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.