Tuesday 15th November 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Lynn Nguyen (St. John’s College) — ‘Recovering memory through the archival  enquête: Christophe Boltanski and Alice Zeniter’ 

From the World Wars to the Shoah to decolonization movements, major twentieth-century upheavals have informed the so-called archival turn in literature: the contemporary rise of writing inflected by engagement with the archive as not just a source for historical research, but a subject worthy of storytelling and critique in itself. The archive’s figuration in literary narratives that often depict an enquête, an investigation, implies a concern with being able to access, understand, and recover unknown histories. Through a comparative analysis of two enquête narratives within the archival turn – Christophe Boltanski’s La Cache (2015) and Alice Zeniter’s L'Art de perdre (2017) –this paper examines the relations among historical knowledge, writerly creation, and the ethical recovery of memory. The texts are concerned with reconstructing the lives of predecessors marginalized or threatened by war and forced migration, and for whom preservation of memory is now precarious, as their experiences have been overlooked by existing official documentation. Though the archive allows for contact with the past, the writers critique its incomplete, fragmented nature through the use of fractured temporality and self-reflexive narration. Where the historical archive is silent, alternative archives of fiction that provide historical knowledge via analogy substitute, albeit imperfectly, for what is missing. Attuned to the nuanced capacity of these substitutions to capture lived realities, the writers incorporate silences into their narratives, their opacity revealing the illusion of overly simplified reconstructions of history. 

Tess Eastgate (Keble College) — ‘Trust or “confiance” in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with Antoine Barnave’ 

From July 1791 up to January 1792, Marie-Antoinette corresponded with a politician named Antoine Barnave; this period is sometimes referred to as their ‘government by letter’ (Hardman, 2019: 242). While Marie-Antoinette and her family lived heavily guarded in the Tuileries, Barnave attempted to shape the new Constitution favourably towards the monarchy, and direct the king and queen’s behaviour in such a way as to improve public opinion towards them. Since the two correspondents could not speak in person, mistrust could easily develop: as Barnave put it, ‘il est trop facile de s’entendre mal lorsqu’on ne peut jamais se parler’ (ed. Lever, 2005: 589). In the letters, Barnave repeatedly pleads for Marie-Antoinette’s trust, and accuses her of losing faith in him because of a letter of 25 July: was he correct in this accusation? Meanwhile, Marie-Antoinette admonishes Barnave for not keeping her informed, and – while employing various methods to depict herself as trustworthy – is occasionally duplicitous.

Tuesday 1 November, 5:15–6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Hestia Zhang (St. Peter’s) — ‘Display in Parisian Parks: Assertion of Bourgeois Identity, 1848-1914’  

Throughout the nineteenth century, French regimes kept renovating the newly democratised royal gardens in Paris to tackle the growing concerns of public health, urban scenery and political tensions. Particularly, the Second Empire and the Third Republic created new parks and squares, redesigned the suburban woodlands, and installed various outdoor entertainment in the rapidly urbanizing metropolis, marking the second half of the century as the prime era of public gardens and outdoor leisure. This public space frequently featured in literary and visual works of the period as a perfect setting for Parisian drama, staging all the “corruption, glamour, political manoeuvring, and false pretence”. In this presentation, I will examine the representation of green space in nineteenth-century French novels and paintings, especially Zola’s La Curée (1871), which opens with a carriage congestion in the Bois de Boulogne, and contemporaneous paintings of modern life by Manet, Degas, et cetera. Analysing the importance of displaying fashion, wealth, and social connections in the social game of looking and being seen, I argue that the public parks and gardens catered to the emerging middle class’s need to affirm their bourgeois rites and identity. 

Becky Short (St. Hilda’s) — ‘Just a Spoonful of Sugar? Horatian Satire in Le Livre de quatre couleurs (1760)’    

In 1759 and 1760, Catholic moralist Louis-Antoine Caraccioli published a visually-striking series of chromatic texts. The first was printed in green ink, the second in pink, and the third – Le Livre de quatre couleurs – in red, yellow, green, and brown. The works’ ludic form complements their content, which gives a whimsical depiction of French society and its frivolous concern with outward appearances. Many scholars have interpreted the function of colour in the texts as strategic, arguing that it serves to seduce a worldly readership before exposing them to the ‘true’ moralising message of the texts. Such a view places Caraccioli’s work in the Lucretian didactic tradition; the colour, it is suggested, is a honeyed veneer concealing the text’s bitter medicine. This interpretation has been supported by scholars’ engagement with the epigraph to Le Livre de quatre couleurs – a quotation from Horace’s Sermones in which he alludes to Lucretius: Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat? ‘What prevents a person from speaking the truth while smiling?’ Caraccioli, however, changes the first word of the question to Ridendo, rendering its translation ‘What prevents a person from speaking the truth by means of smiling?’ This alteration, which has been overlooked until now, demands a new reading. The author is not subscribing to Lucretian didacticism here, but rather is challenging it. This paper will argue that colour does not function as an accidental disguise, but rather is itself a vector of meaning. In interrogating how this interpretation changes our understanding of the texts, I will in turn assess Caraccioli’s contribution to the broader reception of Epicurean moral philosophy and Horatian satire in the long eighteenth century, along with thinkers such as Shaftesbury and La Rochefoucauld.  

Tuesday 18th October 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Tuesday 18th October 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nora Baker — 'Revisiting Early Drafts for the Thesis Write-Up'

As she is preparing to submit her thesis, which investigates Huguenot refugee memoirs written after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Nora will discuss the final stages of a multi-year research project, focusing on strategies for dealing with large bodies of material and restructuring drafts in the process of ‘writing up’. 

Roundtable Discussion

Nora's presentation was followed by a discussion in which students introduced themselves, reflected on the year ahead, and discussed current research projects.  

 

Tuesday 1st March 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Anna Wilmore (St Anne's) - ‘Cité de dieu en tout temps pure et belle’: The Virgin Mary as City in Oxford MS Douce 379

Douce 379 is a manuscript sitting in the Bodleian library containing 91 poems about the Virgin Mary presented at the Rouen Puy in 1511. During the late medieval period, many of the cities in Northern France had their own Puy, a confraternity dedicated to the Virgin Mary which organised poetry competitions in her honour. Rouen's Puy, specifically devoted to Mary as the Immaculate Conception, grew in grandeur and increasingly attracted poets from across France. In 1511, the year of this recueil, the King's Secretary, André de la Vigne, competed and won the most prestigious prize, but perhaps more interesting is that most of the entrants were local 'amateur' poets, committed to poetic production within the urban institution of the puy. In this presentation, I will use the collection of lyric in Douce 379 to examine how Marian poetry could be used as a vehicle for exploring urban identity and reflecting the urban space in which the competition took place. In particular, I will consider the importance of images of enclosure and the use of artisanal language within the poetry of the Puy to argue that the figure of Mary was particularly apt for such urban poetry and could represent the city itself.  

Roger Navas (Trinity) - The Interpretation of “Don Quijote” in France, 1790 – 1810 

In a 1673 Aristotelian treatise, René Rapin claimed that Cervantes, “ayant esté traitté avec quelque mépris par le Duc de Lerme, premier Ministre de Philippe III”, wrote Don Quijote as “une Satire très-fine de sa nation”. A satire of a prominent court figure, of the Spanish noble class in general and of the entire country, “Rapin’s Quijote” did not pose any ideological problems in early modern France: that version of Cervantes’ novel could be integrated into the dominant anti-Spanish discourse, which ran parallel to the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries. Indeed, Rapin’s ideas were hugely influential. It was not until the nineteenth century that the views on the novel substantially changed. Instead of a funny satire of Spanish nobility, a light book of entertainment that did not warrant special critical attention, it was then read as a timeless reflection on human condition, a complex work, both comic and tragic. This paper will examine texts on Don Quijote by Antoine-Vincent Arnault (1800) and Charles Marie de Féletz (1806) to argue that the concept of satire itself evolved at the start of the century, allowing for the Romantic rediscovery of Cervantes’s novel two decades later. 

 

  

 Tuesday 15th February 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Michelle Hsu (Wadham) - Romancing the Chinese Empire and Gender in Victor Segalen and George Soulié de Morant 

    Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a doctor of the French navy who taught medicine and carried out archeological missions in China. George Soulié de Morant (1878-1955) worked for the French diplomatic corps as an interpreter and is known for his introduction of acupuncture into France in the 1930s. Both of them were proficient in Chinese and wrote extensively about China, using the Chinese empire during the Boxer uprising or revolutionary upheavals as the decor of their novels. In this presentation, I look into how Segalen’s René Leys (1922) and Soulié de Morant’s Bijou-de-ceinture ou le Jeune Homme qui porte robe, se poudre et se farde (1925) stage various forms of gender crossings and alter the terms in which social and gender hierarchies are evoked through the shift of cultural perspective. I will first show how René Leys, the eponymous hero of Segalen’s novel, uses information as capital to gain leverage in his homosocial relationship with Segalen the narrator. Then, I will discuss how the effeminate masculinity of the transvestite performer of Chinese opera in Bijou-de-ceinture is endowed with nationalistic agency through the gaze of a European protector amidst xenophobic resentment. What kind of gender identities can be gleaned from these readings? Even if Segalen and Soulié de Morant belong to the same generation and share an interest in Chinese culture, their approaches to writing differ from each other significantly. They are both concerned with incorporating the culture of the Other, whether of class, ethnicity, language or sexuality. This paper explores how they position themselves within frameworks of representation marked by romance, fantasy, and sinologist knowledge. 

 

 Tuesday 1st February 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Clara Baudet (Jesus) - Les lazzaroni napolitains dans la littérature de voyage des XVIIIème et XIXème siècles/ Neapolitan lazzaroni in 18th and 19th century travel literature 

This presentation will be in French with Q&A in French and English.

Upon reaching the city of Naples - the last destination on the Grand Tour itinerary - 18th and early 19th century travellers were greeted by a picturesque crowd of lazzaroni, which seemed to be purposelessly roaming the city streets. Despite being socially and politically marginalised, lazzaroni were at the centre of Neapolitan urban life and lodged themselves in the imagination of French, English and German visitors. This paper will investigate how travel literature shaped representations of the lowest rungs of Neapolitan society. While often depicted as a dangerous and lazy mob in travellers’ accounts, representations of street people shifted towards a more positive view thanks to the rise of Romanticism. The lazzarone thus came to embody the remnant of a primitive stage of humanity still untouched by civilisation. Works by Sade, de Staël, Dumas, Nerval as well as Goethe and Hester Piozzi shaped the myth of the lazzarone. Not only do these accounts provide an avenue to explore European stereotypes and the embeddedness of nature and civilisation, but they also encapsulate an original discourse on ethnology. 

Elly Walters (Wadham) - ‘Je sentais le poids de la mer sur ma poitrine’: Marie Darrieussecq and the depths of despair 

‘The face of the sea is always changing’, wrote Rachel Carson in The Sea Around Us (1951). And just as the water’s surface surges and swells, our mindscapes are ever-shifting – they gush and flourish, crash and flounder. This paper explores the dynamic interplay between water and (body)mind in the fiction of contemporary French novelist Marie Darrieussecq, with a focus on her novel La Mer à l’envers (2019) and short story ‘Encore là’ (2006). Anchored in a corpus that treats themes of anxiety, depression, anorexia, dissociation, trauma, and grief, these two works are epitomic of Darrieussecq’s water-soaked writing of distress and disorder. Whilst ‘Encore là’ counts its protagonist’s lost kilos as she stews by the coast in post-partum depression, La Mer à l’envers tracks a mother’s disordered eating and parallel fixation (quite literally, ‘elle fixe son regard’) on the sea. Across both texts water serves as an immediate distraction from hunger and an abject reminder of crisis and mortality, such that Darrieussecq’s protagonists walk the shoreline between loss and immensity, between suffering and relief.