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.