Tuesday 31st October, 2017

5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

William Clement (St. John's College)

'A bar crawl, a scandal, and fake news: tracing a religious outrage from Northern France to the international press in 1874'

On 21 April 1874, four workers from the French industrial town of Roubaix took a wooden statue of Christ on a bar crawl of several of the town’s cabarets, culminating in a series of scandalous events at the final cabaret that they visited. They were arrested, the cabaret was shut down, and the men were tried the following month for ‘Outrages to the Catholic religion’, despite there being no French law against sacrilege at the time.

This paper will take a microhistory approach to trace the way the events of this night were told and retold over the following months, both in France and abroad. The first part of the paper will examine the bar crawl itself, tying it into the fabric of working-class sociability in early Third Republic Roubaix. The second part will show how the court prosecutor turned this bar crawl into a religious scandal that attacked the central tenets of early Third Republic French identity. The final part of the paper will show how and where the events of the night and the trial were retold in newspapers through France, Belgium, Britain, and even North America. By analysing which features are preferred or even drastically altered in each retelling, we can see the role of editors in shaping narratives to fulfil their readerships’ prejudices.

Khalid Lyamlahy (St. Anne's College)

‘Un Désir d’écriture: Flaubert, Barthes et la pratique de la notation dans le Voyage en Italie'

Dans le long voyage littéraire et critique de Roland Barthes, Flaubert a été un compagnon utile, une présence dans l’écriture, jusque dans les derniers cours au Collège de France, sur le chemin qui mène à la Vita Nova. En relisant les fragments du Voyage en Italie de Flaubert à la lumière du projet barthésien de la préparation du roman, cette contribution cherche à montrer que dans la notation flaubertienne réside un désir, une volonté, un élan vers le Roman comme pratique absolue de l’écriture.

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Throughout his critical and literary work, Roland Barthes considered Flaubert as a helpful companion, a presence in writing, including in his late lectures at College de France dedicated to the preparation of his desired novel Vita Nova. By reading Flaubert's fragments from Voyage en Italie in light of Barthes's reflections on the preparation of the novel, this paper aims to demonstrate that Flaubert's practice of notation reveals his desire for the Novel as an absolute form of writing.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar

Michaelmas Term 2017

Tuesdays 5.15 – 6.30 pm

All Souls’ College, Hovenden Room

October 17th (2nd Week)

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln College)

'The Self-Translation of Mental Verbs in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy'

Philippe Panizzon (St. Anne's College)

‘'Ces rencontres qui voient à peine le jour’ (Rachid O.);  Identity, Mobility and Homosexual Encounters in Abdellah Taïa’s and Rachid O.’s Work’

October 31st (4th Week)

William Clement (St. John's College)

'A Bar Crawl, a Scandal, and Fake News: Tracing a Religious Outrage from Northern France to the International Press in 1874'

Khalid Lyamlahy (St. Anne's College)

'Un Désir d’écriture: Flaubert, Barthes et la pratique de la notation dans le Voyage en Italie'

November 14th (6^th Week)

Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College London)

'The Representation of Clinics, asiles, and maisons des femmes in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Writing'

Hannie Lawlor ( Wolfson College)

'Ventriloquising Voices in (Auto)Fiction of the Extrême contemporain'

Tuesday 17th October, 2017

5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln College) - The Self-Translation of Mental Verbs in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy

This paper compares the translation of verbs describing mental processes in the trilogy, which include all types of cognitive actions and emotional states; it analyses its repercussions on the representation of the mind. Differences in Beckett’s verb translations are indeed extremely common and vary in type. While translating the trilogy, the author often widens or narrows the meaning of mental verbs. He also regularly substitutes a mental verb for another. These semantic differences have an effect on the representation of the protagonists’ minds. 

Philippe Panizzon (St. Anne's College) - ‘Ces rencontres qui voient à peine le jour’ (Rachid O.);  Identity, Mobility and Homosexual Encounters in Abdellah Taïa’s and Rachid O.’s Work

In his study Queer Nations (2000) Jarrod Hayes examines how North African literature from the 1950s to the 1990s deals with transgressive sexualities. Also, Joseph Massad shows in Desiring Arabs (2007) that from the 1990s western gay and lesbian identities have spread throughout the Arab world. In this paper I look at how two contemporary, outspokenly homosexual Moroccan writers, Abdellah Taïa and Rachid O., both question established models and suggest an uncoupling of homosexuality and identity in their work. How do these authors deal with the concept of a western gay identity, coming from a cultural background where such an identity is non-existent? While the critics who have studied these questions have been concerned to pigeonhole the narrators’ identity as queer or gay (Badin; Smith), I would like to demonstrate, first, how being a gay Muslim challenges the fixity of these two supposedly exclusive categories. Secondly, I will argue that the narrators’ selfhood is built through the fleeting affiliations they engage in, which resonates with  the practice of the sexual cruiser or loiterly subjectivity (Ross Chambers). Their selfhood, made of a plurality of different selves, in constant interrelation with others, dramatizes Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts in Être Singulier Pluriel in that the narrators’ singular being is constructed through the plurality of passing (sexual and non-sexual) encounters. Whilst this paper will challenge the ontological security of Muslim and western gay identity, it will shed new light on selfhood in Rachid O.’s and Taïa’s work and on the migrant homosexual self more generally.