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.