Tuesday 17th October, 2017

5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln College) - The Self-Translation of Mental Verbs in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy

This paper compares the translation of verbs describing mental processes in the trilogy, which include all types of cognitive actions and emotional states; it analyses its repercussions on the representation of the mind. Differences in Beckett’s verb translations are indeed extremely common and vary in type. While translating the trilogy, the author often widens or narrows the meaning of mental verbs. He also regularly substitutes a mental verb for another. These semantic differences have an effect on the representation of the protagonists’ minds. 

Philippe Panizzon (St. Anne's College) - ‘Ces rencontres qui voient à peine le jour’ (Rachid O.);  Identity, Mobility and Homosexual Encounters in Abdellah Taïa’s and Rachid O.’s Work

In his study Queer Nations (2000) Jarrod Hayes examines how North African literature from the 1950s to the 1990s deals with transgressive sexualities. Also, Joseph Massad shows in Desiring Arabs (2007) that from the 1990s western gay and lesbian identities have spread throughout the Arab world. In this paper I look at how two contemporary, outspokenly homosexual Moroccan writers, Abdellah Taïa and Rachid O., both question established models and suggest an uncoupling of homosexuality and identity in their work. How do these authors deal with the concept of a western gay identity, coming from a cultural background where such an identity is non-existent? While the critics who have studied these questions have been concerned to pigeonhole the narrators’ identity as queer or gay (Badin; Smith), I would like to demonstrate, first, how being a gay Muslim challenges the fixity of these two supposedly exclusive categories. Secondly, I will argue that the narrators’ selfhood is built through the fleeting affiliations they engage in, which resonates with  the practice of the sexual cruiser or loiterly subjectivity (Ross Chambers). Their selfhood, made of a plurality of different selves, in constant interrelation with others, dramatizes Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts in Être Singulier Pluriel in that the narrators’ singular being is constructed through the plurality of passing (sexual and non-sexual) encounters. Whilst this paper will challenge the ontological security of Muslim and western gay identity, it will shed new light on selfhood in Rachid O.’s and Taïa’s work and on the migrant homosexual self more generally.

May 23rd 

5.15-6.30pm

All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

Helen Craske (Merton College) 

Rachilde and the Art of the Book Review: A Matter of Taste

Rachilde is best known for works displaying overtly ‘Decadent’ themes, images or figures – from the gender-bending in Monsieur Vénus, to the necrophilia in La Tour d’amour. However, the tendency in modern criticism to concentrate on these elements of Rachilde’s work – as rich and rewarding as they are – often ends up eliding the wide-ranging and heterogeneous nature of the contribution Rachilde made to fin-de-siècle literary culture. In particular, her involvement in the Mercure de France has been relatively neglected. This paper attempts to redress this imbalance slightly, by providing an analysis of Rachilde’s book reviews at the turn of the century (c.1894-1906), situating them within and against the work of fellow writers and critics. In particular, I will explore how Rachilde manipulated her role as book reviewer at the Mercure in order to distinguish herself, and a select group of fellow writers, from the increasing novelistic production at the fin de siècle. I will argue that Rachilde’s self-aware reflections on criticism and aesthetic taste work alongside her playful approach and creative style, producing an ‘art’ of the book review that is both serious and irreverent in its treatment of partiality,  justice/ethics, exceptionality, and literary influence.

Sinan John-Richards (Wadham College) 

‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ : Lacan, Sexuation, and God

In this paper I show how Lacan’s conception of sexual difference (‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’ ) occurs at the level of the signifier and not at the level of the signified. The ‘non rapport sexuel’ does not denote the impossibility of the sexual act, instead Lacan suggests that the ‘non rapport sexuel’ is the condition of possibility of the sexual act. The impasse reached in the ‘non rapport sexuel’ is the renunciation of unrestricted jouissance at the original level of castration. Absolute jouissance would entail a return to the unregulated desire of the Father of the mythic hoard. The dislocation that sexuality exposes through the ‘non rapport sexuel’ is Lacan’s equivalent of the ontological gap which finds its earliest expression in German Idealism, most notably in the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel. This is, however, the truth founded on a lie. The very same lie which is the object-obstacle necessary to sustain the truth. This mimics the function of God, the meaningless and unnecessary lie (counterfactual) which supports the structure of the Symbolic, and therefore the entire empiricism of modern science. As Lacan put it : ‘la vérité surgit de la méprise’. 

May 9th (3rd Week) 5.15-6.30pm

Sam Bailey (Jesus College)
'Beauty or the Beast? Literary Representations of the Hermaphrodite in Late Eighteenth-Century
France'

This paper examines the figure of the hermaphrodite in French literature from 1772 to 1798. It draws on Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), the Chevalier d'Eon’s La Pucelle de Tonnerre (1785) and two pornographic novels by the Comte de Mirabeau (1783 and 1798) to study the significance of this literary figure in the context of the French Enlightenment. This paper initiates a dialogue between eighteenth-century material and recently published theoretical works to investigate the hermaphrodite’s relation to a performative conception of gender, the pathologisation of non-standard bodies and eroticism. The different literary hermaphrodites depicted in these texts complicate the traditional picture of the eighteenth century as one of demystification in which an overriding philosophical and scientific desire to classify caused binaries of all kinds to solidify. Furthermore, they clash with much of the non-fiction literature relating to gender and the hermaphrodite that was circulating in late eighteenth-century France. Far from conforming to existing norms, these hermaphrodite texts suggest a new interpretive lens through which to view this figure: that of le fantastique, a nascent literary genre that deals in worlds where realism shades off into make-believe by almost imperceptible degrees. The texts offer an alternative view of gender in late eighteenth-century France in which empirical investigation fails, all categories prove chimerical and monsters could very well be real.

Melissa Purkiss (Wolfson College)
'Gaito Gazdanov, a 'Russian Proust'? The question of French influence for Russian émigrés in interwar Paris' 

April 25^th (1^st Week) 5.15-6.30pm 

Elliot Grogan (Christ Church College) 

'"The past should be altered by the present as much as the present directs the past"; Navigating Alexandre Dumas' revolutionary past' 

This paper evaluates Alexandre Dumas’ depiction of the past in the Mémoires d’un Médecin cycle of historical novels. Also known as the Marie-Antoinette romances, the collection of five novels, penned between 1845-1855, narrates the final days of the Ancien Régime, dramatising and attempting to make sense of the French Revolution and its chief protagonists. I argue that Dumas’ oeuvre follows in the poetic tradition of Sir Walter Scott, blurring the boundary between history and fiction as ‘stories, not facts are what we turn to when we want to make sense of chaos and complexity.’

In re-telling the foundation myth of modern France, Dumas’ series navigates the political and philosophical conflicts of revolution within a thoroughly Romantic context. In doing so, and drawing upon the weight of history, the novelist attempts to re-define French national identity, and to construct what Victor Hugo described in Dumas’ novels as, ‘cette idée Française.’ This paper consequently suggests that Dumas’ oeuvre supports T.S.Eliot’s assertion that the artist’s relationship with the past is not a purely linear one. Rather, whilst the past directs a political, social and artistic present, Dumas also actively shapes the nineteenth-century reader’s collective memory of its revolutionary past.

Matthew Innes (University College) 

‘Pierre de Belloy and legal polemic during the French Wars of Religion’

Pierre de Belloy (c.1550 – 1611) was a French jurist and polemicist during the Wars of Religion whose importance has been unjustly neglected. In this paper, I offer an overview of my research project. This is primarily in the history of political thought: I explain how Belloy contributed to a particular style of French obedience theory which was, in turn, a response to Calvinist and Catholic resistance theories. In his defence of Henri of Navarre, later Henri IV, he also engaged with the disputed tradition of Gallicanism. Secondly, I suggest that Belloy’s life helps to illuminate the political and social history of his day. This is partly through the stories and rumours which he repeats in his political works, but it will also come from the documentary evidence of his later life as a Toulousan magistrate allows us to better understand the process of rebuilding civic institutions after decades of civil war.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar

Trinity Term 2017

Tuesdays 5.15 – 6.30 pm

All Souls’ College, Hovenden Room

April 25^th (1^st Week)

Elliot Grogan (Christ Church College)

'"The past should be altered by the present as much as the present directs the past"; Navigating Alexandre Dumas' revolutionary past' 

Matthew Innes (University College)

‘Pierre de Belloy and legal polemic during the French Wars of Religion’

May 9^th (3^rd Week)

Melissa Purkiss (Wolfson College)

'Gaito Gazdanov, a 'Russian Proust'? The question of French influence for Russian émigrés in interwar Paris' 

Sam Bailey (Jesus College)

'Beauty or the Beast? Literary Representations of the Hermaphrodite in Eighteenth-Century France'

May 23^rd (5^th Week)

Sinan John-Richards (Wadham College)

‘“Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”: Lacan, Sexuation, and God’

Helen Craske (Merton College)

 ‘Rachilde and the Art of the Book Review’

French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday February 21st (6th Week)

All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

5.15-6.30pm

Natalie Pangburn (Lincoln College)

'Foudroiement: Wajdi Mouawad and the philosophy of Jan Patočka'

One of the most prolific and well-received French-language playwrights of his generation, Lebanese Canadian Wajdi Mouawad has authored twenty-three original plays, recently directed new adaptations of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays, and served in a number of high-profile positions in the French theatre, including his current position as Artistic Director at the Théâtre national de la Colline. Although Mouawad’s literary and dramatic sources have been the subject of numerous studies, one influence that has, as of yet, gone largely unexplored is that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. This paper argues that this is an important lacuna in contemporary scholarship. It describes how Mouawad discovered the works of Jan Patočka in 1991, the year his career began, and has frequently referenced Patočka’s writings in his exegetical texts and interviews, as well as in the plays themselves. This paper explores how Patočka’s ideas provided Mouawad with a language and philosophical framework for his artistic project and ambitions. It describes a number of Patočka’s key philosophical innovations - ‘shakenness’, the three movements of human existence, metanoia and solidarity - and demonstrates the deep impact of these ideas on Mouawad’s dramatic work. It argues that these ideas are in fact the basis for the four key philosophical and theatrical ambitions most frequently expressed by Mouawad: metamorphosis; the recognition of the other; responsibility; and  ‘solidarity of the shaken’. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how, and to what degree, Mouawad achieves his Patočkan philosophical and ethical ambitions.

Robert Pruett (St Cross College)

'Remy de Gourmont's Lilith: mythic structures of sexual pessimism'

Remy de Gourmont's work at the end of the 19th century (notably Sixtine, La culture des idées, and Le livre des masques) cemented the author as both a practitioner and analyst of Symbolism's aesthetic tactics of subjectivity and dream. Regarded as the philosopher laureate of the movement, he sought to carry these unfolding artistic concerns into the theoretical realms of idealism, the study of cultural constructs, and, central to this paper, the unwieldy subject of sexuality and its governing influences. The bulk of Gourmont's fiction explores, in one form or another, the precariousness of love and sex in a phenomenological world. Of particular note is Lilith (1891-2), a play which restructures, re-purposes, and combines elements of lapsarian lore to the effect of a lewd and parodistic origin myth of carnal desire and its flaws. I argue that Gourmont's dramatization, however ironic, adeptly personifies the forces which shape human sexual relations in a manner unique among his other works. My discussion of the archetypes which he employs will focus primarily on three main themes: Firstly, the struggle between patriarchal control and chaotic 'inutilité' in the figures of Jehovah and Satan, secondly, the principle of individuation in the figure of Adam, and thirdly, the question of ideal sexuality as a 'lost inheritance' in the figures of Lilith and Eve. 

Oxford French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday February 7th (4th Week)

All Souls’ College, Hovenden Room 5.15 - 6.30pm 

'Cet autre moy': Poetic Selves and Other Friends in Selected French Writings of the Sixteenth Century’

Vittoria Fallanca (Pembroke College, Oxford)

My paper begins by considering a line from a complainte by the French poet Philippe Desportes, written in 1581. Drawing on Terence Cave’s Pré-histoires, I identify this line as the first use of the French substantive ‘moy’. Like Cave, I take issue with the idea that what we see here is the beginning of a grand narrative of ‘selfhood’ and ‘modern’ subjectivity. I begin instead with the idea that ‘cet autre moy’ occurs in the context of Renaissance writings on friendship. These were characterised by the ‘Aristotelian-Ciceronian model’, whereby a friend was portrayed, under the shadow of Neoplatonism, as another self. I propose that alongside this well-established model of friendship, there is another, competing model. I call this model ‘anterotic’, as at its heart lies the Greek myth of Eros and Anteros. The anterotic model is characterised by strife as well as mutuality, by competition alongside imitation, and by opposition as much as communality. This other, ‘anterotic’ model, can help us to capture and make sense of some of the most salient characteristic of sixteenth-century French writings, including (but not limited to) tensions between Latin and the vernacular, localised imitative poet-model relationships and the friendships between the writers themselves. What emerges is not so much ‘modern’ identity as we know it, but a poetic identity, rooted in the double-sidedness of anteros.  

‘When water was thicker than blood: the development of Marie de Gournay's famille d'alliance in the seventeenth century'

Jess Allen (University of Durham)

Today we email, text, and phone our friends, imparting personal and private messages about all kinds of issues from gossip and social arrangements to love and loss. In the Republic of Letters, however, missives were public documents: they were exchanged by friends who aimed to praise each other's work and good qualities, promote their own, and offer mentorship. This large network contained several smaller networks consisting of alliances between scholars which were mostly elective and often transnational.

Marie de Gournay's (1565 - 1645) relationship with her père d'alliance Montaigne is already well-documented and indeed dominated Gournay scholarship until recently. Her other correspondences are comparatively much less well-known: this paper will explore the letters she exchanged with her own fille d'alliance, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607 - 1688), who went on to expand her family by adding a sœur d'alliance, Marie du Moulin (1622 - 1699). Building on existing scholarship about women in the Republic of Letters which provides a coherent account of this famille d'alliance, I will reconstruct their friendships through reading these letters, examining the extent to which they were able to control their self-fashioning and the ways in which these literary identities were subsequently received. The paper will show what we can learn about their individual circumstances and their ideas about relationships, highlighting discrepancies between how they write about themselves and how they are written about by others both during and after their lifetime.