Tuesday 20th February 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Liam Johnston-McCondach (New College, Oxford): 'Reading Postcritically with Roland Barthes'

In their influential surveys of the field, Rita Felski (The Limits of Critique, 2015) and Joseph North (Literary Criticism, 2017) affirm the need to look beyond contextual, historicist approaches to literary criticism and towards ways of reading that consider the aesthetic, affective responses of the reader. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that Felski and North do not propose the complete abandonment of socio-political criticism but instead recommend fusing it more thoroughly with formal and stylistic analysis. Taking this insight as my starting point, I will return to the early work of Roland Barthes to consider contemporary debates on literary criticism from a different perspective. Across texts such as Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) and Mythologies (1957), Barthes engaged deeply with questions surrounding aesthetic form, political ideology, and the possible relation between the two. I will consider how Barthes might help us to challenge assumptions around the political relevance of literature and reframe the terms of ongoing discussions in literary theory. 

Kate Sligo (New College, Oxford): 'Liberté, fidélité, curiosité: reading la diversité through the lens of France's oldest publishing house'

Éditions Stock is France’s oldest publishing house, founded in 1708. In June 2023, the director of Stock, Manuel Carcassonne, decided to hold Stock’s rentrée littéraire in the Metaverse. This interplay between past and future, conservatism and innovation, homogeneity and heterogeneity captures the diverse motivations of the house. This thesis focuses on the concept of diversity via the books published by Stock in the 21st century. 

A brief history of the publishing house first evidences Stock’s continual impulse to challenge established standards. For example, in 1894, the then-director of Stock, Pierre-Victor Stock, became the editor for the Dreyfus Affair on the side of the accused despite the intense atmosphere of antisemitism in France at the time. Today, Stock specialises in foreign literature, but this was not always the case. The house turned towards foreign literature or ‘la Bibliothèque cosmopolite’ in 1921. Through applying a quantitative analysis to the translation trends of Stock since the late 20th century, it becomes apparent that Stock’s foreign collection is delicately poised between English-language hegemony and a strong desire to publish voices from diverse languages and backgrounds. Stock’s French collection, distinguishable by its midnight blue cover, will also provide a case study for diversity. La bleue tends to do away with genre and concentrates primarily on autofiction. Autofiction often raises themes of exile and displacement, blurring identities and the space between fiction and reality. Stock also publishes non-fiction and essays. Other areas of potential exploration include the emerging space of live literature, ‘la crise de la littérature,’ and Stock’s foray into the digital. This project aims to combine a quantitative, sociological approach to literature with qualitative analysis and interviews to argue that ‘le métier de Stock consiste à aider la diversité’.

Tuesday 6th February 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Marie Martine (Hertford College, Oxford): 'Unhinged Women: Violence and Gender in Rachilde's La Marquise de Sade and Eliza Clark's Boy Parts'

In the last decade, representations of ‘female rage’ have taken over our social media, cinema, and literature. The fictional depiction of women’s use of violence is not as radically new as it seems, as the 1887 French novel La Marquise de Sade, by Rachilde, reflects. This paper will compare it to a more recent text, Boy Parts (2020) by Eliza Clark, to uncover how our current literary production shares similar concerns with nineteenth-century society, particularly our ambivalent responses to violence enacted by women. Both authors portray sadistic female protagonists who take pleasure in dominating and torturing men in a society that dismisses the possibility of women acting violently and attempting to reverse gender power dynamics. However, both authors challenge any fictional idealisation of ‘female rage’ by showing how their protagonists act out because of their traumatic past and are ultimately unable to bring about systemic change.

Alyssa Ollivier-Tabukashvili (Wolfson College, Oxford): '"Il y en avait deux" : Writing and Translating Algeria into the World Literature Canon'

‘The most notorious literary killing of the 20th century takes place on a deserted beach near Algiers, at two o’clock in the afternoon.’ Such is the opening of an Observer review of Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête (2013, 2014): it immediately situates the novel within the French literary canon, reminding many readers of their first exposure to francophone literature, Albert Camus’ L’Etranger (1942). However, whilst the review naively describes Meursault, contre-enquête as an ‘homage to Camus’, scholars of postcolonial and world literature studies will recognise Daoud’s novel as an example of ‘writing back’, contributing to a tradition of responding to, or re-placing, literature through a post-colonial lens.

Tuesday 23rd January 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Olivia Russell (St Hugh's College, Oxford): 'Dissecting the Written Body: Gaze, Violation, and Shame in Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Isabelle de Charrière's Lettres écrites de Lausanne'

In letter 12 of Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), young Incan princess Zilia is adorned in French clothing for the first time. When Déterville – the Frenchcaptain who rescued her from Spanish captivity – sees her new appearance, Zilia describes his reaction: “les yeux attachés sur moi, il parcourait toute ma personne avec une attention sérieuse dont j’étais embarrassée, sans en savoir la raison.” His face becomes enflamed and he clasps her hand, before pulling away and throwing himself on a chair at the opposite side of the room. A similarly dramatic scene arises in letter 12 of Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres écrites de Lausanne (1785). Young Cécile is playing chess with a male suitor when, in a moment of passion, he grabs her hand and “sembloit la dévorer des yeux.” She pulls back, hides her face, and then leaves the room. 

In both scenes, Graffigny and Charrière rely on a specific language to make desire and, arguably, violation more visible to the reader. My paper will show how they each use the language of physicality to demonstrate an unspoken transgression of boundaries, but in such a way as to avoid calling the virtue of their female characters into question. Offering a comparative close reading, I will argue that they foreground certain body parts to express the destructive and violent force of gaze, and use affect to accentuate the presence of intangible forms of violation. Ultimately, this paper will show how Graffigny and Charrière use the body in their writings not only to comment on gender power dynamics, but also to criticise the expectations and education of women in eighteenth-century French society. 

Ramani Chandramohan (The Queen's College, Oxford): '"De trop parler est vilonie/Et de trop taisir est folie": Weaponising Speech and Silence in 13th-century manuscripts of Les Sept sages de Rome'

The premodern narrative tradition of Les Sept Sages de Rome stretched from Asia to the Middle East and Europe, encompassing more than thirty languages over a period of five centuries. Anchored by the retelling of a trial in which a mute prince is falsely accused of rape by his stepmother, the manifold adaptations of the Sept Sages typically use binary forms of speech to marginalise both characters from the courtly sphere. The text-world thus constructs and understands questions of gender and bodily impairment via the opposing axes of calumny and silence. This paper will focus on Herbert’s thirteenth-century Roman de Dolopathos, which belongs to one of the earliest branches of the Sept Sages cycle in western Europe, in order to examine how the romance uniquely shapes the weaponising of the verbal and non-verbal within its clerical and Cistercian framework. Through consideration of the Dolopathos’ understudied codicological context, I will show how medieval compilers, who incorporated the work into multi-text and multi-generic manuscripts, opened up the possibility of redressing the Sept Sages’ polarised treatment of speech. Whilst the inclusion of the Dolopathos alongside romans antiques and romans de chevalerie in MS BnF fr. 1450 arguably facilitates a recovery of the female voice, the didacticism of MS BnF fr. 24301 highlights a middle ground which questions the very need to either ‘trop parler’ or ‘trop taisir’.

Tuesday 14th November 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Zak Eastop (Durham): 'Anatomy of a Scandal: Reading, (Re)writing, and Restricting Rabelais on the 19th-century lyric stage'

On Christmas Eve of 1855 the Paris Opéra was embroiled in a scandal. That night, Pantagruel, a newly written two-act opera based (loosely) on the works of François Rabelais, received its first performance. Unfortunately, it was not the rip-roaring success that everybody had predicted: the piece caused such a stir among the audience that its run was immediately cancelled. The production disappeared from public view overnight and has never been performed since. We still don’t really know why.

In my talk I will sift through what is known about Pantagruel’s implosive premier, asking whether disagreements about how to read Rabelais’s texts played a part in the demise of their operatic afterlife. How did the composer, librettist, and those involved in the piece’s production - as readers of Rabelais themselves - reformulate and represent aspects of his texts on stage, and how might this have rubbed the Second Empire’s audience or authorities up the wrong way? What might this negative reaction tell us about how they understood Rabelais? And what can this, in turn, reveal about the curé’s texts themselves, or their potential to be read plurally, divergently, and in ways that often seem incompatible with one another? 

Though extremely patchy archival records, wildly divergent published accounts of the evening, and the ever-snipping sound of the censor’s scissors mean that there is simply no way of knowing for certain what went wrong at Pantagruel’s premier, I contend that this scandal represents more than a merely musical misjudgement. It is an example of a historical community reading and disagreeing about the meaning and status of a text. So who, then, was Rabelais to these people? And why all the fuss? 

Hestia Zhang (St Peter's College, Oxford): ‘When the Flâneurs Sit Down: The Haussmannian Benches and Urban Storytelling’

In the 1850s, as part of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the French architect Gabriel Davioud designed the iconic dark-green public benches that are still seen in Paris today. Wooden benches and chairs had been installed on the walkways in royal gardens in the ancien régime, making them more than merely a place for strolling. It was not until the French Revolution that the gardens and parks in Paris were opened to the general public, which, throughout the century, developed into a sort of outdoor salon for social mingling and licit encounters among people of different socioeconomic status. Conforming to Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s political ambition of social integration, Davioud’s public benches pervaded the new boulevards and public parks and provided the untiring flâneurs a moment of rest. By settling people, sometimes even strangers, in close proximity, the benches also created more potential for urban meetings. In this paper, I will look closely into some nineteenth-century Parisian writings and paintings to see how, by juxtaposing characters of various social types in one line and staging them facing the audience, the artists exploited the bench’s theatrical effect and narrative potential to present a microcosm of nineteenth-century Parisian society.

Tuesday 31st October 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Abel Delattre (Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne): 'Daughters, Sisters, and Partners: The Filiation of Women Artists in the Musée national d'art moderne (Paris)'

In 1989, New York’s Public Art Fund commissioned advertising posters to the Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminist women artists’ known for their fight against sexism and racism in the art world. Their posters and slogans are now famous: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”, “Less than 3% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 83% of the nudes are female.” Another question that they could have asked is: do women artists need to have a filiation to a male artist to be acquired and exposed in museums? This question of filiation is one that arises in my study of women artists’ artworks in the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Paris). Does filiation – by blood, marriage, or simple partnership – of a woman artist to a male artist affect her being acquired? Is she showcased the same way as her male counterpart? Can a male artist’s name give more value to a woman artist’s, to her work? Or, on the contrary, does his name completely erase hers, her work, and her status as an artist? This paper dwells on all theses questions and tries to answer them by focusing on several examples of acquisitions and exhibitions of women artists’ in the Musée national d’art moderne, some of them well-known (Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber and Suzanne Valadon), others less-known (Juliette Roché, Françoise Gilot, Alice Halicka). 

Megan Williams (Surrey): '"Je ne sais d'autre bombe qu'un livre": French Anarchism in English Literature'

On the 17 February 1894, The Times reported “take me home” as the final words of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who had died two days earlier as a result of the accidental detonation of the bomb he was carrying in Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory. ‘Home’ is ambiguous: Bourdin provided no indication of context. He could have been talking about his home in London (a room in Fitzroy Street) or perhaps he meant to be taken back to Tours, where he was born. There is something deeply elusive about the spatiality of exiled anarchists, whose belief that anarchism ‘must be realised immediately’, in the words of Errico Malatesta, impacted how they thought about borders and boundaries. Eve Sedwick’s spatial metaphor of peri-performativity provides a vital point of analysis from which to consider these disorienting ideals. Where performative language requires the ‘presumption of consensus’, anarchists displace this consensus through alternative ways of conceiving and living in space. In this paper, I look at the reverberations of Bourdin’s death in the language that was used to explain it - xenophobic representations in the media, obituaries in the anarchist press, and revealing details in diary accounts of the time. I then look at literary responses including Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘The Informer’ (1906) and ending with TS Eliot’s poem Animula (1929).

Tuesday, 17th October 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls' College

Aditi Gupta (Exeter College, Oxford): 'Networks & Roots of Early French Indology: A Catalogue of Indian Manuscripts in 18th-century Paris'

Knowledge-power structures have been extensively studied for nineteenth-century British-colonised India. Lesser known is the fact that a century earlier France too was a contender in the race to colonise the people. This paper will shed light on the process of knowledge production on India in eighteenth-century France. Early French Indology developed under Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), a scholar and linguist celebrated for the first translation of Zend-Avesta, a Zoroastrian scripture. I will analyse a catalogue of Indian manuscripts sent to Anquetil-Duperron by Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799), a Frenchman who came to India in 1752 as a junior officer in the French East India company, and later served as a military advisor to Indian princes.

In the list that he drew up, Gentil provides titles and brief notes on the manuscripts he had sent to the scholar at his residence in Marly, a Parisian suburb. On the same pages, Anquetil-Duperron thematised the titles and scribbled notes along the margins. This catalogue stands witness to the knowledge exchange between two Frenchmen sharing a common interest: understanding India.

Rebecca Boyd (St Hugh's College, Oxford): 'Monsters out of the closet? Nightmarish lesbian identity in fin-de-siècle France'

‘Lesbos se trouve à chaque coin de rue…’ Written in 1884, these words of Henry Fouquier summon the vision of a fin-de-siècle France engulfed by legions upon legions of women-loving women. Such a claim may not have reflected the historical reality of the streets of Paris, but it does give an idea of the cultural landscape at the time. Lesbians were indeed to be found everywhere, whether in the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine, the sculptures of Rodin, the novels of Balzac and Zola, or the paintings of Courbet and Klimt – not to mention swathes of pornographic productions. Yet almost without fail, women who love other women were represented by these men as monstrous, vampiric creatures, belonging to the shadows. Towards the turn of the century, however, a new tendency emerged. Self-professed lesbians such as Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien began actively to embrace this discourse, styling themselves as nocturnal femmes fatales and using nightmarish imagery to signal their queerness to others like them, in their writing as well as in real life. How did they go about reclaiming the fin-de-siècle nightmarescape for themselves? How did this endeavour contribute to the broader development of lesbian identity as we understand it today? And what can it tell us about the perks and perils of accepting a notion of queerness founded on monstrosity and fear?