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.