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.
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