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.