Tuesday 23rd November 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Anna Glieden (Oriel) - History of Polemic? The ideal ‘homme de lettres’ Voltaire in Irailh’s Querelles littéraires (1761)

Even though the Querelles littéraires, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire des Révolutions de la République des Lettres, depuis Homère jusqu’à nos jours (1761) by the Abbé Augustin Simon Irailh is considered the first history of querelles littéraires that marked the Republic of Letters and is frequently referred to as such, it has rarely been looked at in greater detail. On closer examination, the historicity of this anthology must be questioned. On the one hand, Irailh’s anthology shows that an intellectual pursuit emerged decades earlier through querelles littéraires and has conditioned the ‘gens de lettres’ ever since and, thus, corresponds to the development of a ‘literary field’ such as Bourdieu defines it a century later. On the other hand, Irailh’s anthology is not a real historical narrative; it is above all a polemical writing that engages itself in querelles littéraires. Behind the veneer of a historical anthology of quarrels and in a time where Voltaire was well known for his querelles littéraires, Irailh not only legitimises the querelleur Voltaire, but even elevates him to a mythical figure, to the ideal ‘homme de lettres’ of a new ‘literary field’.

Harriet McKinley Smith (Jesus) - 'But O! He could not speak': the mute voice in Mary Robinson's 'The Savage of Aveyron

(This paper will be given via Zoom)

In 1800, the English Romantic poet Mary Robinson learned of a French feral child found living in the woods near Saint Sernin. The real-life boy’s discovery inspired her to write the ballad ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ and the poem raised several questions about the child’s rudimentary existence: who, or what, was he? How did he come to be in the woods? How can he communicate his story if he could not speak? The boy’s mutism is central to his characterisation within the poem, reflecting simultaneously his natural innocence, but also his experience of trauma; his mother is murdered by ‘ruffians three’ and he is then forced to live a solitary life in the woods. This paper examines how Robinson portrays the feral child’s identity to navigate the complex relationship between mutism and narrative voice.   

  

 Tuesday 9th November 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nicola Holt (Wolfson College) - What can literature do that philosophy can’t? Entering the hybrid worlds of Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch

The notion and value of literature has of course been contested ever since the days of Plato’s ‘ancient quarrel’ and his (very poetic) banishing of the poets. What makes literature distinct from philosophy? What can literature do that philosophy can’t? Why might a philosopher choose also to write literature? And who decides – whose quarrel is it anyway? My project approaches this ‘ancient quarrel’ through the specific lens of two hybrid ‘novelist-philosophers’ of the twentieth century: Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch. In this presentation, I shall begin to explore some of the key metaphors or fundamental symbols used by these two hybrid practitioners in their lectures and philosophical discourse to convey their own thinking on the nature of literature. What do these metaphors tell us about their conception of literature as an art form?

Tristan Alonge (Université de la Réunion; Maison Française d'Oxford) - Les origins grecques de la tragédie française : une occasion manquée / The Greek origins of French Tragedy: a missed opportunity

(This paper will be presented in French with questions in English and French)

Despite a promising start, the return of Greek tragedy to France abruptly faded from 1550, leaving the way open for Seneca as the only ancient model in the birth and development of French tragedy. How to justify the astonishing silence which separates the first translations of Sophocles and Euripides, under François I^er, from the success of Racine’s Phèdre in 1677? The explanation sketched out by Alonge’s recent book (Paris, Hermann, Nov. 2021) decompartmentalizes the fields of research to show that the fluctuating interest in Athenian theatre stems from extra-literary preferences: behind the passion for Greek hides another, unavowable passion for the reading of the Bible in the original language. A dangerous passion that the Council of Trent was quick to erase for more than a century, thus delaying the outbreak of a French tragedy inspired by Athenian models. The story of a missed opportunity.  

 

 Tuesday 26th October 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Alex Lawrence (Keble College) - 'Un maistre bec': confessional appropriations of the Toucan in seventeenth-century France

The ‘discovery’ of the Toucan by European explorers in the sixteenth century sparked a series of imaginative responses across literary genres and cultural media. First appearing in the texts of travellers and natural historians, the bird became a subject of interest for confessional writers -- both Catholic and Huguenot -- by the turn of the seventeenth century. How did these writers interpret this bizarre creature? In what kinds of context did they place it? Importantly, what were the principal differences between Protestant and Catholic representations of the bird, and how might these inform our understanding of the confessional conflict in the broader sense? This paper addresses such questions through a selection of sources, including those of the Reformist pastor Jean de Léry, the Capuchin friar Claude d’Abbeville, and the Jesuit emblematist Nicolas Caussin.

Following Q&A and a short break, we will move to a roundtable which will give all attendees the change to introduce themselves and their research topic. 

 Tuesday 8th June 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Kristina Astrom (University of Glasgow) - '[P]li sur pli, pli selon pli': The folding of epistolary and pictorial space in Stéphane Mallarmé's Les Loisirs de la poste and James McNeill Whistler's Thames Set

The nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his friend the painter James McNeill Whistler were both fascinated by the limits of poetic and aesthetic form and sought to experiment with the contextual and framing elements of their respective works. In particular, Mallarmé's collection of octosyllabic quatrains, Les Loisirs de la poste (1894), grapples with the different addresses of a poetic work, as the poems were written on envelopes and sent through the post, with the quatrain replacing the address of the letter. The letter has this been folded inside out, transposing the subject content with the frame or carrier of the poem. In a similar vein, Whistler's Thames Set etchings The Lime Burner (1859) and Old Putney Bridge (1879) manifest a folding aesthetic through their portrayal of blank spaces and vertical lines, in which it could be argued that the frame becomes the central subject of the etching. Here, Gilles Deleuze's notion of the fold, as inferred from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's concept of the 'Baroque', makes visible a constant folding as central to poetic and aesthetic signification in that the fold generates a new meaning between text or artwork, reader(s) or viewer(s) and context(s), each time that it is read or viewed. In this paper, I will contend that Mallarmé's postal poems and Whistler's Thames Set etchings enact a folding which disregards the distinction between poem and addressee, subject and frame, and instead foregrounds their own status as verbal and visual media. This enfolding of text and artwork, along with their contexts broadens our understanding of modernist aesthetics, further opening up the fields of literary and art historical research to interdisciplinary enquiries.

 Tuesday 25th May 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Hannah Scheithauer (Jesus) - Writing Gender into Multidirectional Memory: Ingeborg Bachmann and Assia Djebar

My M.St. Dissertation will integrate discussions of gender into Michael Rothberg's theory of 'multidirectional memory' through a comparative analysis of texts by the Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the French-Algerian writer, translator, historian, and filmmaker Assia Djebar (1936-2015). The two authors share an acute awareness of the historical burdens borne by language, which makes it a fundamentally problematic means of self-expression for the narrators of Bachmann's novel Malina (1971) and Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) alike. Denounced as patriarchal in structure, language is shown to alienate, exclude, and objectify its female speakers. This gendered alienation, however, also opens up the individual narrator's case to a wider, historical horizon, providing a starting point for discussing multiple other, violent memories. In Malina, patriarchal oppression is framed within a post-Holocaust context, as the narrator's dreams disturbingly blend visions of her violent father with concentration camp imagery. The opening of Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia, on the other hand, gives a gendered inflection to the French-Algerian colonial relationship. It figures the French conquest of Algiers as the unveiling of a woman's body, problematically poised between seduction and rape. For both authors, gendered identities intersect with dialectical models of conceptualising traumatic pasts, theoretical reference points represented by the Frankfurt School's enlightenment dialectic for Bachmann and by Frantz Fanon's account of Algerian colonialism for Djebar. As both authors call into question the binaries of selfhood and otherness, of victimhood and perpetration, these models propose, the discussion of gender transforms the dialectic into an ambivalent, triangular constellation. This initial refraction, then, opens up new, expansive and 'multidirectional' conceptions of memory, as Bachmann enters postcolonial spaces in her unfinished Todesarten project, while Djebar, in her turn, records Holocaust memories in her 1997 novel Les Nuits de Strasbourg. Reading the two authors' mirroring trajectories in conjunction promises to yield a productive triangulation of post-Holocaust, postcolonial, and feminist discourses, carving out a space for gender within Rothberg's model while questioning the ethical issues arising from the memorial intersections which structure it. 

 Tuesday 11th May 2021, 5:15-6:30pm 

Online

Claire Jeantils (CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle-Maison Française d'Oxford) - From the Arts: On the Theatrical Motif in Contemporary Epilepsy Narratives

Historical motifs of epilepsy are still embedded in contemporary epilepsy narratives (Clément, 2017; Findley, 1995, etc.). From religiosity to madness, they influence our perception of this common but still misunderstood neurological chronic illness. The representation of the seizure as a show is another widely spread motif.

Contemporary fictions and non-fictions are no exception on that matter. Theatricality impacts the perception of the disease but also of the illness narrative itself. Then, I wonder, how far does this motif change these narratives on the diegetic level? What are the ethical implications of such a metaphor? And, by the way, is it merely a metaphor?

With a corpus of both French and British texts, I will put into dialogue the contemporary representations of epilepsy, trying to navigate with and tackle this important and stigmatizing vision of epilepsy. 

I will argue that if seeing the epileptic seizure as a show is highly stigmatizing, contemporary literature can also empower people with epilepsy by creating new images to describe their lived experiences. Thus, I will make a case for a cautious practice of reading in the healthcare setting for both patients and caregivers.

Keywords: epilepsy -- illness narratives -- theatricality -- stigmatization

Samantha Seto (King's College, London) - The Female Role in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction: French Stories by Guy de Maupassant and a British-American Novel by Henry James

The French and British-American authors, Guy de Maupassant and Henry James, establish a revolutionary portrayal of female characters at the turn of the century. In a close reading of Maupassant’s “A Parisian Affair” (1881) and “A Woman’s Confession” (1882) in addition to James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), my research focuses that my analysis of the female character provides a lens through which to study the female gaze and social class. heroines are constructed with avant-garde attributes that reveal a nuanced progressive nature in their character that indicates that they are ahead of their time. I analyse narrative themes of marriage, the female desire for liberation from conventional position, and modern elements in addition to the representation of aristocratic women during the historical period of the nineteenth century. The novels illustrate women within a historical context who challenge living according to the social conventions. My thesis aims to study the author’s creation of the female role via narratology and portrayal of the unconventional heroine. I propose that the heroines in Maupassant's stories and James's novel emphasise a shift from the present historical period toward modernity. The authors pioneer the unveiling of a unique female character with French and American origins. The divide between the three countries, France, England, and America, during the historical past is critical to the portrayal of the female character rooted in transnational identity and a traditional cultural setting in the literature. My character analysis extends to Maupassant’s “La Maison Tellier” (1881) and “Rosalie Prudent” (1886) in addition to James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Wings of the Dove (1902). Furthermore, I compare Maupassant’s and Jamesian fiction to French literature such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1859), Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), and George Sand’s Elle et Lui (1859) as well as American literature including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Reef (1912), and other forms of literary criticism and scholarship to reflect on Wharton’s genesis of the bohemian female character. The female character in Maupassant’s and Jamesian fiction exemplifies a revolutionary portrayal of women, gender role via the progression towards liberating women from their conventional position, and power relations through the empowerment of women in nineteenth century American and French literature.

 Tuesday 2nd March 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Lili Owen Rowlands (University of Cambridge) - 'Je désire donc je suis': From Autofiction to Autotheory in Recent French Life Writing

'Autotheory', the blending of autobiographical and theoretical modes, has been figured as a new, North American generic innovation, with Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) perhaps the best-known example. Yet the genre's proximity to 'autofiction', which enjoys critical purchase in the French context, has been entirely unexplored. In this paper, I follow recent moves in French life writing away from the predominance of autofiction, whose focus on confession, desire and interiority I argue tacitly evince a psychoanalytic theory of the subject, towards 'autotheory', whose theoretical investments convey a more constructivist and materialist account of subjectivity. To do this I trace the imprint of Anglophone queer and feminist theory in two works of autotheory: Anne F. Garréta's Pas un jour (2002) and Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie (2008). These authors, I conclude, refuse the notion that desire is a well of truth marked by sexual difference and instead show how desire is shaped by social violence and exclusion.

David Ewing (University of Cambridge) - Metaphor and its Antitheses in Henri Lefebvre's Postcolonial Imaginary

In the second volume of his Critique de la vie quotidienne, Henri Lefebvre writes that 'la vie quotidienne, selon l'expression énergique de Guy Debord, est littéralement "colonisée".' Lefebvre cagily attributes the idea of the colonization of everyday life to Debord, although the pair had elaborated the concept in tandem and Lefebvre had provided the bulk of the intellectual ballast. What is invoked is not only the phenomenon of colonialism, understood as the conquest and control of overseas territories by a colonial power, but the process and project of colonization; as Lefebvre was only too aware, this term could not but invoke the history of settler colonialism. While metropolitan France underwent considerable demographic, territorial, and environmental transformations after the Liberation, it is not at all apparent how such changes can be understood as an extension of the French state's settler-colonial project in Algeria or of French colonialism tout court. Despite Lefebvre's plea, then, the colonization of everyday life resists literal understanding. Indeed, the concept works through metonymy and metaphor and, in positing everyday life in the metropole as the final frontier, reproduces the spatio-temporal dimensions of those figures of speech. As such, the idea enacts a theory of history in which capitalist modernity radiates outward from Europe, only to fold back on itself in the midst of decolonization. We might nevertheless understand Lefebvre's project as having produced a postcolonial imaginary insofar as it displaces the analytical frame of the Westphalian state in its historicization of everyday life. Attending to his use of his language may bring into focus the contours of possibility for relating the everyday as a level of social reality to the history of colonialism.

Tuesday 16th February 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Raphaëlle Errera (Sorbonne Université) - Real-life Poets on Parnassus: Early Modern Fictions and the Alternative Making of Literary History and Criticism

À partir du XVIe siècle apparaissent en Europe des dizaines de fictions pour le moins curieuses, qui font figurer quelques personnages imaginaires -- essentiellement des divinités de la mythologie gréco-latine comme Apollon et les Muses --, et de nombreux personnages "réels", sur une montagne elle-même à demi-imaginaire, le Parnasse. Qui sont donc ces personnages ? Des "poètes" antiques, vieux vernaculaires et modernes. Que font-ils là ? Cette communication se propose de montrer l'intérêt qui pousse des auteurs divers à écrire de telles fictions, à travers deux pistes de lecture. Ces textes réunissent de façon synchronique les meilleurs auteurs de tous temps ; je monterai d'abord qu'ils constituent une forme originale de l'histoire littéraire alors naissante. L'inclusion d'auteurs contemporains suppose en outre de faire des choix, voire justifier ou de débattre de ces choix : il s'agira de voir ensuite qu'à l'histoire se combine la critique littéraire, qui s'y exerce de façon souvent plaisante, et même parfois franchement comique et satirique. Ces œuvres mêlent ainsi au plaisir de la fiction celui de la réflexion sur le passé et le présent des belles-lettres.

Rowan Anderson (Trinity) - Retranslating Euphemism in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu

Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is most famous for its exploration of time and memory, as emblematised by the madeleine sequence. However, Proust's novel is also ground-breaking in its presentation of taboo topics, such as lesbianism and sex work. My overall project is therefore a comparison of the original text with its English translations in order to analyse how differences in translation reflect cultural attitudes to social transgression. In this presentation, I focus on translations of euphemism and slang in the Recherche, in order to analyse how different English editions of the text have translated covert and vague references to homosexuality. By examining how editors and translators have taken different approaches in translation, editing, and use of paratextual material, I explore how translators act as co-creators of the text. Furthermore, I use Karen Emmerich's argument that 'original text' is a misnomer in that originals are not completely stable, thus calling into question the stability of meaning in interpretations of euphemism and slang. Through this line of argument, I argue that variance in translation may shed light on new possibilities of meaning generated through different readings of the text, thus mimicking how we interpret euphemism and slang in day-to-day life.

 Tuesday 2nd February 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Justine Feyereisen (Wolfson) - Afrotopia: Léonora Miano's Utopian Poetics of Repair for a Postcolonial Politics of the Living

Over the past few years, utopian proposals have increasingly emerged from the Sub-Saharan Francophone literature to challenge the current dominant social relations in a resolutely pragmatic approach. With the power of the imagination, "afrotopias" operate a shift in cultural, historical, media and political representations for an inclusive society. What counter-narratives do these emancipatory utopias oppose to the logics of exclusion? What would a relational, post-imperialist and post-racist political project for a non-colonial society consist of in literature? This presentation will explore the ways in which the Cameroonian writer, Léonora Miano, delivers an afrotopia in Rouge impératrice (2019) and Afropea (2020) through a poetics of repair focused on a postcolonial politics of the living. Promoting a cosmopolitan condition opposed to nationalist ideologies and protectionist policies, the Afrotopian perspective aims to rebuild an imaginary mobilising an "atopos", -- a place that does not yet exist --, which not only rehabilitates Africa to its inhabitants and its diasporas, but which reimagines and common home for all forms of life.

Clara Baudet (Worcester) - Culture, Nature and Unity: an Ecocritical reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau dissected the layers of human nature in his Second Discourse and embraced the beauty of the natural world in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. This presentation seeks to ascertain how Rousseau's corpus reveals a nascent ecocritical intuition, and conversely, how the multifaceted aspects of Ecocriticism (Deep Ecology, Ecopoetics...) can shed light on his writings.

Throughout his corpus, Rousseau addressed the fact that the civilised individual is not "unproblematically embedded in physical nature". To map out the philosopher's pervading influence on the critical field of literary ecocriticism; this paper connects an analysis of his philosophical and literary works, while referring to both French and English articles. Rousseau's major ideas on the State of Nature, modern alienation, and the critique of progress fuel debate on human nature, land ethics and animal rights. Together, these ideas rephrase the epistemological framework of Ecocriticism. On the other hand, applying the ecocritical lens on Rousseau's Reveries reveals the originality of his approaches to botany, to a forever-lost wilderness, and to the tension between an eco-centred and a subject-centred narrative voice.