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.

Wednesday 2 May - Jessica Goodman (Worcester College) and Rosalind Holmes Duffy (Merton College)

JOINT SESSION
17.30-19:00
Massey Room, Balliol College 
Wine and Nibbles provided


Papers and discussion
In her thesis, Jess traces the career of Carlo Goldoni in relation to those of other hommes de théâtre working in Paris from the 1760s to the 1790s. In this paper, she sketched out the hierarchical structure of the four different theatres in Paris - the foire, the comédie italienne, the comédie française and the opéra – explaining that it was considered the height of a playwright’s career to have a play performed at the comédie française. Using detailed archival facts and figures, she argued that although playwrights did seek such renown, they were also motivated by commercial and financial goals, and as such, would not necessarily be deterred from having plays performed in any of the theatres. She showed that the difference in terms of performance frequency, payment of actors, ticket prices and sales between the comédie française and the comédie italienne, in particular, was much smaller than the prestige hierarchy might suggest. She thus made a convincing case for the pragmatic career trajectory of her chosen hommes de théâtre. A lively discussion followed, with questions about reviews and the bias of the press, status symbols within the theatres themselves, the social class of these playwrights and the extent to which the different theatres determined the content and genre of the plays performed. 

Rosalind's research focuses on analogies between the senses in the French Enlightenment, taking its cue from the concept of the ocular harpsichord proposed by Louis Bertrand Castel in 1725. In this paper, she discussed Castel’s 1740 l’Optique des Couleurs, a tract written against Newton’s Opticks and the latter’s application of mathematical approaches to the comprehension of the physical world. Castel argued that instead of seven distinct colours, as Newton proposed, their division was not perceptible. His tract was then heavily satirized by André-François Boureau-Deslandes in his L'Optique des Moeurs, opposée à l'optique des couleurs. Rosalind analysed some of the implications of this satire though close readings of the two texts. Her paper was met with an enthusiastic response. Questions were asked on the role of language in the mediation of the senses, whether discussion of the senses in the Enlightenment had aesthetic implications, metaphysics, and synesthesia among the Romantics.

Thanks so much to Jess and Rosalind for starting this term with such interesting and stimulating papers! And to all the attendees for their engagement and enthusiasm.

Jessica Goodman (Worcester College, Oxford) 
Mapping theatrical Paris in the 1760s: an author's-eye view

Abstract
Eighteenth-century Paris was the vibrant European capital of theatre. From the marionettes and tightrope dancers of the Boulevard, through commedia and comic opera at the Comédie-Italienne, to classical greats at the Comédie-Française and grand performances of opera at the Académie-Royale, the city offered the whole gamut of theatrical experience. But how did these theatres relate to one another? Who attended their performances, when, and why? And what did this world look like for a dramatic author, trying to forge a career in an increasingly competitive and commercial environment? This paper tracks the career trajectories of a sample of the authors working at the Comédie-Italienne in the 1760s, using their experiences to address the perception of a hierarchy of prestige in Parisian theatres, and exploring how these very different individuals negotiated the fine balance between status and economics.



Biography
Jessica is a third year DPhil student at Worcester, where she also completed her undergraduate studies in French and Italian, and her MSt in the European Enlightenment. Her thesis, under the supervision of Alain Viala, explores dramatic authorship in eighteenth-century Paris through the experiences of Carlo Goldoni, who was invited to work at the Comédie-Italienne in the 1760s. It is provisionally titled ‘A servant of two masters: Carlo Goldoni in and around the Comédie-Italienne, 1760-93’. She has recently published an article in Modern Language Notes on the subject of anonymity in the 1760s Comédie-Italienne, and she has two more articles forthcoming in the Revue d’histoire du théâtre and Littératures classiques.

http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/goodman

Rosalind Holmes Duffy (Merton College, Oxford)
The Polemical Optics and Optical Polemics of 1740

Abstract
1740 saw the publication of a popular tract on optics, L'Optique des Couleurs, which argued against Newton's Opticks. Written by a powerful and controversial Jesuit scientist, Louis Bertrand Castel, it was soon ridiculed in a short satire, L'Optique des Moeurs, opposée à l'optique des couleurs, written by provincial polymath André-François Boureau-Deslandes. This paper will juxtapose close readings of passages from Boureau-Deslandes' text with corresponding passages from Castel's work, for the purposes of inspiring discussion and tracing the tensions that run through this chain of optics and polemics.


Biography
Rosalind Holmes Duffy is in the first year of a doctorate in French at Merton College, Oxford. She received a BA from Simon's Rock College in the USA and an M.St at Worcester College, Oxford. Building on her masters' dissertation, which examined references to the ocular harpsichord in Diderot's works and letters, her D.Phil project looks at analogies between the senses in the French Enlightenment.

TRINITY TERM CARD
French Graduate Seminar
Wednesday Even Weeks 5-6.30
*Balliol College, Massey Room* (note change of venue)

Wednesday 2nd May (2nd week)
Jessica Goodman (Worcester College, Oxford) 
Mapping theatrical Paris in the 1760s: an author's-eye view

Rosalind Holmes Duffy (Merton College, Oxford)
The Polemical Optics and Optical Polemics of 1740

Wednesday 16th May (4th week)
Huw Grange (St John’s College, Cambridge & University of Oxford)
Monstrous doubles: warning and showing in medieval French hagiography
Respondent: Pauline Souleau (Merton College, Oxford)

Wednesday 30th May (6th week)
Ruth Bush (Wolfson College, Oxford) 
L’aventure ambiguë: Publishing African literature in the world republic of letters 1945–1970
Respondent: Sarah Puello (Wolfson College, Oxford)

Wednesday 13th June (8th week)
Mara van der Lugt (Corpus Christi, Oxford)
Of faux savants and faux Philosophes: quarrels and morals in Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique

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

Wednesday 7th March - Elizabeth Geary Keohane (Trinity College Dublin & Université d'Orléans)

GIDE, TRAVEL AND MORTALITY 

Respondent: Sam Ferguson (New College, Oxford)

17.00-18.30
Massey Room, Balliol College
Wine and Nibbles provided

 André Gide

Paper and Discussion: 

Examining Gide's late-career travels in Equatorial Africa in the mid-1920s and his trip to Soviet Union in 1936, Elizabeth's paper demonstrated the centrality of his experience of geographical displacement to issues of politics, ethics, and aesthetic creativity in Gide's later works. She argued that the "transformative capabilities of travel" are articulated in Gide's writings in relation to a repeated preoccupation with youth and renewal, a preoccupation which emerges out of, and collides with, Gide's increasing awareness of senescence and the question of his own morality. Elizabeth's paper viewed this shift as more than a straightforward recasting of thematic concerns in Gide's work: it is also accompanied by a formal, stylistic divergence in his writings -- a shift which offers evidence for the existence of a distinctive 'late style' in Gide's corpus.

An enjoyable discussion followed, aided by a perceptive response to Elizabeth's paper from fellow Gidean Sam Ferguson (New College). Issues raised included the relevance of Gide's physical (versus imagined) presence in the country; the issue of sexuality in Gide's diaries and its relationship to his mortality; parallels with another diarist of the period, Roger Casement; and the possibility of a tradition of imaginary and real travel writings in French literature at least as early as the 18th century.

Many thanks to Elizabeth for a provocative and fascinating paper (and for making the trek from Paris!).

Abstract:  

This paper considers André Gide’s approach later in life to travel and writing up the travel
 experience, specifically in the interwar period, during which Voyage au Congo, Le Retour
du Tchad, Retour de l’U.R.S.S. and Retouches à mon Retour de l’U.R.S.S. all appeared. 
It suggests that Gide’s conception of travel evolves with age, as travel becomes for him a
process which has the potential to enable renewal and rejuvenation, as much as it represents a search for the new (understood, in the context of Gide’s travel-based work, in terms of the exotic, the supposed antonym of the everyday). Gide’s evolving approach to travel and travel writing during the interwar period will be explored in the light of his understanding and interrogation of the aging process and his own mortality. The shift that can be detected between the West Africa narratives and the texts on the Soviet Union will be understood as a stylistic as well as a formal development; Edward Said’s posthumous work On Late Style informs this element of the paper. Debating the effect of looking back on one’s work in order to sustain and inspire further artistic production in the face of one’s demise, Said might also be seen to delineate the figure of the aging traveller-writer, in speaking of the ‘increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses and, more important, uses to formally sustain itself’. Gide, for example, attempts to maintain a sense of apartness as well as a physical and ultimately ideological ‘exile’ in his interwar travel-based writings. Indeed, he will also be seen to resist aging through frequent invocation of his early travel-based works of the fin-de-siècle, whether focused on real or imagined travel, in these later texts. This jarring effect will be explored in detail, especially in relation to the 'progression' that is supposedly central to the traveller-writer’s creative project.

Biography: 

Elizabeth Geary Keohane is a postgraduate in the Department of French, Trinity College Dublin, where she recently submitted her IRCHSS-funded doctoral thesis entitled 'Real and Imaginary Travel in Gide and Michaux'. She was also awarded the A.J. Leventhal Scholarship and the Arnould Memorial Prize from Trinity College Dublin. She has previously published an article on Michaux and ekphrasis in French Studies and has an upcoming publication on Gide and bedroom-based imaginary travel in Aller(s)-Retour(s), the conference proceedings of the Society of Dix-neuviémistes, as well as participating in a new proposed interdisciplinary volume entitled Travel and Imagination. She is currently a maître de langue in the Department of English at the Université d'Orléans. 

 

Wednesday 22 February - Gillian Pink (St John's College, Oxford & Voltaire Foundation)

Devil in the Details: Preparing a Critical Edition of Voltaire’s Pauvre Diable

17.00-18.30
New Seminar Room, St John's College
Wine and Nibbles provided

Paper and Discussion

Gillian’s paper took us through the various stages of preparing a critical edition of Voltaire’s poem, Le Pauvre Diable, first published under a pseudonym in 1760 but antedated to 1758 to distance it from the polemics and controversies of the period. Gillian provided a detailed account of the mechanics behind the preparation of critical editions, from the initial stages of deciding on which version of the text to choose to the process of modernising spelling and punctuation. She argued for the importance of including variant readings from both authorised and unauthorised versions of the text in circulation at the time. She demonstrated how to describe an eighteenth-century printed volume in all its material detail using a bibliographical ‘short-hand’ and also talked us through the role and characteristics of an editor's introduction (neutrality, factuality, objectivity). 

A very enthusiastic and dynamic discussion followed with questions about the history of the Voltaire Foundation, its ‘house style’, the role of critical editions in the academic world, their target audience and whether there is a difference between French and English practices. The discussion moved on to the importance of the material, physical nature of the text in interpretation and the possible interpretative role involved in glossing allusions (and how far this should be taken), with questions about Voltaire’s library, correspondence, ‘diaries’ and the stakes surrounding posthumous publication. Thanks so much to Gillian for such an interesting and clear paper, and to this session's attendees for their participation and commitment.

Abstract

As literary scholars, we all use critical editions in our work, but how closely do we examine the principles according to which they were prepared? Do we ask ourselves what has been included and what has been left out? If there are several versions of the text, which has been chosen (and why?) and to what extent does the edition allow us insight into the alternative versions? Is the presentation historical and objective or might the editor be using the platform of the critical edition to promote a controversial new interpretation of the work? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in this seminar, using as a case study Gillian Pink's recently completed critical edition of Voltaire's 1760 poem Le Pauvre Diable for the ongoing Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Oxford, 1968- ).

Gillian Pink, Research Editor with the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire project (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford) since 2007, is publishing manager and in-house editor of the ongoing sub-series, the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (ed. N. Cronk and C. Mervaud) and the Corpus des notes marginales (ed. N. Elaguina et al.). She is also preparing a D.Phil. on Voltaire’s marginalia: Les Pratiques de lecture chez Voltaire. Avec une édition critique de notes marginales inédites (St John’s College, Oxford). Before working on Voltaire she lectured in French and literary translation at St Francis Xavier University (Canada), and recently published the French translation of Hermia Oliver’s 1980 monograph, Flaubert et une gouvernante anglaise (PURH, 2010). She has published a number of critical editions of eighteenth-century texts, mostly by Voltaire, and is interested in initiatives to bring the activity of scholarly editing into the digital sphere.

Wednesday 8th February - Joanne Brueton (UCL) and Paul Earlie (Balliol College, Oxford)

JOINT SESSION: Jacques Derrida 
17.00-18.30
New Seminar Room, St John's College
Wine and Nibbles provided

Papers and Discussion 
Jo’s talk focused on Derrida 1974 text, Glas, and its relation to Jean Genet’s essays on Rembrandt. She interrogated the idea that meaning in a text can only be determined equivocally, challenging linear reading and probing the relationship between text and the space around it. She argued that the oblique becomes an optic for interpretation par excellence as it fragments and multiplies meanings; that its impulse demands engagement and textual agitation, exceeding language while questioning its very structure.

Paul's paper analysed the concept of 'spéculation' in Derrida's 1980 text, 'Spéculer - sur "Freud"'. Paul showed how Derrida turns to Freud's notion of 'speculation' in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to provide a means of questioning phenomenological accounts of scientific method and progress. He argued that far from being a philosopher inattentive to scientific problems, Derrida's texts on psychoanalysis constitute a privileged means of reengaging and reenergising the relationship between deconstruction and science.

Questions were asked about the role of etymology in Derrida’s writings and how this related to word play and sonority; about the notion of voice in his writing; and about metaphor and its effect on reading. Thanks to Jo and Paul for such a stimulating, dynamic session!

'N'y allons pas par quatre chemins?*' Figures of the oblique in Jean Genet and Jacques Derrida
Joanne Brueton

© Anish Kapoor, When I Am Pregnant, 1992–1998, sculpture

Abstract
In 1972, the radical journal Obliques, defined as “une revue, à dominante critique, [qui] puisse avoir un espace où le discours critique soit contrarié, contesté, piégé, dynamité par une parole contradictoire […] pour toujours bifurquer dans d’autres directions”,[1] dedicated its second edition entirely to Jean Genet. In 1974, Derrida published his genre-defying text Glas whose fragmentary structure sought to “rendre le texte imprenable, bien sûr”.[2] We can find an oblique aesthetic at play in both Derrida and Genet’s writing: ubiquitously deployed in the former, and latently derived from the latter; and this paper offers an analysis of the purpose, behaviour and figuration of such indirection. By exploring the oblique in terms of its anamorphic, implicit, and liminal connotations, I argue that it becomes the metaphor of interpretation par excellence. It is through this oblique optic that Genet and Derrida prompt us to think about our structures of epistemology, encouraging us to consider the interstice between words as a locus of meaning, and find signification in that which resists direct communication. In its etymological parity with ‘limus’, to mean both askew and residual waste, the oblique points to a void or remnant which cannot be appropriated by the structures of language, but which constantly slips from them: an ever present absence which both reveals and exceeds the very frame that denies it.

*Jacques Derrida, “L’Offrande Oblique” in Passions, Paris: Galilée, 1993, p.26
[1] René Zahnd, Henri Ronse: La vie oblique, avec des textes de Jacques de Decker [et al], Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, c1996, pp.15 & 5
[2] Jacques Derrida, Glas, Paris: Éditons Denoël/Gonthier, 1981, p.90b

Joanne Brueton read Modern and Medieval Languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, and is now in the first year of her PhD at University College London. Her thesis looks at how geometry offers a figure of subjective experience in Jean Genet’s writing, and seeks to explore how a geometric ontology influences figural processes of writing in general. Her other research interests include Hélène Cixous, Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Frank O’Hara and modern literary theory.

Psychoanalysis between Science and Fiction: Derrida’s ‘Spéculer—sur Freud’ 
Paul Earlie

The ‘Fred and Ginger’ Building, Prague. An example of deconstructivist architecture

Abstract
By focusing on Derrida’s use of the key term ‘spéculation’, this paper reads La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (1980) as a text centrally concerned with problems of science and scientificity. While previous accounts have highlighted the importance of autobiographical traces in Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), I argue that this interpretation stops short of a complete and holistic account of Derrida’s text. Such an account can only be given once three distinct senses of the word ‘spéculer’ are seen to be inextricably related: namely, the ‘specular’ structure of self-other identity (exemplified in the fort-da game of Freud’s grandson Ernest); ‘speculation’ in the economic sense of investment, reserve, and return; and the kind of metaphysical ‘speculation’ that Freud’s positivism is determined to isolate and exclude from his analysis. In highlighting the implicated nature of this personal-economic-scientific speculation, 'Spéculer - sur Freud' provides a privileged means of engaging issues of science and empiricism in his writings and therefore offers a reply to critical readings which stress the supposedly anti- or a-scientific character of Derrida's work.

Paul Earlie is a third year DPhil student in French at Balliol College. His thesis examines the influence of Derrida’s reading of Freud on the formulation and development of deconstruction. His other interests include literary theory, modern European philosophy, and literature and thought in France from the Belle Epoque to present. He has also studied at Trinity College Dublin, St John’s College, Cambridge, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure.