Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

26th April 5-6.30pm

Questions of Duration and Ethics in New Extreme Cinema

Oliver Kenny (QMUL)

Long takes and long sequences are common elements in films which have been associated with new extreme cinema, a loose grouping of films from the last two decades which challenge and provoke the spectator in radical, disturbing and often problematic ways. The final chapter of my thesis, from which the ideas of this paper are drawn, seeks to interrogate the links between duration and extremity as well as duration and ethics in French films such as Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), À ma sœur! (Catherine Breillat, 2001), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001), Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002), Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003) and We Fuck Alone (Gaspar Noé, 2006) as well as some from outside France such as The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, 2003), Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005), Free Will (Matthias Glasner, 2006), Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), and The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, 2014). 

This paper will propose that the durative qualities of many scenes from these films are able to create a confrontational realism by bringing us into a relation with the qualitative and processive – rather than quantitative and unitary – aspects of ‘extreme’ events such as murder, rape and bodily mutilation. This exploratory claim will be made by examining some intersections of Henri Bergson’s durée, Gilles Deleuze’s time-image and Stanley Keeling’s concepts of processive and unitary duration. In doing so, I aim to provide a basis for considering why new extreme films turn so frequently to the long take and drawing on examples from the films of Breillat, Dumont and Noé I hope to show that spectatorial engagement with the qualities and processes of violence can be ethically powerful in its disturbing, challenging address to the spectator. 

‘Does Madness Represent a Threat in a Deterministic Universe? Diderot and d’Holbach answer’    

Ruggero Sciuto (Merton College, Oxford) 

In my thesis I argue that both Diderot and d'Holbach should be regarded as endorsing determinism. I reach this conclusion by examining their treatment of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the laws of Nature, and causal necessitation.

Diderot's works, however, are teeming with references to madness and mad characters. This might seem to indicate that Diderot's philosophy ought not be taken as deterministic after all. Indeed, in the eighteenth century madness and determinism were perceived as being at odds: we see this, for example, in the Réflexions philosophiques sur le Système de la Nature of the Abbé Holland, as well as in the parallelism between madness and dreaming, which is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century French texts. Significantly, the latter parallelism between madness and dreaming can be found in the works of Diderot, too.

In my paper I shall demonstrate that neither madness nor dreaming represent a threat for Diderot and d'Holbach's determinism. In accordance with the Leibnizian principle of continuity, in fact, d'Holbach and Diderot obliterate all distinctions between mad- and non-mad people – as well as between sleep and wakefulness, for that matter. They consistently insist that madness derives from physical causes, and prove that mad people's actions are just as necessary as anyone else's.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

8th March 5-6.30pm

Performing and Exploring Gender in the Plays of French Caribbean Women Writers

Vanessa Lee (St Edmund Hall, Oxford)

My thesis research focuses on the theatrical works by French Caribbean women writers; Ina Césaire, Michèle Césaire and Suzanne Dracius, from Martinique; and Maryse Condé and Gerty Dambury, from Guadeloupe. Martinique and Guadeloupe are French départements, however the islands have produced many writers and theorists whose writings form the kernel of postcolonial and anticolonial thought. French Caribbean writers are often marginalized by metropolitan French literary and artistic culture, and have only become the focus of Francophone postcolonial studies over the past thirty years.

Theatre constitutes an under-researched domain within Francophone postcolonial studies, and I aim to demonstrate how the analysis of Caribbean performance cultures enhances our understanding of the fragmentary and multicultural socio-historical realities of the region.  The works of women writers in French theatre is even more under-researched, despite the exceptional concentration of female playwrights within the same generation, a phenomenon that demands more extensive study.

This paper will analyse the representation and exploration of gender constructs and relations in the plays Mémoires d’îles (1983) by Ina Césaire, Comme deux frères (2007) by Maryse Condé and Lettres indiennes (1993) by Gerty Dambury.The artificiality of theatre questions and problematizes gender signifiers and constructs, and offers multiple frames within which to explore gender relations in Antillean society. Using postcolonial, theatrical and spatial theories of gender, I shall analyse how the plays tackle issues of motherhood, domesticity and male-female relations.

The (dis)appearance of nothing in Beckett’s L’Innommable

Amy Steinepreis (Merton College, Oxford)

This paper focuses on the trope of self-erasure in Samuel Beckett, epitomised by L’Innommable’s: ‘Et si je parlais pour ne rien dire, mais vraiment rien?’ I return to Jacques Derrida’s writings on the inevitable doubling of presence and absence in literature to ask whether it is ever possible for a narrator to say nothing without leaving behind a remnant of the act of saying. Citing Gustave Flaubert’s dream of a ‘livre sur rien’, Derrida’s essay ‘Force et Signification’ posits the critic’s object as ‘la façon dont ce rien lui-mêmese détermine en se perdant’: in other words, we should scrutinise the disappearing act of nothing.

Our question becomes: if nothing leaves a wake behind it to thwart the Flaubertian dream in its pure form, in what way does the disappearance of this ‘rien’ itself appear in Beckett’s text? Engaging with Hegel, Blanchot, Derrida, and Levinas, I investigate the ‘trace’ or ‘remainder’ (Derrida) that self-cancelling narration leaves in L’Innommable. Having considered what kind of surplus might inhere in Beckett’s work despite narrative processes of self-negation, I test the argument that Beckett’s ‘signature’ persists after what Derrida terms the exhaustion of this author’s ‘thematics’.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

23^rd February 5-6.30pm

Textbook Structure and the Framing of Descartes’ Arguments

Jon Templeman (St John’s College, Oxford)

It's common to find Descartes presenting the same argument in a variety of formal settings. The paper argues that formal variation in Descartes' work tracks, in part, his shifting attitude towards teaching. In particular, it tracks the varying influence of contemporary textbook styles on Descartes' own methods of presentation. I look briefly at four projects: the /Discours de la méthode/, the proposed Eustachius commentary, the /Principia philosophiae/, and Henri Regius's /Fundamenta physices/. The first three projects seem to describe a gradual simplification in Descartes' style of presentation, and an increasing conformity to late scholastic academic norms. I think that is right, with heavy qualification. To develop that qualification, I compare the /Principia/ with Regius's text, which is from the same period but is substantially less daring both in terms of form and argument. That brings out the distance that remains, at the end of Descartes' career, between his style and that of more conventional textbook-writers.

A DPhil ‘through the ages’

Emma Claussen, Olivia Madin, Cameron Quinn & Gemma Tidman

In this session, four graduate students at varying stages in their DPhil research will talk briefly about their experiences of DPhil life – applications, challenges, strategies, methods etc. There will then be an open discussion during which people are invited to ask questions and to share their own experiences and thoughts. We hope that this will provide an opportunity for people who are already doing a DPhil or are thinking about applying to do a DPhil, to talk about research in a relatively informal and constructive environment.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls’ College (Hovenden Room)

Tuesday 9^th February, 5-6.30pm

The Body of Ourika: The Doctor, the Patient and the Text

Sarah Jones (Oriel College, Oxford)

Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) is a powerful exploration of the psychological effects of social exclusion upon the novella’s eponymous heroine. This exclusion is justified with reference to Ourika’s body and the ways in which it is coded and deciphered by society: Ourika’s blackness debars her from fulfilling her supposedly natural role of maternal reproduction. Against this background of the body’s primacy, it is surprising that limited critical attention should have been paid to the frame-narrator of Ourika, the young doctor who encounters the protagonist on her death-bed and procures her story from her. My paper will argue that the body of the text and the body of the heroine are intimately linked, and that this connection brings the role of the doctor to the fore. I shall suggest that medical narratives of the body, and the characters who incarnate them, form an ideology which must perpetually be negotiated within the social relations that encircle and engender it. The doctor shows remarkable sympathy for Ourika which draws him into the nexus of social forces that centre on Ourika’s body. This demonstrates a complex web of relations between his sympathetic attitude towards his patient, the permutations of his medical discourse within Ourika’s narrative, and the ways in which Ourika can use her body, the instrument of her own marginalization and source of the doctor’s sympathy, to resist attempts to subject her narrative to the authority of the doctor’s.

Points de re-père: Paternal Hauntings in Marie Nimier’s Works

Adina Stroia (KCL)

At the age of five, Marie Nimier loses her father, writer Roger Nimier, in a tragic car accident. Nimier’s mourning process is problematized and deferred by the ontological uncertainty of the paternal figure who was ‘ni vraiment là quand il était présent, ni vraiment absent quand il nous quitta’ (Reine du Silence, 37) and is thus (dis)placed outside of a Freudian understanding of Trauerarbeit as finite. The ghostly materiality of the father as a figure of the entre-deux haunts Nimier’s writing through the point de re-père, a term the author advances in her debut novel, Sirène (1987), whose manifestations take the shape of a series of paternal avatars and attributes woven throughout the textual fabric of her corpus. I argue that the point de re-père is coherent with Derrida’s logic of spectrality through its dispersive qualities and repetitive structure. This paper will analyse the means through which the paternal hauntology refracts and insinuates itself in the interstices of the narrative in two autobiographically inflected works, Sirène and La Reine du silence (2004). I will trace the disorienting effects of the temporal shifts and of the gestures of material dislocation and analyse the means through which the spectral paternal configurations in the form of the re-père contaminate Nimier’s narrative and linguistic practices, installing a presence/absence aporia which traverses the author’s œuvre.

As you know, we are holding our French Graduate Seminars this year in conjunction with the IMLR. Check out details of their events in London by following this link:

https://www.fabula.org/actualites/the-french-postgraduate-seminar-series-at-the-imlr-london_72196.php

French Graduate Seminar 

Tuesdays, 5-6.30pm, All Souls' College (Hovenden Room)

Co-convenors: Olivia Madin (Wadham) and Gemma Tidman (Wolfson)

In conjunction with the IMLR, and with the support of Dr Dominic Glynn (IMLR), Dr Jessica Goodman (St Catherine's) and Professor Catriona Seth (All Souls')

All Welcome! 

Hilary Term 

9^th February (4th Week) - in conjunction with the IMLR

Adina Stroida, KCL: 'Points de repère: Paternal Hauntings in Marie Nimier’s Works’

Sarah Jones, Oriel: ‘The Body of Ourika: The Doctor, the Patient, and the Text’

23^rd February (6^th Week)

Jon Templeman, St John’s: ‘Textbook Structure and the Framing of Descartes’ Arguments’

8^th March (8^th Week)

Vanessa Lee, SHE: ‘Performing and Exploring Gender in the Plays of French Caribbean Women Writers’

Amy Steinepreis, Merton: ‘The (dis)appearance of nothing in Beckett’s L’Innommable’

Trinity Term

26^th April (1^st Week) – in conjunction with the IMLR

Oliver Kenny, QMUL: ‘Questions of Duration and Ethics in New Extreme Cinema’

Ruggero Sciuto, Merton: ‘Does Madness Represent a Threat in a Deterministic Universe? Diderot and d’Holbach answer’

10^th May (3^rd Week)

Rodney Mearns, St Cross: ‘The Interface Between Literature and History in the Late Writing of Marguerite Yourcenar’

Sophie Turner, Worcester: ‘Errant Friendships in Libertine Literature’

24^th May (5^th Week)

Cédric Ploix, St Hugh’s: ‘The Dramatic Quality of Verse in Translations of Molière’s Comedies’

Jordan Phillips, Oriel: ‘Ça craint, ça fait trop retour aux sources’: Immigrant Writers and the (Impossible?) Quest for Origins’

Call for Proposals for 2016

We’re very pleased to announce that the Oxford French Graduate Seminar will be re-launching next term, with the support of Professor Catriona Seth and Dr Jessica Goodman. These seminars are intended to provide graduates in French with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with other graduates in a relaxed environment. There will be three seminars per term, held on Tuesdays, 5-6.30pm, at All Souls’ College. Each session will feature two 20-minute papers, plus time for discussion. We welcome papers on any topic relating to French language, history, literature and culture. We are currently looking for graduate students who are interested in speaking in Hilary or Trinity term, 2016. The seminars will take place on the following dates:

Hilary Term (Spring)
Tuesday 9th February (4th Week)
Tuesday 23rd February (6th Week)
Tuesday 8th March (8th Week)

Trinity Term (Summer)
Tuesday 26th April (1st Week)
Tuesday 10th May (3rd Week
Tuesday 24th May (5th Week)

If you are interested in speaking, please send us an email by Friday 11th December, 2015 with an outline of what you propose to present (no need for a fixed abstract at this stage), and any date preferences you may have. Though we will aim to group together papers on related themes or periods, we will try to accommodate requests for particular dates.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Gemma & Olivia

gemma.tidman@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
olivia.madin@wadh.ox.ac.uk