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.