Tuesday 26 November, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Hannah McIntyre (Pembroke College)- Leonora Carrington in French: Language, Madness and Power

Leonora Carrington’s residence in France lasted only three years of her long and varied life, yet during this time and the period immediately following it, she produced some of the most enduring artistic and literary works of her career, writing in both French and English. With the recent rediscovery of Carrington’s writing in the Anglophone world, this paper aims to bring an overview of Carrington’s work in French; questioning particularly how her use of the language intersects with the gendered power dynamics at work in the Surrealist circle.

Alex Lawrence (Keble College)- A New Order of Animal: The Transference and Transformation of the Toucan in Early Modern Travel and Nature Writing

Aesthetically appealing, bizarrely formed, and with an impossible beak, the toucans of America captivated the imagination of European travellers and naturalists in the ‘New World’. From the ‘unknown’ species of Pierre Belon’s Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, to the ‘monstrous’ creature of Ambroise Paré and its elegant depiction in the paradise landscape painting of Rubens, the bird enjoyed notable attention across a range of different genres and media in the sixteenth century. This process of transmission and assimilation into European consciousness constituted an evolutionary flight for the species, which gradually cast a different figure as it became stratified within cultural topoi and scientific discourses. This paper will underline the initial stages of this process, seeking to demonstrate how representations of the toucan developed over time, and how the bird might provide an insight into the transference and dissemination of texts, objects and information of the ‘New World’ in early modern cultures.

Tuesday 12 November, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nicola Pearson (University of Bristol) – Breaking Taboos: Embodying Self and (M)other in Fawzia Zouari’s Le Corps de ma mère

This paper explores the concept of relational subjectivity and its fictionalisation in Fawzia Zouari’s Le Corps de ma mère (2016). Written at the height of the Tunisian Revolution in 2010-2012, the text explores the author’s quest to discover the life story of her dying mother. Although we may be seduced by the title into thinking that this is a biographical story about Zouari’s mother, the narrative says a lot more about the author’s own thoughts, emotions and lived experience. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of relational subjectivity (2004), I discuss the extent to which Zouari’s sense of self becomes undone by the idea of her recently deceased mother and the degree to which grief might trouble the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘mother’ in the narrative.

At times, Zouari adopts a strategically stable and authoritative narrative persona in order to contest and affirm her difference from her mother’s patriarchal values. Alternatively, her narrative identity dissolves, merges and enmeshes with the abstract concepts of her mother and the maternal body. I argue that Zouari’s ambiguous fluctuation between essentialism and fragmentation, in her presentation of her narrative self, constitutes an alternative style of writing that transcends dominant paradigms traditionally associated with the genre of feminist life-writing, as well as existing scholarship on the author’s earlier works of fiction. Finally, Zouari’s embrace of the French language as her langue utérine, a way back to her mother through writing, signals new directions for the genre of Tunisian women’s life-writing in French.

Blanche Plaquvent (University of Bristol) – The Sexual Revolution against Orthodox Communism: Radical Sexual Politics and the Cold War in France, 1950-1968

In the post-war decades in France, intellectuals and activists rediscovered the idea of sexual revolution, which had emerged at the beginning of the century: they argued that the revolution was not only to be pursued in the economic sphere, but also was to impact and transform people’s intimate lives. In the fifties, defending the idea of sexual revolution became a way to oppose political parties on the far left which neglected sexual and intimate issues which they considered bourgeois issues. When they started to write about sexuality and discuss sexuality collectively, activists sought to oppose this orthodox communism and invent heterodox approaches to Marxism. Moreover, in defending the sexual revolution, they were opposing both the puritanical communism and the American liberalism where sex was commodified, in advertisement for instance. They envisioned a liberating use of sexuality that would pave the way for a revolutionary society. In the context of the Cold War, fighting for the sexual revolution therefore constituted a resistance to these international dynamics

Tuesday 29 October, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Sarah Bridge (St. Hilda's) – ‘Thinking Multilingually in Fourteenth-Century England: Nicole Bozon’s Contes Moralisés'

The Contes moralisés, written in the fourteenth century by the Franciscan friar Nicole Bozon, is a medieval exempla collection written in Anglo-Norman French. Although texts of this genre appear to have been enormously popular for use in preaching, it is the only example of such a text in a vernacular language. Critical attention has thus centred around the question of language choice: what was the appeal of French to the  English author and audiences of this text? This paper will attempt to nuance our answers to this question by focusing on the multilingualism inherent to the Contes moralisés, both in its manuscript context, and within the text itself. By developing a fuller picture of the ways in which the three languages of the text interact, and using Thomas Hinton’s concept of ‘thinking through multilingualism’, it will be possible to reach a better understanding of how and why French might have been used.