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.