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.