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

Tuesday 1 November (4th Week) 5pm - 6.30pm

"Une Imagination Réglée": The Role of Imagined Paintings in Diderot's Salons

Rachel Skokowski (University College, Oxford) 

Originally published as part of Grimm's Correspondance littéraire, Diderot's Salons were ostensibly intended to provide descriptions of real paintings displayed at the Salon for readers who could not visit the exhibitions themselves. However, these descriptions of real artworks are often interrupted and overshadowed by descriptions of paintings that were never exhibited on the walls of the Salon Carré, unusual entities that masquerade as artworks, yet exist only in Diderot's imagination. 

My paper examines the phenomenon of these “imagined paintings” in detail for the first time. While scholars have noted the existence of imagined paintings, no one has yet investigated how and why Diderot constructs these strange objects, what Phillipe Déan calls "aberration[s] ontologique[s]." My paper explores the importance of imagined paintings for understanding larger issues in the Salons, such as the position Diderot takes as a writer and critic, and the role of the imagination. I will consider in particular the unusual term of the "imagination réglée," introduced in conjunction with imagined paintings in the Salon de 1767, which I argue acts as the ultimate manifestation of Diderot's quest to harness the unique strengths of poet and painter.

Redefining the Composer’s Voice in A.E.M. Grétry’s Mémoires

Jonathan Huff (King's College, London) 

The life of the Liégeois composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813) is an intriguing (if disconcerting) testament to the fragility of celebrity. Grétry is hardly a household name, and yet during his lifetime he enjoyed fame across Europe as the pre-eminent composer of opéra-comique. If, however, his opéras-comiques are yet to enjoy the status they deserve, Grétry’s Mémoires (published in three volumes between 1789 and 1797) remain all but unknown.

The obscurity of these Mémoires belies their striking radicalty: in a text which one would expect to contain a preponderance of autobiography, his commentary covers a broad range of subjects from aesthetics to psychology, with Grétry adopting the role of sociologist, architect, aesthetician, theatre director, and more besides.  This is all the more remarkable because during the eighteenth century, such subjects—and the freedom to move between them with impunity—were traditionally the prerogative of men-of-letters. They were certainly not under the jurisdiction of composers, who, according to Rousseau, were simply to ‘compose music or make the rules of composition.’

Employing the term ‘voice’ as metaphor with which to bind up the relevant issues of compositional agency, subjectivity, positionality, and responsibility, I argue that this text deserves greater recognition as a remarkable moment in the development of the composer’s voice; as a bold attempt to enlarge the composer’s authority over areas of his art traditionally considered off-limits, and in this way to redefine the composer’s profession at the dawn of a new era.

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

Tuesday 18 October (2nd Week) 5pm - 6.30pm

'La Mettrie's radical materialism in L’Homme Machine'

Audrey Borowski, (Queen’s College, Oxford)

The 18^th century emerged as the golden age of French materialism. Within this context of ‘mechanization of the world-picture’ (in the words of E. J. Dijksterhuis), the French philosopher Descartes in his Discourse on the Method and Treatise on Man postulated an essentially mechanistic take of human physiology. For him the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead one was ‘the difference between a watch or other automaton when it is wound up… and when it is broken.’ Man only differed from animals in that he had been endowed with a soul which provided him with consciousness, reasoned thought and the ability to communicate. The French doctor Julien Offray de la Mettrie simultaneously extended and vitalized what be perceived as Descartes’ ‘dead mechanism’. In the process he reconciled philosophy with medicine by naturalizing the former and displacing all metaphysical and theological accounts. A military doctor, philosopher, pamphleteer, La Mettrie was an outsider intent on observing, experimenting, deconstructing, polemicizing and reforming. With L’Homme Machine, he forged his own particular brand of radical materialism, one which paradoxically incorporated a vitalist element and veered into the sensuous.

 ‘Tableaux rapides: Théodore de Banville as lanternist and reluctant prose poet’

Natasha Ryan (St Anne’s, Oxford)

In his ‘Petit traité de poésie française’, Théodore de Banville declares that there is no such thing as prose poetry. However, twelve years later he published his own collection of prose poems, La Lanterne magique. Banville’s title demonstrates a fascination with optical devices during the nineteenth century, when lens technology improved substantially and was used in the development of photography, microscopic and telescopic research, and ultimately the cinematograph. The magic lantern, already a well-established optical device and a common domestic feature, was the natural precursor to cinema. Its ability to project images in succession, along with its cultural prominence and its association with the camera obscura, means that it contributes to contemporaneous debates about the relationship between visual art and technology, which had been shaken by the arrival of photography. By extension, these debates were applied to writing, with particular attention paid to the effect new visual technologies had on literary form: Banville’s Lanterne magique exemplifies this. I examine the relationship between poetic form and magic lantern technology in the late nineteenth century. Taking Banville’s collection as illustrative of this relationship, I explore the magic lantern as a metaphor through which Banville processed his changing attitude towards prose poetry.

French Graduate Seminar 

Michaelmas Term 2016

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

2^nd Week – 18 October

Audrey Borowski, (Queen’s College, Oxford) 'La Mettrie's radical materialism in L’Homme Machine'

Natasha Ryan (St Anne’s, Oxford), ‘Tableaux rapides: Théodore de Banville as lanternist and reluctant prose poet’

4^th Week – 1 November

Rachel Skokowski (University College, Oxford), ‘Une Imagination Réglée: The Role of Imagined Paintings in Diderot's Salons.’

Jonathan Huff (King’s College, London), ‘Redefining the Composer’s Theatre Voice in A.E.M. Grétry’s Mémoires’

6^th Week – 15 November

James Illingworth (Queen’s University, Belfast), ‘Lifting the Veil: George Sand's Mythopoetic Bodies’

Stacie Allan (University of Bristol), ‘National Histories and Transnational Myths in George Sand's Jeanne’

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

Tuesday 24^th May, 5-6.30pm

‘The Dramatic Quality of Verse in Translations of Molière's Comedies’

Cédric Ploix (St Hugh’s, Oxford)

Many seventeenth-century French drama critics and practitioners have defended the alexandrine for its ‘musical’ dimension and held verse superior to prose, mostly on account of a pure ‘formal pleasure’. The fact that the practice remained generally unquestioned resulted in the absence of any comprehensive theoretical reflection on the aesthetic and dramatic use of versification on stage. Surprisingly, even now, the dramatic qualities of the alexandrine have been the object of little attention in critical studies on Molière. When critics do reflect on Molière’s verse, they usually limit their remarks to reproaching the dramatist with often poor and awkward versification. Thoroughly reflecting on the dramatic quality of verse forms seems relevant inasmuch as verse is often regarded as a major constraint in modern productions. 

My paper attempts to reassess the value of prosody and rhyme and their contribution to the dramatic text. Not to dismiss prose as a valid and efficient dramatic medium, I will argue that Le Misanthrope, l’Ecole des femmes, Tartuffe and Les Femmes savantes would lose many qualities if they were not written in alexandrines. Among others things, the alexandrine plays a great role in creating a self-conscious language conducive to comic effects, parodying tragic tone, buttressing argumentation, setting a hypocritical tone, building up dramatic tension and dynamising conflicts.

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

Jordan Phillips (Oriel, Oxford)

This paper will give a general overview of what one might call francophone immigrant literature. The tentative approach to this categorization is deliberate: indeed, my broad aim is to examine the extent to which ‘immigrant literature’ can be considered a viable category, by looking for common issues which could bind texts and authors together.

One obvious issue is that of origins: the very term ‘immigrant’ seems to presuppose multiple (perhaps even conflicting) sites of home. More specifically, then, this paper will analyse how a reconciliation with origins is configured in three fairly recent novels written in French. L’Exil selon Julia (1996) by Gisèle Pineau, Garçon Manqué (2000) by Nina Bouraoui and Black Bazar (2009) by Alain Mabanckou approach this problematic through various prisms, be it the notion of return, coming to terms with a dual heritage, or building a new life in a multi-cultural city. Engaging with theories of nomadism and exile, as well as sociological data, I argue that while these prisms represent powerful concepts and literary devices, an emphasis on origins is missing the point. Once we recontextualize the texts into the particular socio-politcal landscape of contemporary France, they read as a challenge to the constant judgement as to the ‘Frenchness’ (or otherwise) of immigrants. Faced with an overwhelming discourse of mistrust, telling one’s story, in all its incoherency and confusion, becomes an act of resistance.

French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday 10th May 5 - 6.30pm

All Souls College (Hovenden Room) 

Walking Into Walls, or, What You Can't See on the Map of Paris

Macs Smith (Princeton University)

Since its pioneering by Nadar, aerial photography has grown as a tool for city planning. Beginning in the 1950’s, however, Situationist International expressed dissatisfaction with aerial views, arguing that by stripping out the chaos and traffic of the city, they made invisible the very thing they hoped to capture: the nature of urban life. SI argued instead for maps drawn from the perspective of the pedestrian. They valued randomness and subjectivity over the clean geometry of aerial views. In the process, SI conceded the basic validity of the map as a tool for knowing the city. In recent years several projects have interrogated both the epistemological role of the pedestrian and the aptitude of maps to represent the city. These projects differ from SI’s primarily in their dismissal of randomness as a methodology. They instead adopt algorithmic or geometric trajectories. I provide a brief overview of these projects before examining Philippe Vasset’s 2007 book, Un livre blanc. Vasset visits on foot every blank area in the official map of Paris. His compulsory trajectory forces him to challenge legal, social, and psychological barriers. In the process he reveals power structures inherent to mapping, including the effacement of certain populations. Vasset’s failed attempt to compensate these lacunae through other media demonstrates the difficulty of transforming the pedestrian’s subjective experience into a totalizing representation of the city. I argue, however, that by embracing forms of hypermediatic representation, the programmatic walk maintains a contagious potential that leaves open SI’s dream of collective, unitary urbanism. 

The Interface Between Literature and History in the Late Writing of Marguerite Yourcenar

Rodney Mearns (St Cross, Oxford)

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 – 1987) was already an established author when the Second World War broke out.  She had had a number of novels published as well as a range of verse, many essays, short stories, translations and numerous experimental pieces.  As the war approached she was invited by Grace Frick to settle with her in Petite Plaisance, a small property on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. Frick was to take over the management of their affairs and also set about supporting the Yourcenar writing project in every possible way.

In 1951 Yourcenar published Mémoires d’Hadrien.  Her imaginative recreation of the life of one of the last great emperors made her an international writing celebrity.  In 1968 she published L’Oeuvre au noir, a second major work which explores the complexities and tensions of the sixteenth century and the birth of modern science.  On 27 March, 1971, MY was elected to membership of L’Académie Royale de Belgique and on 3 March 1980 to the Académie française, the first woman to be so.  In 1974 the first volume of her Mémoires, Souvenirs pieux, appeared.  Archives du Nord, was published in 1977; Quoi? L’Éternité, was published the year after her death.

Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Oeuvre au noir carry detailed bibliographical notes.  The first two volumes of the Mémoires carry similar short explanations of source material.  This concern with the historical record, with the verificational and the veredictional is a core concern of her writing, an aspect this paper will seek to highlight and discuss.

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’.