Tuesday 30th May 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Ian Boyd (University of Cambridge): ‘Of Underworlds and Other Worlds: The Subterranean in Eighteenth-Century French Literature’ 

The subterranean voyage is most often considered to be part of the nineteenth-century “adventure fiction” tradition. In this paper, I will propose that there are eighteenth-century roots for the genre and that an interest in the subterranean goes deeper than it seems at first glimpse as well as travels across genres such as gothic fiction, satire, and proto-science-fictions. In this paper, I will take a close look at Casanova’s 1787 novel L’Icosameron, which tells the story of a brother and sister who fall into a subterranean world populated by polychrome half-sized people known as mégamicres. I will consider Casanova’s colorful world as demonstrative of the “slipstream”, a notion from twentieth-century science fiction and Indigenous stories that unpacks the idea of linear time streams. I will also dig into Madame de Genlis’ 1782 novella Histoire de la Duchesse de C***, a gothic story about the harrowing survival of a Duchess locked away in an underground cavern. This story will also be considered as a part of the slipstream as I build towards an understanding of subterranean fictions that revolve around the underground as womb. Finally, I will take the ideas hailing from the underground and the imagination of it and see what it can do for the ability to imagine another world in the eighteenth-century as well as what the subterranean can do for us today, as we struggle to imagine other worlds that we might like to live in.

Isabel Maloney (University of Cambridge): ‘“C’est Classique!”: Defending Naturalism in the Trial of Lucien Descaves’  

In March 1890, the young Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves found himself in court, charged with ‘injures à l’armée’ and ‘outrages aux bonnes mœurs’ for his anti-military novel Sous-Offs, which depicted misconduct, sexual debauchery, and poor living conditions in the French army. He cannot have been comforted by the fact that the person presiding over the trial was Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who had a productive side-career as the author of Idealist novels and who had publicly professed his hatred of Naturalism. Naturalist fiction had crossed into the legal arena, where it was scrutinised as a threat to national security. Although underexplored in existing scholarship, the Sous-Offs scandal was one of the most high-profile clashes between the Third Republic and its artists, dominating the front pages of newspapers and triggering polarised reactions from the gamut of significant contemporary figures, from General Boulanger to Zola. I argue that Sous-Offs provoked such a scandal because it turned the Naturalist method to a sacrosanct symbol of the state, the army. I also provide a close reading of the novel alongside its trial to explore how sexual obscenity became a site of political contestation. What, I ask, can Descaves’s trial tell us about how aesthetic and political anxieties were intertwined in the late 1880s in the lead up to the Dreyfus Affair? And how was Naturalism’s ambiguous relationship with patriotism funnelled through contemporary discourse about sexual politics? 

   Tuesday 16th May 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Amber Bal (Cornell): ‘Chants de la terre: a pastoral reading of Léopold Sédar Senghor's poetic oeuvre’

In our next FGS meeting I will discuss the poetic oeuvre of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, reading his poetry through the lens of the pastoral tradition. The topos of the royaume d’enfance in Senghorian poetry (which is constructed from references to his Serer identity, to the paysan serer and the landscape they inhabit) is almost always read in terms of its import for “African identity”. In other words, this highly localized setting is interpreted in relation to a broader set of “African” values, or “ways of seeing and knowing” that Senghor founds his négritude upon. However, here, I would like to redirect focus towards the littoral section of the Serer-Siin region (Joal-Fatick) -Senghor’s royaume- as a particular place. The principal question I ask in this chapter is how the material realities of agrarian Serer society appear (or are omitted) in Senghor’s poetry and what relation they bear to a broader literary tradition of philosophizing about life and love in rural settings. To begin to answer this question, I point to the “rapport spécial au terroir” associated with the Serer paysan and the tension between this praise of the paysan serer’s way of life in Hosties Noires (1948), Chants d’ombre (1956) and Nocturnes (1961) and Senghor’s abolition of Serer land tenure through La Loi sur le domaine national (1964). The movement by which ascriptions of “tradition” and “attachment to the land” obfuscate this community’s continued and involuntary adaptation to external, “modern” structures is manifest. Finally, the cascading series of affective attachments between Senghor and his Serer identity, the land, the spiritual realm, and the groundnut economy are a nexus traceable back over several centuries in ethnographic documents and agricultural initiatives of the French colonial administration.  

Jack Nunn (Exeter): ‘Cosmetic Surgery? Gathering the (In)Complete Works of Jean Molinet (1531)’ 

In Paris, the first decades of the sixteenth century saw an unprecedented boom in the publication of books that were labelled as ‘œuvres’, referring to the ‘collected works’ of a single author. A significant but little-studied moment in the history of authorship, the 1530s represent the very first time in French literary history that the collective term ‘œuvres’ is used to designate works by a vernacular writer. 

This paper takes as its case study a substantial anthology of works by the Burgundian rhétoriqueur Jean Molinet (1435–1507). I ask questions like: why did bookmakers decide to compile and print a new anthology of Molinet’s poetry over two decades after his death? Why were Parisian publishers so confident in a poet whose political loyalties were pro-Burgundian and often virulently anti-French? To answer these questions, I engage with material aspects of the anthology, including paratexts, the ordering and selection of poems, as well as patterns of textual editing. By unravelling the production history of this under-studied book, we will encounter a whole host of agents involved in the print trade: a pair of clever publishers, a pro-French reviser, and even a compiler with a hidden agenda. 

 Tuesday 2nd May 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

 Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Rachel Hindmarsh (Trinity): ‘Dolet, Rabelais, Paré: Medicine and Literature in Early Modern France’   

The most common articulation of the relation between medicine and literature in early modern studies is that of dissecting the text. My paper brings together three early modern moments that coalesce around this conceptual mainstay. The first is Etienne Dolet’s poetic representation of François Rabelais’s own public anatomical demonstration in 1537 at Lyon’s Hôtel-Dieu, which seemingly invites this critical practice before opening up cracks in its analogical power by asking new questions of testimony and temporality. The second moment takes place in Rabelais’s fictional text, as I trace how Dolet’s tensions are reworked by Rabelais in the testimony of a character who loses his head in battle, takes a trip to the underworld, and is resurrected by suturing hands. Rethinking the practice of dissection in Dolet allows for, here, a reconsideration of the analogical value of dissecting a text; I put forward an alternative lens of reanimation and suggest that it is the tools of interdisciplinary study that can make this happen in Rabelais’s text. Finally, this paper visits the medical world proper; surgeon Ambroise Paré’s case history about a patient who, just like Rabelais’s fictional one, speaks after suturing –this time to exonerate his servant who has been wrongly convicted of his murder. This third moment allows for a reflection on how we can understand medicine and literature to reciprocally inform and challenge each other in this period; thus concretising the new model of multidisciplinary scholarship –beyond dissecting the text– that this paper puts forward.   

Sarah Leanne Phillips (École Normale Supérieure, Sorbonne Université): ‘The Importance of Interdisciplinarity: Working with Disability Studies and Crip theory’  

This paper will provide an introduction to disability studies and crip theory. I will be discussing the importance of engaging with these two fields of critical theory and their relevance within the realm of French studies. I will begin my paper by discussing the social model of disability; I will follow this up with summaries of the most interesting critical theories I have encountered in my research, including, but not limited to, crip theory, crip time, masking, disability as masquerade and culture “as” disability (R. McDermott & H. Varenne, 1995). My paper will end with a personal reflection on the teaching of disability studies. I will also (briefly) touch upon research issues relating to literary and historical disability studies.  

Tuesday 7th March 2023, 5:15-6:30pm 

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Elly Walters (Wadham): ‘C’est une danse de ressac, c’est un ballet de marée’: Water, Dance, and Nathacha Appanah’ 

This paper considers the symbiosis of water, dance, and traumatic memory in Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah’s Rien ne t’appartient (2021). Beginning in France, the text follows Vijaya, a recent widow in deep psychological distress. Speaking in the first-person, she relays her grief alongside an ebb-and-flow of clarity, her mental processes skewed by panic, intrusive thoughts, hallucinations, and an unshakeable sense that she has lived through this before. Then, compelled by a feeling she cannot explain, she lifts herself from the sofa, removes her clothes, and starts to dance, moving through the poses and gestures of the Bharatanatyam she was taught as a child. As the novel progresses, the reader learns of the violences defining Vijaya’s early life in Sri Lanka: the murder of her family, and subsequent years of abuse in solitude, preceding the Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck the coast on 26 December 2004. Vijaya survives these crises, and survives a husband that helped her bury memory of them. In the wake of his death, the contours of Vijaya’s traumatic past resurface – often fleetingly, emerging and retracting like the tide, undulating in ‘une danse de ressac, un ballet de marée’. In this paper, my interest lies in how the shoring of Vijaya’s memory spans trauma and nostalgia; I argue that the process of remembering takes on the rhythms and movements of both water and dance, whose mutual fluidities see mind, muscle, and mer sink into one. 

Tuesday 7th February 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Violeta Garrido (University of Granada): ‘Conditions for a Materialist Aesthetics: Consciousness and Unconsciousness in the Althusserian Reading of Brecht’  

In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson observes that the practice of “metacommentary”, that is, the re-evaluation of the interpretative methods overlaid on texts, illuminates the theoretical positions of the “commentators” themselves. In this paper, I will explore Althusser’s theorisation of ideology by studying his comments on Brechtian theatre, which he deeply admired. In particular, I will interrogate Althusser’s claim that Brecht’s theatre “produces a critique of the illusions of consciousness” in light of his thoughts on the mechanism of interpellation and the unconscious nature of ideological activity. 

Liam Johnston-McCondach (New College): Le Plaisir de Brecht: Roland Barthes and Literary Politics 

When the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht travelled to Paris in 1954 to direct his play Mother Courage, the production was heralded in some quarters as a ‘révolution brechtienne’ and dismissed elsewhere as the beginning of an ‘épidémie brechtienne’. In the years following the Mother Courage production, however, Brecht’s profound influence on French culture quickly became apparent. Brecht came to embody a strikingly modern form of literary engagement. His work not only attracted the attention of dramatists and practitioners of theatre but also provoked the interest of writers seeking to theorise and rethink the political possibilities of literature. Chief amongst the latter group was Roland Barthes who, through a series of influential reviews and essays, did much to shape the image of Brecht in France. In this paper, I will consider how the appearance of Brecht’s dramatic and theoretical work in French helped Barthes to respond to pressing political and literary concerns during the early stages of his career. With its pleasurable fusion of politics and aesthetics, Brecht’s writing provided a key reference point for Barthes’s experimentation with a variety of critical idioms and perspectives. Through an analysis of Barthes’s engagement with Brecht, I will also draw on broader processes of cultural exchange and developments in criticism during a period of national and international political upheaval. 

Tuesday 24th January 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Joanna Beaufoy (University of Copenhagen): ‘Doing things with light: the soirée as a luxotope (1841-1913)’  

Both the soirée as an ‘espace de temps compris entre le déclin du jour et le moment où l'on se couche’ and the soirée as a ‘spectacle, fête, réunion qui a lieu le soir, en général après dîner’ (Larousse) depend on the possibilities of seeing during and after the setting of the sun. The semantics of soirée are therefore intimately connected to the development of lighting technologies, and the mass lighting of Paris, beginning in 1841, introduced a new luminous era for the city, generating spaces for the soirée that took form in literature. This paper will first remind the audience of scenes in Proust, Zola, and Maupassant where the authors produce the soirée with light, such as by blurring distinctions like indoor and outdoor, public and private, producing certain tones and colours through different lighting technologies, playing with time, and interiorising light as part of style indirect libre.  

The paper will then propose a new theoretical approach: building on Bakhtin’s notion of ‘chronotope’ (1978), part of a ‘geographical turn’ (Moretti, 2000), the paper proposes a ‘luxotope’. A chronotope is a meeting of time and space which is repeated across literature, for example, a village, or a castle. In the ‘luxotope’, there is a space-time assemblage that is æstheticised by light, for example, a soirée in this period of Parisian history. By identifying the soirée of this period as a ‘luxotope’, the paper argues that the development of the soirée by way of artificial lighting in this period afforded new narrative possibilities in literature and invites discussion of other ‘luxotopes’. 

Arthur Houplain (Université Rennes 2 / Université de Bâle): « Le “demi-jour”, l’Allemagne et le fantastique. À propos d’une remarque de Gautier sur Hoffmann » / ‘“Half-light”, Germany, and the fantastic. About a remark on Hoffmann by Gautier’ 

Streetlamps, Voltaire, the French language, and the press – what do these things have in common? Gautier’s answer is: light. And it is specifically the French taste for light that he deems responsible for the absence of an authentic fantastic movement in France in an article related to Hoffmann published in the Chronique de Paris of 14 August 1836. The paper aims to show that the elements incriminated by Gautier have a true consistency from the perspective of the romantic and fantastic canons. In so doing, the presentation intends to bring out the importance of light as an aesthetic criterion, with particular emphasis on the role of lamps. Far from being a purely practical issue linked to the management of lighting, artificial light also raises debates implying artistic reflections, and involves a set of problems intertwining ideology, judgement taste, art, and literature.