Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

8th March 5-6.30pm

Performing and Exploring Gender in the Plays of French Caribbean Women Writers

Vanessa Lee (St Edmund Hall, Oxford)

My thesis research focuses on the theatrical works by French Caribbean women writers; Ina Césaire, Michèle Césaire and Suzanne Dracius, from Martinique; and Maryse Condé and Gerty Dambury, from Guadeloupe. Martinique and Guadeloupe are French départements, however the islands have produced many writers and theorists whose writings form the kernel of postcolonial and anticolonial thought. French Caribbean writers are often marginalized by metropolitan French literary and artistic culture, and have only become the focus of Francophone postcolonial studies over the past thirty years.

Theatre constitutes an under-researched domain within Francophone postcolonial studies, and I aim to demonstrate how the analysis of Caribbean performance cultures enhances our understanding of the fragmentary and multicultural socio-historical realities of the region.  The works of women writers in French theatre is even more under-researched, despite the exceptional concentration of female playwrights within the same generation, a phenomenon that demands more extensive study.

This paper will analyse the representation and exploration of gender constructs and relations in the plays Mémoires d’îles (1983) by Ina Césaire, Comme deux frères (2007) by Maryse Condé and Lettres indiennes (1993) by Gerty Dambury.The artificiality of theatre questions and problematizes gender signifiers and constructs, and offers multiple frames within which to explore gender relations in Antillean society. Using postcolonial, theatrical and spatial theories of gender, I shall analyse how the plays tackle issues of motherhood, domesticity and male-female relations.

The (dis)appearance of nothing in Beckett’s L’Innommable

Amy Steinepreis (Merton College, Oxford)

This paper focuses on the trope of self-erasure in Samuel Beckett, epitomised by L’Innommable’s: ‘Et si je parlais pour ne rien dire, mais vraiment rien?’ I return to Jacques Derrida’s writings on the inevitable doubling of presence and absence in literature to ask whether it is ever possible for a narrator to say nothing without leaving behind a remnant of the act of saying. Citing Gustave Flaubert’s dream of a ‘livre sur rien’, Derrida’s essay ‘Force et Signification’ posits the critic’s object as ‘la façon dont ce rien lui-mêmese détermine en se perdant’: in other words, we should scrutinise the disappearing act of nothing.

Our question becomes: if nothing leaves a wake behind it to thwart the Flaubertian dream in its pure form, in what way does the disappearance of this ‘rien’ itself appear in Beckett’s text? Engaging with Hegel, Blanchot, Derrida, and Levinas, I investigate the ‘trace’ or ‘remainder’ (Derrida) that self-cancelling narration leaves in L’Innommable. Having considered what kind of surplus might inhere in Beckett’s work despite narrative processes of self-negation, I test the argument that Beckett’s ‘signature’ persists after what Derrida terms the exhaustion of this author’s ‘thematics’.