Tuesday 24th November 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College, London) - Nelly Arcan's Autopathographies

Quebecois writer Nelly Arcan (1973-2009) is known for her first work Putain (2001) in which the autofictional narrator writes of her sex work in addition to her alienation from others due to a patriarchal logic of female competition. She simultaneously participates in this competition of beauty and youth while also criticising it. Subtending her implication in this logic is an increasing sense of alienation while signs of psychological suffering are revealed throughout the text. She also writes of an illness and suicide determinism throughout the text, which is further elaborated in her second autofictional work, Folle (2004), an extended suicide note to an ex-lover before her self-determined suicide date at the age of 30. This determinism that runs through the two texts is retrospectively shadowed by Arcan's suicide at the age of 36. In this paper, I will investigate the extent to which Arcan's two autofictions are autopathographies (patient-authored narratives) and what they autofictionally reveal about psychological suffering.

Joanne Hornsby (King's College, London) - Sex Work and Subjectivity in George Bataille's Madame Edwarda

Georges Bataille is an ambivalent figure; he has exercised an enormous influence over deconstructive theory, been celebrated for his 'transgressive' theory of waste and excess as the fundamental truth of humanity, and his rejection of the 'restricted' utilitarian economy of investment and return (Baudrillard, Hollier, Stoekl). However, he has also been criticised as obsessed with masculinity, dangerously attached still to a masculine ideal which keeps him rooted within a heterosexist hierarchy of value (Carolyn Dean, Susan Sulieman). What I intend to explore in this paper is the connection between these two positions, understood through the deployment of the sex worker as a figure in Bataille's texts, particularly Madame Edwarda. Edwarda herself, who embodies the figure of the mad and nymphomaniacal prostitute, acts as the vector for the 'impossible', excessive experience the narrator of the text seeks; but that experience, which declares itself anti-utilitarian, therefore depends on the utilisation of Edwarda to signify the 'prostitute', on her material labour as a sex worker (she is there because she is being paid) and on the absence of her recognition as an 'autonomous desiring subject' (because she is given a priori as 'mad'). This, I will argue, raises serious problems for the credibility of any deconstructionist understanding of Bataille's work, and must furthermore cause us to ask if deconstruction itself invariably comes at the cost of a certain subjectivity or 'voice consciousness' (Spivak).

This session was recorded for those unable to attend.

 Tuesday 10th November 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Nora Baker (Jesus) - "Distingués par leur piété": The Social Value of Suffering in Huguenot Memoir

The late seventeenth century saw a renewed wave of hostilities against Protestantism in France, culminating in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. State persecution led a large number of French Protestants, or 'Huguenots', to escape their homeland and start new lives elsewhere, though some were captures during their attempts to flee and then subjected to lengthy periods of confinement. Many Huguenots wrote memoirs detailing their experiences during these troubled times. My work looks at accounts penned by those who faced three different kinds of hardships: women imprisoned in convents, men forced to work as galley slaves, and refugees who struggled to negotiate their identities after settling in new lands. We know that these 'life stories' were often read aloud in refugee and social spaces or circulated to the wider Protestant community in Europe thanks to clandestine networks such as that of Pierre Jurieu's Lettres Pastorales. My work investigates the identities the authors sought to establish for themselves when composing their autobiographical accounts. I argue that these memoirs could be used as tools to win the approval of co-religionists, as they showcased their authors' intelligence, charisma, and dedication to their faith, even in traumatic circumstances. I will contend that the form and content of the memoirs discussed in this paper were influenced not only by Biblical exegesis, but also by the continuing legacy of early Huguenot martyrological writing.

Caroline Godard (University of California, Berkeley) - Being Time-Bound: Montaigne on Touch, Contagion, and the Contemporary

In this presentation I will read from a portion of my MSt dissertation, which looks at how various forms of touch and temporal presence illuminate the intersubjective nature of Montaigne's Essais. Working against the assumptions towards individuality that often emerge in readings of Montaigne, I ask how the confluences of contemporaneity, contagion, compassion and community can offer alternative ways of understanding the relations between self and other. Ultimately, the essay questions how Montaigne does (or does not) perceive himself to be part of his contemporary moment, as well as what it means to read Montaigne now in a contemporary way; in so doing, it amends existing definitions of the contemporary as an individual concern.

Finally, I will end this presentation by discussing how and in what ways this work at Oxford is following me into the first year of my PhD program at UC Berkeley.

This session was recorded for those unable to attend (please see below):

Tuesday 27th October 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

McNeil Taylor (St John's) - "Marcher au désert": Claire Denis' Perverse Ecologies

Summarizing Deleuze's aesthetic philosophy, Jacques Rancière states, "L'œuvre est marche au désert." The artwork reformulates time and relationality, as narrative desire for an object is replaced by an impersonal drift. Deleuze most strikingly outlines this orientation in the essay "Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui", in which the geographical isolation of a desert island enables the complete dismantling of Freud's anthropomorphic model of narrative desire. Cutting out the detour of desire for the Other, bodies regress to a perverse intertwining with the "Terre-Mère" as boundaries of self and other, animate and inanimate collapse.

This aesthetic mode is exemplified in Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999) a film that stages its own literal and figurative march into the desert. The hermetic community of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti becomes a petri-dish experiment with new modes of inhuman desire, as subjective intentionality gives way to the distillation of deep ecological time. My reading will therefore bring together two approaches to the film -- psychoanalytic and ecological -- that have yet to be put in conversation with one another. I will argue that the legionnaires' diffusion into the landscape functions as an impersonal rebirth, as the snuffing out of neurotic, Freudian desire enables a new perverse sociality.

Tuesday 18th February 2020, 5.15-6.30pm

Old Library, All Souls College

Lisa Nicholson (University of Cambridge) - Translating the Vagabonde: Figuring Exile in the Operas of the Mazarin Salon

When Hortense Mancini Duchess of Mazarin arrived in England on 31st December 1675, she came in sodden men's attire with few possessions and plenty of scandal in tow. Having fled her abusive husband several years earlier, Mancini was constantly called upon to defend herself as an 'errant Lady', particularly after she made the decision to publish her memoirs that marked the first time a European woman had allowed her life-writing to enter the public domain during her lifetime and under her own name. Once installed in London, Mancini established the Mazarin salon, which brought together an eclectic mix of European exiles and Restoration London's cultural elite who collaborated on a series of operatic pieces. In this paper, I will examine the representation of Mancini and the salon's habitués in these operas, which form a narrative on exile, loss, and displacement.

Anton Bruder (University of Cambridge)- Changing Tastes among Sixteenth-Century Readers: From the Roman de la Rose to Amadis de Gaule


A medieval best-seller, the Roman de la Rose sailed into the age of print on a wave of popularity. In the first fifty years following the introduction of the printing press to France (1470) the Rose went through twenty-one editions, being printed in a variety of formats at both Paris and Lyons. After a final edition in 1536, however, this book vanished from bookshops; it was not to be published again till the eighteenth century. What might account for the sudden fading of the Rose? And what might the publishing success of the Amadis de Gaule serial have to tell us about the mysterious disappearance of the time-honoured classic? For just a few years later, in 1540, the French reading public would be gripped by Amadis-fever. Amadis de Gaule, the last and greatest hero of chivalric romance, galloped across the shelves of readers of every station for the better part of a century, from kings to farmhands, in adventures spread over twenty-seven sprawling volumes. Amadis, however, burst not from the manuscript pages of medieval legend, but from the imagination of a series of translator-authors working in the first half of the sixteenth century, authors deeply committed to the modern ideal of Renaissance. Is there more to this change in taste than meets the eye? Perhaps it was not so marked a change after all; on closer inspection Amadis and the Rose have much in common. More fundamental, however, is the question of how we measure the popularity of a text, whether today or five hundred years ago. Ultimately this paper asks: what makes a classic – and what unmakes it?

Tuesday 4th February 2020, 5.15-6.30pmOld Library, All Souls College

Nathalie Jeter (St Cross College)- Chronicles of Exile: Loss and Identity in the Memoirs of Early Modern Huguenot Refugees

The memoirs of Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet chronicle his adventures and misadventures across four countries as a French Huguenot refugee. What does the language in which he describes his gains and losses reveal about the identity Dumont is seeking, consciously or subconsciously, to portray? What might this language tell us concerning the role of memoir in shaping the identity of early modern Huguenots in exile? To what extent is the narrative shaping in Dumont’s account characteristic of Huguenot refugee self-writing? This paper addresses the role of memoir in the construction of community identity and argues that Huguenot refugee accounts are essentially narratives of loss in which loss, treated both materially and emotionally, is a means of regeneration. It considers notions of exemplarity and singularity in Dumont’s account against the greater corpus of Huguenot self-narratives, exploring ways in which Dumont’s framework may have influenced the redefinition of individual and cultural identity among French Protestant immigrant populations.

 Vincent Roy-Di Piazza (Linacre College)- The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) in the Context of dialogues des morts Literature 

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish civil servant, natural philosopher and mystic theologian, assessor at the Board of Mines of Sweden for thirty-one years (1716-1747). In 1747 Swedenborg retired to focus on theology, claiming to have acquired through divine grace the gift to speak with angels and the spirits of the dead. Swedenborg’s theological works subsequently drew heavily on his alleged regular conversations with the dead. Mostly remembered as a seer, Swedenborg is best known by the public for his detailed visionary descriptions of the spiritual world. However, scholarship has long neglected to contextualize Swedenborg’s conversations with the dead in relationship to other popular literary genre at the time such as the dialogues des morts, famously exemplified in France by figures such as Fontenelle, Fénelon and Voltaire. This paper will investigate to what extent Swedenborg’s visionary works featured typical characteristics of dialogues des morts literature. By doing so it will provide evidence for a drastically new picture of Swedenborg, as a versatile recombiner of literary genres determined to spread his theology to new audiences. More broadly, the paper will showcase underrated interactions between dialogues des morts literature, mysticism and satire during the 18th century.