WEDNESDAY 20 FEBRUARY: IRENA ARTEMENKO (WADHAM COLLEGE) AND SARA-LOUISE COOPER (BRASENOSE COLLEGE)

JOINT SESSION

CONFERENCE ROOM @ TS ELIOT THEATRE, MERTON 

17:00 - 18:30

DRINKS AND NIBBLES PROVIDED

Irena Artemenko (Wadham College)

Emmanuel Levinas: Being, Death and Infinity

Abstract

The truism of no contact between life and death implies that it is impossible for us to experience our own death and that the only relation we can have with death is built out of emotional and intellectual repercussions after the death of the other and provides a rich matrix for a philosophical reflection on the role of ethics in the quest for meaning.  Emmanuel Levinas notes that we gain knowledge about death from experiencing and observing the behaviour of others near death or simply the behaviour of others as mortals who are aware of their finitude and oblivious to it at the same time.  But the consciousness of one’s finitude implicates the idea of time, which leads Levinas to pose a question about the function and significance of time in one’s being - now from the vantage point of the involvement of the self with the other.  Because, for Levinas, if the only way one can be affected by death is through the death of the other, the notion of finitude translates into the realisation of time not as the limitation or annihilation of one’s own being but, first and foremost, into the understanding of time as the experience that is attainable solely through the other and, only then, as the context within which the relationship of the self with the other unfolds.  Should we accept this proposition, it does not matter whether time indeed organises, totalises or gives continuity and meaning to our own finite existence as long as it allows us to exit our self-centred, self-enclosed being and try to aim beyond it – at infinity.

Sara-Louise Cooper (Brasenose College)

‘Une assise prismatique de l’être’: Spectra in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une enfance créole

Abstract

In this paper, I show how the fluidity of the spectrum and its capacity to bring together seemingly separate phenomena allows Chamoiseau to re-establish the linguistic, temporal and spatial continuities he knew as a child and which were broken upon his entry into the adult world.

The schooling system Chamoiseau experiences institutes a vertical, hierarchical relationship between French and Créole, whereas before he had not realised there was any distinction between the two languages. The association of French with learning and the dismissal of Créole as backward installs a separation between the young Chamoiseau’s intellectual life and his bodily life, his lived worlds and his learned worlds. The adult Chamoiseau comes to see this separation as damaging, so his autobiography emphasises the porous boundaries between mind, body and world. He wishes to convey that his pre-school freedom from colonial hierarchies is not irrevocably lost to him and to do this he must demonstrate how past and present are not sealed off from each other, but are joined in constant interaction on a temporal spectrum.

Une enfance créole is generically situated between fiction, autobiography, and theoretical work, as the author uses his childhood to make political points, meditates on the structures of memory, and slips seamlessly from historical fact to fantastic and dream-like episodes. This exploration of the generic spectrum lets Chamoiseau show how memory, invention and political action are bound up with each other.

WEDNESDAY 6 FEBRUARY: CLARISSE ZOULIM (WADHAM COLLEGE) AND ALICE HOLT (WADHAM COLLEGE)

JOINT SESSION

FITZJAMES II, MERTON
17:00 - 18:30
DRINKS AND NIBBLES PROVIDED

Clarisse Zoulim

The self and language : Ricoeur's narrative theory of the self vs. Stéphane Chauvier's linguistic account

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur'’s narrative theory of the self, developed in Soi-même comme un autre has attracted a lot of attention since its publication in the 1990s and is still considered by some as providing a solution to several questions concerning the true nature of the self. But, however appealing this theory might be, the highly metaphorical, and therefore not so explicit, dimension of its content, cannot be denied. For this reason, this paper’'s aim will be precisely to attempt to strip this theory of its metaphorical dimension in order to reveal its very theoretical core on the one hand, and, on the other, to propose a critique of this theoretical core  by setting up a fruitful confrontation with Stéphane Chauvier’'s linguistic theory of the nature of the self, set out in his 2001 seminal book Dire « je ».

Clarisse Zoulim is teaching French at Wadham. She is agrégée in philosophy as well as a student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and of the Sorbonne (Paris I), where she is undertaking a PhD in contemporary philosophy.

Alice Holt 

'Un temps habitable à l'homme': A comparison of Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin's Philosophies of Time and Industrial Modernity

Abstract

This paper will seek to offer a new perspective on French philosopher Simone Weil's (1909-1943) account of inter-war industrial work, suggesting that it can be read as more than a commonplace account of the dehumanisation inherent to modern industrial labour, but also as a distinct philosophy of time. Using her own experience as a factory worker as the basis from which to critique industrial practices, Weil sets out a vision of the inter-war factory worker as torn out of "habitable" time and hurled into the "tumulte glacé" of the mechanised production line with devastating psychological and physical consequences. This paper will show how Weil in her Cahiers, in her articles on industrial life and in L'Enracinement (1943), undertook to prove that industrial reformer F.W. Taylor and his disciples had confused the distinct temporal orders separating men and machines. With this in mind, she elaborated a conception of time, set out diffusely across a series of texts, which, this paper will argue, is related to Walter Benjamin's representation of time in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939), where mechanised factory work provoked a fragmented "isolated experience" of time (Erlebnis) that lacked embeddedness within tradition-bound long-experience (Erfahrung). These approaches unite a conception of time estranged from rational, modern and scientific 'clock time' and favour an understanding of time determined by memory, experience and imagination.

Alice Holt is a second year Dphil student at Wadham. She did her BA in French and German at Pembroke College, Cambridge and her masters in political science at the London School of Economics. 

Wednesday 23 January: Adam Guy (Lincoln College) and James McFarthing (University of Bristol)

Joint Session
Fitzjames II, Merton
17:00 - 18:30
Drinks and nibbles provided

Adam Guy (Lincoln College)
Robbe-Grillet in space: Brian W. Aldiss’s sf nouveau roman

Abstract

In 1962, Brian W. Aldiss – an established British science fiction (sf) author – had a manuscript rejected by his publisher. At this point titled Garden with Figures, or Figures in a Garden, Aldiss’s novel is a conspicuous imitation of the early novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, at this point in Britain the exemplary figure of the contemporary international literary avant-garde. The novel was eventually published in 1968 – re-titled Report on Probability A and containing a recognisable generic apparatus to frame the original text. 

Using the Deleuzo-Guattarian pairing of de-/reterritorialisation, my paper considers Aldiss’s engagement with Robbe-Grillet, and more broadly with the idea of the nouveau roman. Viewed in the context of Aldiss’s critical statements, as well as his place within the British Science Fiction New Wave, the novel’s adoption of Robbe-Grillet is a brave deterritorialisation of the hermetic and perceivedly middlebrow genre of sf into the currents of fiction that emerged in the wake of modernism. However, Aldiss’s eventual capitulation to a more recognisable version of sf seems to reterritorialise the genre to some extent. At the same time, another movement is taking place. If, in Report, the nouveau roman is deterritorialised into the exterior terrain of sf, then concurrently, Aldiss reterritorialises his influences by evoking the theoretical coordinates that Robbe-Grillet set up for the nouveau roman. The conventionally sf sections of Report in fact develop a metalanguage for the original Robbe-Grillet-inspired text, reflecting on it – as nouveau roman – on Robbe-Grillet’s terms.   

Adam is a second year DPhil student in the English Faculty. His thesis – supervised by Valentine Cunningham – will most probably be titled ‘The Nouveau Roman in Britain, 1957–73’.

James McFarthing (University of Bristol)The Science of Experience – A Jules Verne Aesthetic

Abstract

‘L’heure est venue où la science a sa place faite dans le domaine de la littérature’ 

Pierre Hetzel, L’avertissement de l’editeur in Jules Verne, Aventures du capitaine Hatteras p. 26. (1864)

The emergence of the roman scientifique in France saw the first great popularisation of the science fiction text and the emergence of a form that would go on to irrevocably shape our engagement with questions of industry, technology and social change. Distinguishing himself from the more didactic texts of scientific popularisation, Jules Verne set out to create a form that could combine the rationalistic scientific epistemology of the sciences with a novelistic aesthetic capable of communicating complex scientific theories and terminology through means of sensual evocation, adventure narrative and social critique. In his great novel cycle the Voyages extraordinaires, Verne helps to elevate scientific discourse from a mere bulwark of verisimilitude or abstract obfuscation to a sensual discourse that helps renegotiate the sensual reception of scientific phenomena in fiction whilst providing the necessary tools for effective artistic and social engagement with science and scientific practice.  

This paper intends to outline how the scientific principle is grounded within the aesthetic core of Verne’s writing, forming an epistemological and aesthetic foundation upon which Verne can build his stories and ideas. By examining the different scientific disciplines of cartography, geometry and geology used by Verne in his works, I will demonstrate how scientific theory and phenomena are reconfigured aesthetically and spatially, creating a new kind of ‘fictional empiricism’. This approach helps ground not only the epistemological and stylistic core of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, but also helps delineate the ways in which science fiction establishes itself both as a formal genre and as a critical mode of writing.   

James is a third-year PhD student at the University of Bristol, whose research centres on Jules Verne, utopian theory and science fiction. He previously read for an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and French at King’s College London where he also received a Master’s degree in French Literature and Culture. As of 2012 he lives and studies in Paris in his capacity as a ‘pensionnaire étranger’ at the École Normale Supérieure. 

28 November: Valentina Gosetti (Balliol)

Fitzjames I, Merton
17:00 - 18:30
Drinks and nibbles provided

Valentina Gosetti (Balliol)
Aloysius Bertrand's formal choice in context: Gaspard de la Nuit and romantic generic mobility in the 1820s

 

Abstract

In French literary history the name of Aloysius Bertrand, the author of Gaspard de la Nuit. Fantaisies à la Manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (published posthumously in 1842), is still remembered as that of the author of the first canonical collection of prose poetry. In this paper I shall consider Bertrand outside of his pioneering role in the development of prose poetry in order to examine this poet's own and unique synthesis of the literary material available at his time and his own formal experimentation. I shall thus examine specific case studies of little known works circulating at Bertrand’s time to see how Bertrand's use of an unusual form fits within wider contemporary romantic generic mobility. The first goal of this approach is to offer more empirical evidence in order to understand what some critics really mean when they state that at Bertrand’s time the prose poem was already ‘in the air’. The second goal is to propose new hypotheses for the possible reasons of Bertrand’s unusual formal choice, without anachronistically thinking of later developments in prose poetry by better known authors such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. 

Valentina Gosetti (Balliol) is writing up her D.Phil. thesis entitled: 'Tradition and Poetic Experimentation in Gaspard de la Nuit: Aloysius Bertrand and Cultural Exchange in French Romanticism', while working as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Modern French Literature at Balliol College. She has spent the last academic year in Paris, in exchange with the École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). She is a postgraduate member of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes and a member of the Associationpour la mémoire d'Aloysius Bertrand.