Tuesday 6th February

5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Louise Ferris (Magdalen College) - 'To Infinity and Beyond: Time and Involuntary Memory in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27)'

At the end of À la recherche du temps perdu, time lost explicitly becomes time that is ‘retrouvé’ through salvation-based involuntary memory moments transcendentally regaining lost paradises of the past, defeating time by moving into a realm outside of time. Yet whilst such extra-temporal moments are announced to be the foundations of the ideal novel, Proust’s narration throughout the Recherche nevertheless seems to be tied to time, to the careful depiction of transient time. Adorno first highlighted this problem in his essay ‘Short Commentaries on Proust’ (1958), which is picked up by Bowie in Proust Among the Stars (1998), and which I have developed further through the ways in which sentences representing both the protagonist and narrator progress towards the future and extend back through the past. This suggests that Proust’s concluding conception of the ideal novel cannot be used to interpret his own novel; a view advocated to at least some extent by both Adorno and Bowie. However, I feel this potential incoherence lies in our traditional understanding of Proust’s involuntary memory moments and the related temporal status of his narrator and protagonist. I argue that we should reassess these well-known Proustian notions in favour of a past-future exchange resembling the infinity symbol; allowing for eternal infinite time to emerge from time itself, and thus for us to uncover the hidden unity of Proust’s temporal masterpiece. 

Béatrice Rea (Lady Margaret Hall) - '“Je m’ai fait mal quand j’ai tombé”: A Real- and Apparent-time Study of Auxiliary Alternation in Intransitive and Pronominal Verbs in Spoken Montréal French (1971-2016)'

My paper investigates the auxiliary alternation in spoken Montréal French between avoir “have” and être “be” with the twenty or so verbs prescriptively requiring the latter, as in (1):

(1)     J’ai tombé (AVOIR) vs Je suis tombé (ÊTRE): “I fell/have fallen”

literally “I have fallen” vs “I am fallen”

This variability has been documented in virtually all the French-speaking communities of North America and in some varieties of popular European French (Ledgeway 2012). After analysing the Sankoff-Cedergren Montréal Corpus (1971), Sankoff & Thibault (1977) record avoir-levelling in 34% of their tokens. Since the linguistic landscape of Montréal has greatly changed in the last 45 years, I attempt to determine, with 48 sociolinguistic interviews, whether there has been a change in the social and linguistic distribution of this variable, and also explore such variation within pronominal constructions, as in (2):

(2)     Je m’ai fait mal (AVOIR) vs Je me suis fait mal (ÊTRE): “I (have) hurt myself”

literally “I have done harm to myself” vs “I am done harm to myself”

My preliminary results (2014) reveal that the auxiliary alternation observed in intransitive verbs has overall significantly decreased since 1971 and that avoir-generalisation in pronominal verbs is highly socially marked. This alignment with Standard French appears to evolve in the opposite direction of a trend displayed by many Romance varieties to use a single auxiliary, namely “have” (Loporcaro 2016).

French Graduate Seminar

Hilary 2018

5.15pm-6.30pm, The Hovenden Room, All Soul’s College

Week 2 (Tuesday 23^rd January)

Amy Steinepreis (Merton) –  Finitude of the Corp(u)s and the Aporia of Touch in Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’ (1951-53)

Fay Wanrug Suwanwattana (Merton) – Reinventing Alternative Modern Masculinity Through Indigenous Androgyny in Fin de siècle French Colonial Literature

Week 4 (Tuesday 6^th February)

Louise Ferris (Magdalen) - To Infinity and Beyond: Time and Involuntary Memory in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27)

Béatrice Rea (Lady Margaret Hall) – “Je m’ai fait mal quand j’ai tombé”: A Real- and Apparent-time Study of Auxiliary Alternation in Intransitive and Pronominal Verbs in Spoken Montréal French (1971-2016)

Week 6 (Tuesday 20^th February)

Jonas Kurscheidt (Université François-Rabelais) - The Parisian editions (1498-1530) of the Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant

Madeleine Chalmers (Trinity) – Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysique: A Science for the Humanities?

Tuesday 23rd of January

5.15-6.30 pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room

Amy Steinepreis (Merton College) - 'Finitude of the Corp(u)s and the Aporia of Touch in Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’'

 My paper considers how aporia relates to finitude in and of Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’. I turn to Jacques Derrida’s identification of three figures of aporia in Apories in order to examine how aporetic figures effect what Derrida describes as a haunting of each other along boundaries, or in my paper, along the bounds of textual 

bodies: Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’Innommable. I probe how Beckett’s aporetics – his oscillating rhythm of repeated affirmations followed by negations, or what Simon Critchley dubs Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’ – might be said to open up, or instead close off passage through the three novels. I argue that Beckett’s framing of identity and alterity, and above all his collapse of the space intervening between the two concepts to the point where they ‘touch’, is precisely what provokes the haunting of aporia within aporia in his novels. This paper examines how narratives in the ‘Trilogy’ both touch and are touched, to borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s terms, and focuses on textual instances of what this philosopher calls the chiasm, or a crossing over between subject and object which renders finitude problematic. Taken together, the aporias of touch in the ‘Trilogy’ point to a crisis of tactility across Beckett’s three novels: the writing that takes place at the extremities of each novel makes contact with another. Drawing on reflections on touch by Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Derrida, I examine how narratives in the Trilogy fold back over each other, peforming a ‘reversibility’ in the Merleau-Pontean sense, which in turn has ramifications for novelistic finitude in Beckett.

Fay Wanrug Suwanwattana (Merton College) -  'Reinventing Alternative Modern Masculinity Through Indigenous Androgyny in Fin de Siècle French Colonial Literature of Indochina : The Case of Albert de Pouvourville (1861-1939)' 

The effeminate male colonised has largely been explored by critics of the Empire as one of the foundational tropes constitutive of colonial discourse and political domination of non-European people. In this paper, I shall examine one of the most acclaimed, yet forgotten, novels of fin de siècle French Indochina, L’Annam sanglant (1890). Using a historicist and materialist approach along with textual analysis, I argue for a counter-narrative reading of this novel, not so much vis à vis colonialism as from the gender terms. Written by the well-respected Orientalist and colonial administrator, Albert-Eugène de Pouvourville, this novel proposes a rewriting of the crucial 1883 episode of the French conquest of Tonkin against the indigenous army led by the Chinese ‘Black Flags’ leader from an unusual point of view of the native. The topos of male androgyny played out around the effeminate Chinese sage-warrior is informed by the Decadent aesthetics at vogue among avant-garde Parisian artistic circle, depicting the military milieu in pervasive homoerotic overtones. However, through an unexpected association of martial heroism with Oriental esotericism, I contend that Pouvourville not only responses to the perceived national crisis of manhood preoccupying France more than any other European nations, but he also reinvents an alternative model of ‘modern masculinity,’ ‘deprovincialising’ Western heteronormative sexuality and morality.