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.