violation more visible to the reader. My paper will show how they each use the language of physicality to demonstrate an unspoken transgression of boundaries, but in such a way as to avoid calling the virtue of their female characters into question. Offering a comparative close reading, I will argue that they foreground certain body parts to express the destructive and violent force of gaze, and use affect to accentuate the presence of intangible forms of violation. Ultimately, this paper will show how Graffigny and Charrière use the body in their writings not only to comment on gender power dynamics, but also to criticise the expectations and education of women in eighteenth-century French society. 

Ramani Chandramohan (The Queen's College, Oxford): '"De trop parler est vilonie/Et de trop taisir est folie": Weaponising Speech and Silence in 13th-century manuscripts of Les Sept sages de Rome'

The premodern narrative tradition of Les Sept Sages de Rome stretched from Asia to the Middle East and Europe, encompassing more than thirty languages over a period of five centuries. Anchored by the retelling of a trial in which a mute prince is falsely accused of rape by his stepmother, the manifold adaptations of the Sept Sages typically use binary forms of speech to marginalise both characters from the courtly sphere. The text-world thus constructs and understands questions of gender and bodily impairment via the opposing axes of calumny and silence. This paper will focus on Herbert’s thirteenth-century Roman de Dolopathos, which belongs to one of the earliest branches of the Sept Sages cycle in western Europe, in order to examine how the romance uniquely shapes the weaponising of the verbal and non-verbal within its clerical and Cistercian framework. Through consideration of the Dolopathos’ understudied codicological context, I will show how medieval compilers, who incorporated the work into multi-text and multi-generic manuscripts, opened up the possibility of redressing the Sept Sages’ polarised treatment of speech. Whilst the inclusion of the Dolopathos alongside romans antiques and romans de chevalerie in MS BnF fr. 1450 arguably facilitates a recovery of the female voice, the didacticism of MS BnF fr. 24301 highlights a middle ground which questions the very need to either ‘trop parler’ or ‘trop taisir’.

Tuesday 14th November 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Zak Eastop (Durham): 'Anatomy of a Scandal: Reading, (Re)writing, and Restricting Rabelais on the 19th-century lyric stage'

On Christmas Eve of 1855 the Paris Opéra was embroiled in a scandal. That night, Pantagruel, a newly written two-act opera based (loosely) on the works of François Rabelais, received its first performance. Unfortunately, it was not the rip-roaring success that everybody had predicted: the piece caused such a stir among the audience that its run was immediately cancelled. The production disappeared from public view overnight and has never been performed since. We still don’t really know why.

In my talk I will sift through what is known about Pantagruel’s implosive premier, asking whether disagreements about how to read Rabelais’s texts played a part in the demise of their operatic afterlife. How did the composer, librettist, and those involved in the piece’s production - as readers of Rabelais themselves - reformulate and represent aspects of his texts on stage, and how might this have rubbed the Second Empire’s audience or authorities up the wrong way? What might this negative reaction tell us about how they understood Rabelais? And what can this, in turn, reveal about the curé’s texts themselves, or their potential to be read plurally, divergently, and in ways that often seem incompatible with one another? 

Though extremely patchy archival records, wildly divergent published accounts of the evening, and the ever-snipping sound of the censor’s scissors mean that there is simply no way of knowing for certain what went wrong at Pantagruel’s premier, I contend that this scandal represents more than a merely musical misjudgement. It is an example of a historical community reading and disagreeing about the meaning and status of a text. So who, then, was Rabelais to these people? And why all the fuss? 

Hestia Zhang (St Peter's College, Oxford): ‘When the Flâneurs Sit Down: The Haussmannian Benches and Urban Storytelling’

In the 1850s, as part of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the French architect Gabriel Davioud designed the iconic dark-green public benches that are still seen in Paris today. Wooden benches and chairs had been installed on the walkways in royal gardens in the ancien régime, making them more than merely a place for strolling. It was not until the French Revolution that the gardens and parks in Paris were opened to the general public, which, throughout the century, developed into a sort of outdoor salon for social mingling and licit encounters among people of different socioeconomic status. Conforming to Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s political ambition of social integration, Davioud’s public benches pervaded the new boulevards and public parks and provided the untiring flâneurs a moment of rest. By settling people, sometimes even strangers, in close proximity, the benches also created more potential for urban meetings. In this paper, I will look closely into some nineteenth-century Parisian writings and paintings to see how, by juxtaposing characters of various social types in one line and staging them facing the audience, the artists exploited the bench’s theatrical effect and narrative potential to present a microcosm of nineteenth-century Parisian society.