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.