Tuesday 6th June 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Cambridge FGRS exchange 

Eve Judah (Newnham, Cambridge): ‘“La Philosophie en effect”: An exchange of letters (Derrida-Nancy)’

The aim of this paper is to introduce the book series, ‘La Philosophie en effet’, which was launched in 1973 by Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and continued until 2023. If this series is best known for various major works published by Derrida and Nancy during the second half of its existence (Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, say, or Nancy’s Le Sens du monde), my research seeks to suspend exclusive attention to individually famous works and authors, to address more carefully the dynamics of intellectual production through which the series came into being and pursued its mission to interrogate the contemporary institutional conditions of philosophical work. Central to this project is the analysis of understudied archival material, notably that of the four-way correspondence around the series, as well as documents like group interviews, adverts in literary magazines and ‘manifestoes’... This paper will focus on an exchange which took place in 1979, between Derrida and Nancy, in which they discuss the immense difficulties they’ve had with editors, the possibility of closing down the series – or – if they were to keep it alive, the specific theoretical and political goals they would aim to pursue. As Nancy writes, “je serais capable de ponde un manuel de ‘la philo en en effet’”.

Samuel Buchoul (Hughes Hall, Cambridge): ‘A phenomenology of writing, after Sartre and Derrida’

How is writing different from all our other activities? This practice is central to virtually everyone — the student just like the engineer, the accountant, the scientist, the merchant, and of course, the novelist —, and yet everyone struggles to find features that would be strictly unique to it. Spontaneously, we think of writing as a sub-genre of communication, sharing some of the aspects of orality while excluding others. Derrida’s reconceptualisation of écriture explored this opposition with speaking, but he also contributed, through a reversal of the binary, to the difficulty of isolating this practice from others. Indeed, if everyday (‘restricted’) writing is only one form of a broader kind of inscription (‘generalised’ writing), then we must also consider painting or dancing as forms of this larger ‘writing’, and in fact, all cultural constructions in general if read as traces developing across time (politics, ideology) and natural phenomena alike (DNA). Why, then, calling all these things with the name of what is for most of us just one technological tradition amongst others?

In this paper, I will suggest that this tension invites us to go back to this practice of everyday writing, to unpack what happens to us as subjects, when we write, and see if it can be interpreted, indeed, as an operation without equal in our condition as humans. Derrida’s proposition that writing is always already editing, i.e., reconstructing meaning through a continuous engagement with the forms of language, evokes Sartre’s definition of freedom as a constant reinterpretation of our ‘situation’ through praxis. But the material we rework in writing isn’t just anything: when removing a subordinate clause or changing a prefix, we basically negotiate, bit by bit, the new value we feel justified attributing to the constitutive blocks of our inherited symbolic order: words. Writing, then, appears as the privileged terrain for every individual’s co-construction of the collective imaginary that is human culture.

Wilfred Skinner (Fitzwilliam, Cambridge): ‘Les dernières vagues de l’Atlantique’: Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec in New York

In the early 70s, Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec saw in New York new ways of making art and negotiating with the geography of the city. Returning a few years later, they both made films there. The paper looks at a figure common to these films: New York as seen from a boat. 

Akerman’s News from Home (1976) and Histoires d’Amérique : Food, Family and Philosophy (1988), and Perec’s and Robert Bober’s Récits d’Ellis Island (1980) foreground this iconic image to signal a departure, an arrival and a stopover-detainment. The water and shorelines here offer ways of thinking through these writer-filmmakers’ relationships to avant-garde artistic practices as well as their own pasts. 

Inserted within forms which are ripe for transmission and sharing – news, histoires, récits, this figure becomes much more than a simple establishing, or closing, shot. Filming from a boat creates a powerful echo with stories of emigration and immigration, as told by Kafka and Singer, among others. These are explored most frontally in Perec’s Ellis Island text and Akerman’s 1988 film. But the figure also allows Akerman and Perec to explore ruptures and potentialities, endings and beginnings which are creative and spatial in nature. 

What did New York offer to them that Paris or Brussels perhaps did not? In what ways can their experiences of this city illuminate how Akerman and Perec handle more generally space and memory in their work? Such explorations will also bring in Perec’s Espèces d’espaces, Un Homme qui dort and its Melville intertext, other films Akerman made in New York, and polaroids Perec took during a cargo-ship voyage there. 

 

 

 

Tuesday 20th May 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Masters showcase

Kathy Fan (New) - Mind the Movement: A Cognitive Reading of Imagery in Mallarmé 

Charlotte Morgan (Keble) - How does the depiction of class influence the formation and evolution of sisterhoods in the Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre and Fatou Diome’s Celles qui attendent? 

 

Millicent Dean-Lewis (St Anne’s) - A poetics of the autistic eye in Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Danielle Collobert 

 

Georgina Walker (Magdalen) - ‘Cooking the books’: Culinary Epistemologies in 17th-Century Short Prose Narratives

 

 

Tuesday 6th May 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Oriane Guiziou-Lamour (University of Virginia): ‘Sex Under the Guillotine: Women, Sexuality, Prison, and the French Revolution’

The literary genre of récits d’emprisonnements flourished in France during the Terror of 1793–1794, giving rise to a form of writing that, less than ten years after 1789, was already negotiating its relationship with the legacy of the French Revolution. Prisons during the Terror held particular appeal for writers of sentimental and erotico-sentimental fiction, as they offered a space to explore the intersections of imprisonment, community, and sexuality. This paper examines how the French Revolution shaped representations of imprisonment and women’s sexuality in works by Giroust de Morency, Choiseul-Meuse, and Guénard de Méré, published between 1797 and 1800: Coralie, ou le danger de se fier à soi-même (1797), Irma, ou les malheurs d’une jeune orpheline (1799), and Illyrine ou l’Écueil de l’inexpérience (1799–1800). The heroines’ experiences of sexuality amid the turmoil of the Terror differ markedly from the sexual norms of the ancien régime. While one might rightly assume that these upheavals led to increased sexual violence against women, these texts also—perhaps unexpectedly—present prison as a space where female desire can be expressed and liberated. The creation of utopian communities, sealed off from the chaos of revolutionary France, becomes a means not only of enacting the ideals of liberté and fraternité, but also of engaging in a collective reflection on time, trauma, and healing.

 

Stéphanie Arc (CY Cergy Paris Université): ‘Between ethics and poetics: the challenges of writing documentary fiction’

‘Documentary novels’ are narratives based upon an investigation (in Emmanuelle Pireyre’s case, on the Internet, in Olivia Rosenthal and Cloé Korman’s cases, in real life). They might be ‘non-fiction novels’ or ‘documentary fictions’. The latter (‘fiction documentaire’ as Pireyre named them after Jacques Rancière) is defined as a combination of fiction and non-fiction, creating a blurry mix where readers can not tell the difference between what is ‘true/factual’ and what has been invented by the author. Each kind of ‘documentary novel’ raises specific ethical questions throughout the creative process.

Having completed the practical part of my thesis in creative writing, a documentary fiction entitled ‘Paillages’ (‘Mulch’), I will propose some reflections towards an ethics of writing such a narrative, which I call an ‘approximative’ or ‘fuzzy ethics’. Based on my own experience of carrying out a series of interviews for my novel and fusing them with fictional events in the process of writing, as well as Olivia Rosenthal, Joy Sorman and Cloé Korman's accounts of their own research and writing process, I will define ‘approximative ethics’ as a third way between strict censorship (principles strictly defined and applied from a superior/external point of view) and the idea that fiction writers would be above all ethical considerations. An ethics led by tact (for Roland Barthes), aiming at ‘justesse’ (rather than ‘justice’, according to Arno Bertina), which requires ‘le sens des situations’ (as described by the French ethnologist Jeanne Favret-Saada, for example), would respect both the freedom that fiction writers need to create their work and the people whose lives and words they cite or rewrite.

 

Tuesday 25th February 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Holly Rowe (Lincoln) - Baron d’Holbach and the essai form as political satire 

Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723-1789) was a German-born, French-naturalised philosopher, salon host, and prolific writer of materialist, political, and antitheological treatises. The majority of his works were published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the limits of his vast literary output therefore remain indistinct.  

D’Holbach is now recognised as the author of five facéties philosophiques, or short, comic anti-religious and polemical writings. These include the sardonic Essai sur l’art de ramper, à l’usage des courtisans (1790), which caricatures the figure of the courtier and satirises the moral and physical qualities required to advance at court. The Essai appeared posthumously in the Correspondance littéraire, a confidential manuscript newsletter circulated among secret subscribers who included European heads of state. However, there is no record of whether d’Holbach saw the Essai as a finished piece of writing or whether it was prepared – or even intended – for publication during his lifetime. 

D'Holbach’s Essai criticises a self-serving system of court politics that lacks any regulatory influence on the exercise of monarchical power. Yet it was circulating among European royal courts at a divisive moment in French revolutionary politics. This paper considers the apparent disconnect between d’Holbach’s envisaged audience and the Essai’s actual readers. It examines what this suggests about the way the Essai was understood and organised for publication by d'Holbach’s editors, and considers how this can inform our understanding of the essai’s function as a form of writing in eighteenth-century France. 

Sasho Pshenko (Magdalen) - ‘Moving Constellations: Gilles Deleuze's Conceptual Transition’

At the start of the 1970s, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze underwent a transition, under the influence of the social theorist and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. He substituted a more classical approach to writing with a more experimental one; he substituted a philosophy which seeks to combine immanence and transcendence with a purely immanent theory. 

This transition, perhaps, is most clearly to be seen in the way in which Deleuze reshuffled a constellation of several conceptual components. At first, these components were organised into two distinct groups, two constellations: on the one hand, the binary pairing Sadistic institution-Masochistic contract, and on the other hand, the concept of the differenciator. After the transition, these two constellations were dissolved and regrouped into two new concepts: on the one hand, the concept of the signifying State, and on the other hand the concept of desire. 

The new concept of the signifying State was comprised of several elements which previously were associated with the Sadistic institution, as well as others which were associated with the differenciator. The remaining elements of the differenciator went on to form the other new concept, that of desire. In my presentation, I aim to demonstrate, in detail, the particular ways in which this deconstruction and reconstruction of concepts occurred. Through this, I aim to show how exactly this transition signified the advent of a new direction in Deleuze's thought and why it was necessary to take place. 

Tuesday 11th February 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nicolas Duriau (Wolfson) - ‘(Un)Voicing Male Prostitution during the First Empire and the Bourbon Restoration: “Riéniste[s]”, “parasite[s]" and “nulliste[s]” characters in Cuisin’s work’ 

According to the conclusions of my doctoral dissertation, which dealt with long-19^th-century French literature (1783-1922), there is a significant decline in the number of novels depicting male prostitution from 1800 to 1830. It seems that the then ‘prostitué’ appeared under the guise of less conspicuous figures, such as the ‘greluchon’, the ‘sigisbée’, or the ‘parvenu’ – who would implicitly engage in sexual activity with women, either for money, or for social prestige – to evade the First Empire’s and the Bourbon Restoration’s censorship. By considering little-known novels by J. P. R. Cuisin, a now forgotten writer of the early 19^th century, I intend to better understand how the representations of male prostitution evolved from the libertine fiction of the late 18^th century to the realist novel of the 1830s. As Andrew Counter (The Amorous Restoration. Love, Sex, and Politics in Early-Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Alain Viala (La Galanterie. Une mythologie française, Seuil, 2019) suggest, extramarital and commercial sex remained ubiquitous in the 1800-1830 literary production, but aligned with a poetics of ‘silence’, or ‘refoulement’. My aim is to demonstrate that the ‘Riéniste[s]’, ‘parasite[s] et ‘nulliste[s]’ who merge into Cuisin’s novels not only embodied the Empire/Restoration style ‘prostitué’, but also allegorised an ideological context in which ‘sexual deviances’ appear through text blanks, or figures of avoidance.  

Lou Khalfaoui (Leeds) - ‘Franco-Algerian relations: hopes for “reconciliation” in the face of memories of colonialism in official discourses (1999-2005)’ 

In this paper, I aim to explore a period of hope for reconciliation between France and Algerian, which have long been studies as an example of dissonant colonial memories plaguing modern state and cultural relations. In the aftermath of the Algerian civil War and Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s ascension to power in April 1999, French and Algerian officials made clear attempts to redefine bilateral relations through greater cooperation. However, as is well established, relations took a turn for the worse in 2005 when France passed the controversial Repatriates’ law, which included an article about French colonialism’s “positive legacy”. I argue that not only did the incident involving local, national and transnational actors precipitate a significant cool down in diplomatic relations, it fundamentally changed the discursive construction of colonial violence in both French and Algerian official narratives. From 2005, impassioned engagement with colonial violence featured growinly in official Algerian discourse, especially around the Massacres of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata, whose anniversary became the National Memory Day in 2020. This both had concrete implications for whom and how episodes of colonial violence were remembered, given growing state control over commemorations, as well as their broader national and international audiencing. On the French side, colonial violence in Algeria was was most frankly alluded to in the direct aftermath of the law with Hubert Colin de Verdière, the French ambassador, describing the repression of May 8th, 1945 as an “inexcusable tragedy”, just as the event was becoming the embodiment of colonial violence in Algerian discourse. I hope to show how discourses about the past have an impact on the viability of memory policies, which profess to help appease and reconcile. 

Tuesday 28th January 2025, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Jodie Miller (UCLA) - ‘A Fox and a Jackal at Court: The Trickster’s Trial in the Roman de Renart and Kalila and Dimna’

The Old French literary cycle, the Roman de Renart, and the Kalila and Dimna fables of the Arabic and Persian literary traditions both tell the tale of a small canine-like trickster who is put on trial for the crime of trickery at the lion king’s court. The Roman de Renart is composed between the late-twelfth century and the mid-thirteenth, whereas Kalila and Dimna stems back to antiquity with the Panchatantra (c. 200 BCE). Although no direct contact is attested between these traditions until at least a century after the composition of the first Renardian branches, both feature a trickster’s trial scene with striking similarities. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the fox and jackal’s trials to better understand the convergences between the Roman de Renart and the Kalila and Dimna fables. In what ways do these trial scenes stem from a global circulation of similar ideals dealing with justice and ethics? 

The analysis of this paper focuses on the following aspects of the trial scene: the depiction of the crime of trickery, the juridical structure of the trials, and the trials’ verdicts. Both texts portray trickery through the subversion of ethical ideals leading to social chaos. Renart is gluttonous and lustful, unable to stop himself from tricking to find a meal or from satisfying himself sexually. Dimna, on the other hand, is greedy and prideful in search for political prestige. Both Renart and Dimna advocate for themselves at trial and manipulate a weak king, albeit within different juridical structures. Kalila and Dimna features a disputational defense-and-response structure, whereas Renart’s trial is based on customary law and the medieval “ordeal.” Various forms of evidence are brought forth during the investigation of their crimes (i.e., physiognomic proof and testimony), however only Dimna is found guilty and punished. Renart escapes at the end of his trial. 

 

Adam Husain (Christ Church) -  Le Temps retrouvé : An Apology for Lost Time?

À la recherche du temps perdu finishes with a very long rant. The narrator, buoyed up by a fresh injection of epiphany, rattles off a whole new philosophy, which is centred around the odd claim that, as Empson once put it: “sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of living in another place, and [thus] you are outside time”. Is there any way of making such an idea believable or interesting? Should we instead treat the narrator as “mad”?  In this talk, I outline a new way of reading the closing pages of the Recherche as the culmination of a contradiction developed throughout the novel, and a true apology for lost time.   

Tuesday 19th November 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Caitlin Sturrock (Bristol): The Sourde-Muette and the Good Mother in Pauliska, ou la perversité moderne (1797-1798)

 

Deafness in eighteenth-century France was a growing fascination; the 1770s marked a period of shifting societal perceptions of the sourd-muet. The Abbé de l’Épée published his treatises on the education of the sourds-muets, institutionalising his methods from the school he opened the decade before, and Pierre Desloges published his influential Observations d’un Sourd et Muet, sur un cours élémentaire d’éducation des sourds et muets in 1779, which marked one of the first interventions of a sourd-muet into these debates. Under the Revolution, the sourd-muet became a figure to imitate during the growing paranoia that spoken language caused the violent excesses of the Terror. This is what underpins the case study of this paper.  

Published over two volumes in An VI (1797-1798), Jacques-Antoine de Révéroni Saint-Cyr’s Pauliska, ou la perversité moderne follows the virtuous comtesse as she moves across borders – from Poland to Italy – in search of safety for herself, her lover – Ernest – and her son – Edvinski. Facing the Baron d’Olnitz, the counterfeiters under the Danube, and Salviati’s group of mesmerists, Pauliska oscillates between imprisonment and freedom to finally end reunited with Ernest and Edvinski. In examining deafness and irrational hearing, this paper will argue that the eponymous Pauliska is virtuous and rational precisely because she is a sourde-muette. When this disability is also central to ideals of femininity – modesty and virtue – this novel further evokes Revolutionary ideas on motherhood. Here, the ideal of women’s enlightenment and the remedy to the irrationality of the Revolution lie in the sourde-muette.  

 

Elliot Koubis (St John’s): ‘Being an “ethical” queer subject: Édouard Louis in Greece’

 

This paper explores what is means to be an ‘ethical’ queer subject in a time where queer movements have largely receded from view or have won mainstream acceptance in certain contexts. It will also explore whether the imagined LGBTQ+ ‘community’ in this climate imposes norms on queer bodies and expression. Louis’s Changer: Méthode (2021) will be read alongside a recent poetry collection in Greek by Spyros Chairetis, Ο Γοργόνος και άλλα πλάσματα (The Merman and Other Creatures, 2023) to examine whether there exists an anxiety for queer subjects across borders to be radical political actors. 

The paper will draw upon approaches to homonormativity to show how norms shape attitudes toward the queer body and political solidarity towards marginalized groups, as well as expressions of queer shame and regret. By reading Louis’s work through the lens of Chairetis’s poems, the paper will highlight how both authors use apologetic forms of writing to establish a more ethical relationship with queer subjects and collectives. This comparison will highlight how recent queer writing has impacted our understanding of queer sexuality as a political, anti-normative demand and underline the existence of an anti-normative ‘politics of respectability’ in queer cultures. What is more, this paper will stress the need to place literature from the ‘European South’ on the same level as that from the ‘European North’ and it will demonstrate how such comparisons can yield fruitful results.  

  

 

Tuesday 5th November 2024, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Sabrina Hogan (Christ Church): States of attention in Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine and Scève’s Délie

 

This paper will consider the themes of attention and distraction in Guillaume Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine (1578) and Maurice Scève’s Délie (1544), two texts which form part of the corpus in my wider poetic project on states of attention in sixteenth-century French poetry. The theme of attention in its various forms permeates a wide spectrum of poetic genres of period, notably devotional poetry, love poetry and creation poetry. A sustained form of attentiveness, vigilance, has a special place in the sixteenth century, a time of poetic vigils and devotional culture privileging the contemplative life, and an age when apocalyptic and prophetic discourses acquired renewed vigour amid the Wars of Religion. I will consider how in his epic creation poem, La Sepmaine (1578), Du Bartas reflects upon the reach and limitations of his ability to recreate the wonder of divine creation revealed in Genesis 1-2. The poet’s depiction of his own attentive state as writer probes the rhetorical figure of copia – popularised in the sixteenth century, notably by Erasmus’ De copia (1512). Scève’s Délie is hailed as the first French canzoniere, displaying the impact of Petrarch's Rime in France in a series of 449 love poems (dizains) addressed to the poet's mysterious object of desire, Délie. States of attentiveness and wakefulness are central to exploring Scève’s evocative sensorial depictions and the staging of the poet’s innamoramento. 

 

Beverly Adrian (Wadham): Charles Nodier and the eternal recurrence of the merveilleux

 

This paper explores how Charles Nodier’s 1830 essay ‘Du fantastique en littérature’ makes the case for a renewed interest in supernatural fiction in the early half of the nineteenth century. Nodier’s essay will be examined in light of Louis de Bonald’s remarks in ‘Du Style et de la littérature’ (1806), in which the latter suggests that ‘la littérature est l’expression de la société’, establishing a hierarchy of literary forms, and traces the development and perceived decadence of French letters up until the revolution, when literature took a philosophical turn. Almost twenty-five years after Bonald, Nodier observes that the merveilleux or rather its offshoot, the fantastique, fulfills society’s aching need for transcendence in a decadent age of scepticism and positivism. Nodier suggests that emphasis on imagination in storytelling should supplant literary classicism, in order to rejuvenate the human spirit, thereby paving the way for a newfound age of innocence which favors illusion over doubt. My paper will consider the tensions between the merveilleux and the fantastique, as envisaged by Nodier, alongside questions of genre and canonicity. I will highlight the ways in which Nodier’s propositions correspond with an upsurge in ideas of spiritual regeneration in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

  

Tuesday 22nd October 2024, 5:15-6:30pm, Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Carrie Heusinkveld (St John’s, Cambridge): ‘“Avez-vous dans les airs entendu quelque bruit?” Sound and Air in Racine’s Theatre’

Jean Racine has often been regarded as the great psychological dramatist of the seventeenth-century. With their emphasis on emotional interiority and spatial and narrative simplicity, his plays have been said to take place primarily in the characters' minds, while the observable action is limited to a single, nondescript chamber from which the wider world is largely excluded. While significant critical stress has been placed on their psychological and emotional complexity, little attention has been paid to the wider material and environmental contexts of his tragedies. This reception is perhaps reflective of a widespread and longstanding strand of critical thought, which has perceived the seventeenth century – a period frequently associated with the consolidation of a modern scientific mentality - as the mainspring of an increasing alienation of the natural from the human. Early modern French theatre, widely regarded as one of the critical paradigms of knowledge during this period, has been interpreted as a crystallisation of this apparent human-nonhuman binary, modelling a wider impulse to separate the material world from the thinking mind. However, ecocritical theory and environmental history have recently started to reframe early modern conceptions of nature-human relationships as more complex and entangled than previously recognised. I will give further impetus to this reappraisal by extending this line of inquiry to early modern theatre. In examining representations of sound and air in Racine’s theatre, I will show that it is possible to discern in seventeenth-century tragedy an awareness of the imbrication of the human with the nonhuman. 

Lynn Ngyugen (St John’s): ‘Migrations in language’

What does it mean to choose another language to be your own? Can it ever be your own? This talk explores several Francophone writers’ relationships to French, a language that they have adopted and/or one that they have actively chosen over their langue maternelle to write their literary works. Reading selections from texts by Nancy Huston, Assia Djebar, Anna Moï, and Alice Kaplan, among others, I will consider what significance French specifically holds for these writers as a language of literary self-fashioning, as well as examine the complex experience of inhabiting the language more broadly—either as a total outsider or from a postcolonial influence—and of grappling with the contradictions of identity that the language might bring.

  

Tuesday 28th May 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Cambridge FGRS Exchange

Maddison Sumner (Robinson College, Cambridge): 'A Glitch in the Matrix? Transclasse Confrontations of Meritocracy'

Nesrine Slaoui has, ostensibly, succeeded in her aspirations to become a legitimate journalist and public figure. She achieved excellent grades in school, gained entry into a classe préparatoire in order to obtain her licence from SciencesPo Grenoble, and went on to graduate with a master’s in journalism from SciencesPo Paris. She is a published author, has directed documentaries with Arte, and even made a cameo in the Oscar-winning film Anatomie d’une chute. However, her autobiography, published in 2021, is entitled Illégitimes, and her podcast, Légitimes, pivots around a central question that she poses to all of her guests: ‘est-ce que tu te sens légitime?’ Why, then, is legitimacy such a central question to her work? In this paper, I start to answer this question, first by moving through a general definition of what Slaoui is referring to when she talks about legitimacy, and introducing my reading – inspired by bell hooks’ ideas on marginality and revolution – of Slaoui as a writer who is engaging in ‘counter-legitimation’. I will then move more closely into a consideration of one of the main vehicles with which Slaoui operates this exercise of counter-legitimation in her autobiography: a laying bare of the deceptive mechanisms of meritocracy which operate in France, particularly through a criticism, informed by Bourdieu’s sociology, of meritocracy’s function as a machine of social reproduction. 

Toby Barnett (Robinson College, Cambridge): 'La Pathologie positive: Broussais, Algeria, and the Problem of Conditionability'

During the 1810s, François-Joseph-Victor Broussais (1772-1838) began to develop a medical theory that would install him as one of France’s most influential – and controversial – physicians. Consolidating Enlightenment materialism, vitalism and republican politics, ‘physiological’ medicine claimed that human life is produced by interactions between the body and its environment. Behind this conclusion was the broader principle that adaptability to the milieu was the primary driver behind human health and disease. In his seminal work Le normal et le pathologique (1943; 1966), written some thirty-five years before Michel Foucault coined the term ‘biopolitics’, historian and philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem would reiterate the significance of the Broussaisian system, conceived as a cornerstone of science’s normative politics in the modern period. As Canguilhem set out, the physician’s ideas ran counter to scientific reality while denying the responsibility, proper to scientific practice, to do justice to human diversity. First composed at the University of Strasbourg during German occupation, Canguilhem’s analyses of Broussais’s ‘positive pathology’ offered a coded rebuke to the biological projects of Nazism. Taking Canguilhem’s commentaries as its point of departure, this paper re-examines Broussaisian thought in the context of another political conjuncture to which it bears a close – if overlooked - relation: namely, the beginning of the second French colonial empire. Focusing on the colonial reception and deployment of Broussaisian thought during the 1830s and 40s, I seek to establish the impact of the French invasion of Algiers (1830) on positive pathological discourses concerning race, anthropogeography and adaptability.

Duarte Bénard da Costa (Peterhouse, Cambridge): 'On Origins: Julia Kristeva'

In the late 1960s, Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva coins the term intertextuality, describing it as the transposition of one or several systems of signs into another. Her understanding of ‘signifying practice’ includes the idea that certain practices comprehend certain transposed systems. Here, I seek to look into concepts such as «revolution», «intrusion» and «subversion» in reference to Kristeva’s texts and to texts criticizing her theory of intertextuality. The politically charged notion of origin stems from interpretive questions beginning with «who», «when», «where». Revisiting Kristeva’s reading of Marcel Proust will expand the notion of origin as a source of ontological instability, rather than stability, which is key to understanding the tension between textual surfaces and subjective agency.

Tuesday 14th May 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

In the first half of the session, Mathieu Farizier (Jesus College, Oxford) gave a paper entitled "'Quels sont les moyens de rendre plus politique un texte qui ne l'est pas assez ?' Quintane’s poetic propaganda, the Marxian revolution as a playful double-bind."

The second half of the session consisted in a 'Masters showcase,' with brief presentations of ongoing MSt dissertations from James Hughes (Magdalen College, Oxford), Gaya Krishna (Pembroke College, Oxford), Imogen Lewis (St Cross College, Oxford), Kate Dorkins (Somerville College, Oxford), and Sophie Benbelaid (New College, Oxford). This provided an opportunity to give informal feedback and advice, and to make enriching links across different levels and areas of postgraduate research.

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

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Claire Leibovich (Durham University): 'The Semite's Body and the Limits of Theory in Denis Guénoun's Writing on the Algerian War'

Denis Guénoun’s Un sémite (2002) has often been read in two seemingly conflicting ways. On one hand, it is presented as a straightforward memoir on the author’s Algerian Jewish family, his childhood in Oran, and the family’s departure for France in the wake of the Algerian independence in 1962. On the other hand, Un sémite has received a deconstructive reading from scholars such as Gil Anidjar and Judith Butler. These scholars underline the text’s undermining of racial discourses on Jews and Arabs in the colonial context in Algeria. They focus on the text’s reappropriation of the racial term “semite” into a political proposition renegotiating the relationship between Jews and Arabs. Through a close reading of Un sémite, my paper explores the tensions it presents between a deconstructive theoretical discourse and the staging of embodied experience and memory. First, I investigate the literary strategies through which the text highlights the fictional dimension of its own historical and biographical narratives, but also of its political discourse. Secondly, I examine how, through the staging of the semite’s body and the dissonance it presents between discourse and the body, Un sémite probes the limits of theory. Ultimately, I show that the two common ways of reading Un sémite – as a deconstructive essay and as a memoir – are not conflicting. Rather, I argue that they are representative of the tensions – between embodied memory and narrative reconstruction, and deconstruction – at the heart of traumatic memories of the Algerian War. 

Lucien Dugaz (Université de Lausanne): 'Dead Poet Society: Chasing a Medieval French Poet in Oxford'

The difficulty of attributing texts to an author is inversely proportional to his fame. Octovien de Saint-Gelais (1468-1502) was one of the most appreciated and admired poets of his time. Today, he is little known and very little read. This may be because he was unable to grasp the printed medium that was developing at the end of the 15th century, or because he fell victim to fashion, his marginal geographical location in Angoulême or the whims of the sovereigns who employed him. 

I will focus on the critical edition of 22 previously unpublished rondeaux, which we are not sure were written by Octovien. Kathleen Chesney (1899-1976), Vice-Principal of St Hilda's College, was a pioneer in planning a critical edition of Saint-Gelais's lyric, alas unfinished, but a draft of which is now in the Taylor Institution Library. She also carefully examined these rondeaux for her catalogue More Poèmes de transition (1965), based on the Taylor Institute manuscript Arch. I. d 22. I will use several philological and linguistic clues to try to identify the pieces among these rondeaux that can be attributed with certainty to Saint-Gelais. I hope to be able to understand when and for whom Octovien composed these texts which, 'in the memory of his youth gone forever, breathe a penetrating melancholy', as his first biographer, the witty Abbé Molinier (1910: 250), wrote.

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?

 

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.