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

Tuesday 1 November (4th Week) 5pm - 6.30pm

"Une Imagination Réglée": The Role of Imagined Paintings in Diderot's Salons

Rachel Skokowski (University College, Oxford) 

Originally published as part of Grimm's Correspondance littéraire, Diderot's Salons were ostensibly intended to provide descriptions of real paintings displayed at the Salon for readers who could not visit the exhibitions themselves. However, these descriptions of real artworks are often interrupted and overshadowed by descriptions of paintings that were never exhibited on the walls of the Salon Carré, unusual entities that masquerade as artworks, yet exist only in Diderot's imagination. 

My paper examines the phenomenon of these “imagined paintings” in detail for the first time. While scholars have noted the existence of imagined paintings, no one has yet investigated how and why Diderot constructs these strange objects, what Phillipe Déan calls "aberration[s] ontologique[s]." My paper explores the importance of imagined paintings for understanding larger issues in the Salons, such as the position Diderot takes as a writer and critic, and the role of the imagination. I will consider in particular the unusual term of the "imagination réglée," introduced in conjunction with imagined paintings in the Salon de 1767, which I argue acts as the ultimate manifestation of Diderot's quest to harness the unique strengths of poet and painter.

Redefining the Composer’s Voice in A.E.M. Grétry’s Mémoires

Jonathan Huff (King's College, London) 

The life of the Liégeois composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813) is an intriguing (if disconcerting) testament to the fragility of celebrity. Grétry is hardly a household name, and yet during his lifetime he enjoyed fame across Europe as the pre-eminent composer of opéra-comique. If, however, his opéras-comiques are yet to enjoy the status they deserve, Grétry’s Mémoires (published in three volumes between 1789 and 1797) remain all but unknown.

The obscurity of these Mémoires belies their striking radicalty: in a text which one would expect to contain a preponderance of autobiography, his commentary covers a broad range of subjects from aesthetics to psychology, with Grétry adopting the role of sociologist, architect, aesthetician, theatre director, and more besides.  This is all the more remarkable because during the eighteenth century, such subjects—and the freedom to move between them with impunity—were traditionally the prerogative of men-of-letters. They were certainly not under the jurisdiction of composers, who, according to Rousseau, were simply to ‘compose music or make the rules of composition.’

Employing the term ‘voice’ as metaphor with which to bind up the relevant issues of compositional agency, subjectivity, positionality, and responsibility, I argue that this text deserves greater recognition as a remarkable moment in the development of the composer’s voice; as a bold attempt to enlarge the composer’s authority over areas of his art traditionally considered off-limits, and in this way to redefine the composer’s profession at the dawn of a new era.

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

Tuesday 18 October (2nd Week) 5pm - 6.30pm

'La Mettrie's radical materialism in L’Homme Machine'

Audrey Borowski, (Queen’s College, Oxford)

The 18^th century emerged as the golden age of French materialism. Within this context of ‘mechanization of the world-picture’ (in the words of E. J. Dijksterhuis), the French philosopher Descartes in his Discourse on the Method and Treatise on Man postulated an essentially mechanistic take of human physiology. For him the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead one was ‘the difference between a watch or other automaton when it is wound up… and when it is broken.’ Man only differed from animals in that he had been endowed with a soul which provided him with consciousness, reasoned thought and the ability to communicate. The French doctor Julien Offray de la Mettrie simultaneously extended and vitalized what be perceived as Descartes’ ‘dead mechanism’. In the process he reconciled philosophy with medicine by naturalizing the former and displacing all metaphysical and theological accounts. A military doctor, philosopher, pamphleteer, La Mettrie was an outsider intent on observing, experimenting, deconstructing, polemicizing and reforming. With L’Homme Machine, he forged his own particular brand of radical materialism, one which paradoxically incorporated a vitalist element and veered into the sensuous.

 ‘Tableaux rapides: Théodore de Banville as lanternist and reluctant prose poet’

Natasha Ryan (St Anne’s, Oxford)

In his ‘Petit traité de poésie française’, Théodore de Banville declares that there is no such thing as prose poetry. However, twelve years later he published his own collection of prose poems, La Lanterne magique. Banville’s title demonstrates a fascination with optical devices during the nineteenth century, when lens technology improved substantially and was used in the development of photography, microscopic and telescopic research, and ultimately the cinematograph. The magic lantern, already a well-established optical device and a common domestic feature, was the natural precursor to cinema. Its ability to project images in succession, along with its cultural prominence and its association with the camera obscura, means that it contributes to contemporaneous debates about the relationship between visual art and technology, which had been shaken by the arrival of photography. By extension, these debates were applied to writing, with particular attention paid to the effect new visual technologies had on literary form: Banville’s Lanterne magique exemplifies this. I examine the relationship between poetic form and magic lantern technology in the late nineteenth century. Taking Banville’s collection as illustrative of this relationship, I explore the magic lantern as a metaphor through which Banville processed his changing attitude towards prose poetry.