Tuesday 28 May, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Nicole Gadras (St. Hugh's) – ‘Painting the Nineteenth-Century City in Baudelaire and Zola’

The flâneur-artiste emerged in the nineteenth century as a specific variation of the flâneur ‘type’, the Parisian stroller and spectator famously classed by Walter Benjamin as the figure emblematic of modernity. With a focus on selected works by Baudelaire and Zola, this paper will explore how the city of Paris is depicted through the eyes of this flâneur-artiste figure as he roams its streets, as the urban topography is painted onto the page with an artist’s focus on light, colour, and form. The analysis of these literary ‘paintings’ of the city is informed by the wide range of art criticism and theory produced by both Baudelaire and Zola, as well as the backdrop of Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris during the 1850s and 60s, which thrust the city into its role as ‘the capital of the nineteenth-century’, and the near-contemporaneous emergence of a new, avant-garde style of painting in the works of Manet and the Impressionists.

Rebecca Short (St. Hilda's) – ‘Le spectateur interieur: Didactic frivolity in the work of Louis-Antoine Caraccioli'

Louis-Antoine Caraccioli is an ambivalent figure in eighteenth-century French literature. Throughout his oeuvre, the ‘moraliste mondain’ reproves the decadence of Enlightenment frivolity all-the-while conceding to its potential spiritual and moral benefits. Writing in the siècle de la légèreté, during which illusion and artifice supersede authenticity and depth, the thought of Caraccioli provides an important insight into a potential ‘middle way’. The author sets out with the explicit aim to ‘rendre la vertu aimable’, employing traditionally frivolous tropes to an overtly didactic end. This paper will consider Caraccioli’s 1757 text La Jouissance de soi-même in light of concurrent debates on the role of the theatre in moral instruction. As the moralist questions the value of pleasure, illusion, and imitation in the cultivation of virtue, he proposes a new form of spectacle which is entirely interior. The individual who develops an ordered memory and a bridled imagination is able to source moral example in the ‘theatre’ of their mind. Through analysis of the interplay between surface and depth, and illusion and reality in this work, this presentation will assess the grounding of this theory and its spiritual and moral significance.

Tuesday 14 May, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Rachel Hindmarsh (Trinity) – ‘Prosthetic Touch of Rabelais's Curing Hands’

The Rabelaisian giant is renowned for eating, drinking, and defecating its way through the texts, a folkloric body wreaking havoc across early modern French society. This paper argues that reading Rabelais in terms of the medical encounter opens up a provocative and newly productive way of understanding the early modern body, and its place in society. I will focus on two encounters between peripheral figures and the giant - the pilgrims who are unintentionally swallowed by Gargantua, and the peasants who are intentionally swallowed by Pantagruel in brass pills to clear an obstruction in his stomach - to explore how Rabelais grapples with the body in his texts in terms of the sense so readily tied up with encounters, 'touch'. It is the instruments that these peripheral figures use, and how they both extend and displace direct touch by acting as prosthetic fingers feeling their way through the giant's bodies, that will help us to understand the textures and dynamics of the curative medical encounter in Rabelais’s texts. 

Kirsty Bennett (University of Lancaster) – ‘The "Isabelle Eberhardt Complex": The Algerian Literary Legacy’

Isabelle Eberhardt was a Russian/French writer who lived in Algeria under the male identity of Mahmoud Saâdi. Since her death in 1904, in a flash flood in the desert, her life has continued to spark the literary and public imagination, and a series of epithets attest to her role as a rebel female figure: as la bonne nomade, l’amazone des sables, la Walkyrie du désert, and la Séverine Algérienne. This typecasting of Eberhardt has been theorised by Emily Apter as the acting out of the ‘Isabelle Eberhardt complex’ – a phenomenon whereby Eberhardt is perpetually (and problematically) consolidated into an historically based, feminist-Orientalist-cross-dressing icon of female empowerment. This presentation examines the latest literary manifestation of the Isabelle Eberhardt complex in the Arabic-language novel, Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle by Saïd Khatibi [2016]. Through an analysis of Khatibi, I present a fresh perspective on the Eberhardt phenomenon, a perspective that both complements and challenges the historic and recent Franco-Algerian afterlives of Eberhardt from writers such as Malika Mokkedem and Leïla Sebbar.