Oxford French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday February 7th (4th Week)

All Souls’ College, Hovenden Room 5.15 - 6.30pm 

'Cet autre moy': Poetic Selves and Other Friends in Selected French Writings of the Sixteenth Century’

Vittoria Fallanca (Pembroke College, Oxford)

My paper begins by considering a line from a complainte by the French poet Philippe Desportes, written in 1581. Drawing on Terence Cave’s Pré-histoires, I identify this line as the first use of the French substantive ‘moy’. Like Cave, I take issue with the idea that what we see here is the beginning of a grand narrative of ‘selfhood’ and ‘modern’ subjectivity. I begin instead with the idea that ‘cet autre moy’ occurs in the context of Renaissance writings on friendship. These were characterised by the ‘Aristotelian-Ciceronian model’, whereby a friend was portrayed, under the shadow of Neoplatonism, as another self. I propose that alongside this well-established model of friendship, there is another, competing model. I call this model ‘anterotic’, as at its heart lies the Greek myth of Eros and Anteros. The anterotic model is characterised by strife as well as mutuality, by competition alongside imitation, and by opposition as much as communality. This other, ‘anterotic’ model, can help us to capture and make sense of some of the most salient characteristic of sixteenth-century French writings, including (but not limited to) tensions between Latin and the vernacular, localised imitative poet-model relationships and the friendships between the writers themselves. What emerges is not so much ‘modern’ identity as we know it, but a poetic identity, rooted in the double-sidedness of anteros.  

‘When water was thicker than blood: the development of Marie de Gournay's famille d'alliance in the seventeenth century'

Jess Allen (University of Durham)

Today we email, text, and phone our friends, imparting personal and private messages about all kinds of issues from gossip and social arrangements to love and loss. In the Republic of Letters, however, missives were public documents: they were exchanged by friends who aimed to praise each other's work and good qualities, promote their own, and offer mentorship. This large network contained several smaller networks consisting of alliances between scholars which were mostly elective and often transnational.

Marie de Gournay's (1565 - 1645) relationship with her père d'alliance Montaigne is already well-documented and indeed dominated Gournay scholarship until recently. Her other correspondences are comparatively much less well-known: this paper will explore the letters she exchanged with her own fille d'alliance, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607 - 1688), who went on to expand her family by adding a sœur d'alliance, Marie du Moulin (1622 - 1699). Building on existing scholarship about women in the Republic of Letters which provides a coherent account of this famille d'alliance, I will reconstruct their friendships through reading these letters, examining the extent to which they were able to control their self-fashioning and the ways in which these literary identities were subsequently received. The paper will show what we can learn about their individual circumstances and their ideas about relationships, highlighting discrepancies between how they write about themselves and how they are written about by others both during and after their lifetime.