May 23rd 

5.15-6.30pm

All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

Helen Craske (Merton College) 

Rachilde and the Art of the Book Review: A Matter of Taste

Rachilde is best known for works displaying overtly ‘Decadent’ themes, images or figures – from the gender-bending in Monsieur Vénus, to the necrophilia in La Tour d’amour. However, the tendency in modern criticism to concentrate on these elements of Rachilde’s work – as rich and rewarding as they are – often ends up eliding the wide-ranging and heterogeneous nature of the contribution Rachilde made to fin-de-siècle literary culture. In particular, her involvement in the Mercure de France has been relatively neglected. This paper attempts to redress this imbalance slightly, by providing an analysis of Rachilde’s book reviews at the turn of the century (c.1894-1906), situating them within and against the work of fellow writers and critics. In particular, I will explore how Rachilde manipulated her role as book reviewer at the Mercure in order to distinguish herself, and a select group of fellow writers, from the increasing novelistic production at the fin de siècle. I will argue that Rachilde’s self-aware reflections on criticism and aesthetic taste work alongside her playful approach and creative style, producing an ‘art’ of the book review that is both serious and irreverent in its treatment of partiality,  justice/ethics, exceptionality, and literary influence.

Sinan John-Richards (Wadham College) 

‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ : Lacan, Sexuation, and God

In this paper I show how Lacan’s conception of sexual difference (‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ ) occurs at the level of the signifier and not at the level of the signified. The ‘non rapport sexuel’ does not denote the impossibility of the sexual act, instead Lacan suggests that the ‘non rapport sexuel’ is the condition of possibility of the sexual act. The impasse reached in the ‘non rapport sexuel’ is the renunciation of unrestricted jouissance at the original level of castration. Absolute jouissance would entail a return to the unregulated desire of the Father of the mythic hoard. The dislocation that sexuality exposes through the ‘non rapport sexuel’ is Lacan’s equivalent of the ontological gap which finds its earliest expression in German Idealism, most notably in the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel. This is, however, the truth founded on a lie. The very same lie which is the object-obstacle necessary to sustain the truth. This mimics the function of God, the meaningless and unnecessary lie (counterfactual) which supports the structure of the Symbolic, and therefore the entire empiricism of modern science. As Lacan put it : ‘la vérité surgit de la méprise’. 

May 9th (3rd Week) 5.15-6.30pm

Sam Bailey (Jesus College)
'Beauty or the Beast? Literary Representations of the Hermaphrodite in Late Eighteenth-Century
France'

This paper examines the figure of the hermaphrodite in French literature from 1772 to 1798. It draws on Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), the Chevalier d'Eon’s La Pucelle de Tonnerre (1785) and two pornographic novels by the Comte de Mirabeau (1783 and 1798) to study the significance of this literary figure in the context of the French Enlightenment. This paper initiates a dialogue between eighteenth-century material and recently published theoretical works to investigate the hermaphrodite’s relation to a performative conception of gender, the pathologisation of non-standard bodies and eroticism. The different literary hermaphrodites depicted in these texts complicate the traditional picture of the eighteenth century as one of demystification in which an overriding philosophical and scientific desire to classify caused binaries of all kinds to solidify. Furthermore, they clash with much of the non-fiction literature relating to gender and the hermaphrodite that was circulating in late eighteenth-century France. Far from conforming to existing norms, these hermaphrodite texts suggest a new interpretive lens through which to view this figure: that of le fantastique, a nascent literary genre that deals in worlds where realism shades off into make-believe by almost imperceptible degrees. The texts offer an alternative view of gender in late eighteenth-century France in which empirical investigation fails, all categories prove chimerical and monsters could very well be real.

Melissa Purkiss (Wolfson College)
'Gaito Gazdanov, a 'Russian Proust'? The question of French influence for Russian émigrés in interwar Paris'