French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday February 21st (6th Week)

All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

5.15-6.30pm

Natalie Pangburn (Lincoln College)

'Foudroiement: Wajdi Mouawad and the philosophy of Jan Patočka'

One of the most prolific and well-received French-language playwrights of his generation, Lebanese Canadian Wajdi Mouawad has authored twenty-three original plays, recently directed new adaptations of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays, and served in a number of high-profile positions in the French theatre, including his current position as Artistic Director at the Théâtre national de la Colline. Although Mouawad’s literary and dramatic sources have been the subject of numerous studies, one influence that has, as of yet, gone largely unexplored is that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. This paper argues that this is an important lacuna in contemporary scholarship. It describes how Mouawad discovered the works of Jan Patočka in 1991, the year his career began, and has frequently referenced Patočka’s writings in his exegetical texts and interviews, as well as in the plays themselves. This paper explores how Patočka’s ideas provided Mouawad with a language and philosophical framework for his artistic project and ambitions. It describes a number of Patočka’s key philosophical innovations - ‘shakenness’, the three movements of human existence, metanoia and solidarity - and demonstrates the deep impact of these ideas on Mouawad’s dramatic work. It argues that these ideas are in fact the basis for the four key philosophical and theatrical ambitions most frequently expressed by Mouawad: metamorphosis; the recognition of the other; responsibility; and  ‘solidarity of the shaken’. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how, and to what degree, Mouawad achieves his Patočkan philosophical and ethical ambitions.

Robert Pruett (St Cross College)

'Remy de Gourmont's Lilith: mythic structures of sexual pessimism'

Remy de Gourmont's work at the end of the 19th century (notably Sixtine, La culture des idées, and Le livre des masques) cemented the author as both a practitioner and analyst of Symbolism's aesthetic tactics of subjectivity and dream. Regarded as the philosopher laureate of the movement, he sought to carry these unfolding artistic concerns into the theoretical realms of idealism, the study of cultural constructs, and, central to this paper, the unwieldy subject of sexuality and its governing influences. The bulk of Gourmont's fiction explores, in one form or another, the precariousness of love and sex in a phenomenological world. Of particular note is Lilith (1891-2), a play which restructures, re-purposes, and combines elements of lapsarian lore to the effect of a lewd and parodistic origin myth of carnal desire and its flaws. I argue that Gourmont's dramatization, however ironic, adeptly personifies the forces which shape human sexual relations in a manner unique among his other works. My discussion of the archetypes which he employs will focus primarily on three main themes: Firstly, the struggle between patriarchal control and chaotic 'inutilité' in the figures of Jehovah and Satan, secondly, the principle of individuation in the figure of Adam, and thirdly, the question of ideal sexuality as a 'lost inheritance' in the figures of Lilith and Eve.