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.