French Graduate Seminar

Hilary 2018

5.15pm-6.30pm, The Hovenden Room, All Soul’s College

Week 2 (Tuesday 23^rd January)

Amy Steinepreis (Merton) –  Finitude of the Corp(u)s and the Aporia of Touch in Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’ (1951-53)

Fay Wanrug Suwanwattana (Merton) – Reinventing Alternative Modern Masculinity Through Indigenous Androgyny in Fin de siècle French Colonial Literature

Week 4 (Tuesday 6^th February)

Louise Ferris (Magdalen) - To Infinity and Beyond: Time and Involuntary Memory in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27)

Béatrice Rea (Lady Margaret Hall) – “Je m’ai fait mal quand j’ai tombé”: A Real- and Apparent-time Study of Auxiliary Alternation in Intransitive and Pronominal Verbs in Spoken Montréal French (1971-2016)

Week 6 (Tuesday 20^th February)

Jonas Kurscheidt (Université François-Rabelais) - The Parisian editions (1498-1530) of the Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant

Madeleine Chalmers (Trinity) – Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysique: A Science for the Humanities?

Tuesday 23rd of January

5.15-6.30 pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room

Amy Steinepreis (Merton College) - 'Finitude of the Corp(u)s and the Aporia of Touch in Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’'

 My paper considers how aporia relates to finitude in and of Beckett’s ‘Trilogy’. I turn to Jacques Derrida’s identification of three figures of aporia in Apories in order to examine how aporetic figures effect what Derrida describes as a haunting of each other along boundaries, or in my paper, along the bounds of textual 

bodies: Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’Innommable. I probe how Beckett’s aporetics – his oscillating rhythm of repeated affirmations followed by negations, or what Simon Critchley dubs Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness’ – might be said to open up, or instead close off passage through the three novels. I argue that Beckett’s framing of identity and alterity, and above all his collapse of the space intervening between the two concepts to the point where they ‘touch’, is precisely what provokes the haunting of aporia within aporia in his novels. This paper examines how narratives in the ‘Trilogy’ both touch and are touched, to borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s terms, and focuses on textual instances of what this philosopher calls the chiasm, or a crossing over between subject and object which renders finitude problematic. Taken together, the aporias of touch in the ‘Trilogy’ point to a crisis of tactility across Beckett’s three novels: the writing that takes place at the extremities of each novel makes contact with another. Drawing on reflections on touch by Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Derrida, I examine how narratives in the Trilogy fold back over each other, peforming a ‘reversibility’ in the Merleau-Pontean sense, which in turn has ramifications for novelistic finitude in Beckett.

Fay Wanrug Suwanwattana (Merton College) -  'Reinventing Alternative Modern Masculinity Through Indigenous Androgyny in Fin de Siècle French Colonial Literature of Indochina : The Case of Albert de Pouvourville (1861-1939)' 

The effeminate male colonised has largely been explored by critics of the Empire as one of the foundational tropes constitutive of colonial discourse and political domination of non-European people. In this paper, I shall examine one of the most acclaimed, yet forgotten, novels of fin de siècle French Indochina, L’Annam sanglant (1890). Using a historicist and materialist approach along with textual analysis, I argue for a counter-narrative reading of this novel, not so much vis à vis colonialism as from the gender terms. Written by the well-respected Orientalist and colonial administrator, Albert-Eugène de Pouvourville, this novel proposes a rewriting of the crucial 1883 episode of the French conquest of Tonkin against the indigenous army led by the Chinese ‘Black Flags’ leader from an unusual point of view of the native. The topos of male androgyny played out around the effeminate Chinese sage-warrior is informed by the Decadent aesthetics at vogue among avant-garde Parisian artistic circle, depicting the military milieu in pervasive homoerotic overtones. However, through an unexpected association of martial heroism with Oriental esotericism, I contend that Pouvourville not only responses to the perceived national crisis of manhood preoccupying France more than any other European nations, but he also reinvents an alternative model of ‘modern masculinity,’ ‘deprovincialising’ Western heteronormative sexuality and morality.

Tuesday 14th November, 2017

5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College London) - 'The Representation of Clinics, asiles, and maisons des femmes in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Writing'

My doctoral project focuses on embodied responses and reactions to original, and ongoing traumas as represented in contemporary francophone women’s writing. It will explore how female trauma survivors attempt to control their past and ongoing suffering through forms of bodily self-harm and deprivation. My project will initially investigate how supposed curative institutions attempt to control, contain, and marginalise the bodies of female trauma survivors. This paper will present an overview of my research thus far into the representation of clinics, asiles, and maison des femmes in works by Maïssa Bey, Chloé Delaume, and Linda Lê.

This paper will examine the purpose and objectives of each type of institution within their cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts, and it will explore how and why female trauma survivors are sent to these places. It will also investigate the ways in which the institutions re-inflict pain and suffering on the female detainees through their location, spatiality, and atmospherics, as well as through medical and non-medical treatment. It will analyse the impact of living in the institutions through the psychological and corporeal actions and reactions of the female inhabitants, while nuancing the concepts of agency, control, and survival. Indeed, this paper will ask how women attempt to survive, and even subvert, the societal powers that contain, marginalise, and re-traumatise, their bodies and minds. In this vein, it will explore the forms of resistance and solidarity that arise within the gynocentric communities of the institutions, while nuancing the role of the reader who becomes a privileged witness to the inside of these non-curative sites.

Hannie Lawlor (Wolfson College) - ‘Ventriloquising Voices in (Auto)Fiction of the Extrême contemporain'

     Marianne Hirsch conceives postmemory as the consequence of traumatic recall at a generational remove; how inherited memories of trauma suffered by their parents affect the second generation and risk eclipsing their own (life) stories.  In this paper, I consider how Lydie Salvayre’s Pas pleurer can be read as interweaving the self-other relationship that this creates with that of autofiction.  Whilst in postmemory, the second-generational self becomes the mouthpiece through which the suppressed story of the other is voiced, autofiction casts the other as a stepping stone by which the author’s story might be told.  In Pas pleurer, Salvayre tells a story that long precedes her, but that perpetually alters her mother’s life and thus irrevocably impacts upon her own; that of the Spanish Civil War.  I contend that by mobilising two oppositional sets of self-other dynamics, Salvayre addresses and reworks the antagonistic pairs so often in play in relational life-writing. 

     This paper explores how Salvayre renegotiates generational binds at the level of narrative voice, intertwining the voices of mother and daughter to replace the self-other binary with simultaneous selves.  By analysing the fluid rather than fixed subject positions she creates, I aim to illustrate how Pas pleurer depicts boundaries between different generations as porous and in flux.  In doing so, I will argue that its second-generational ‘narrator’, Lydie, consciously cedes her place in the narrative as a means of telling not only her mother’s story, but also an indispensable part of her own. 

Tuesday 31st October, 2017

5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

William Clement (St. John's College)

'A bar crawl, a scandal, and fake news: tracing a religious outrage from Northern France to the international press in 1874'

On 21 April 1874, four workers from the French industrial town of Roubaix took a wooden statue of Christ on a bar crawl of several of the town’s cabarets, culminating in a series of scandalous events at the final cabaret that they visited. They were arrested, the cabaret was shut down, and the men were tried the following month for ‘Outrages to the Catholic religion’, despite there being no French law against sacrilege at the time.

This paper will take a microhistory approach to trace the way the events of this night were told and retold over the following months, both in France and abroad. The first part of the paper will examine the bar crawl itself, tying it into the fabric of working-class sociability in early Third Republic Roubaix. The second part will show how the court prosecutor turned this bar crawl into a religious scandal that attacked the central tenets of early Third Republic French identity. The final part of the paper will show how and where the events of the night and the trial were retold in newspapers through France, Belgium, Britain, and even North America. By analysing which features are preferred or even drastically altered in each retelling, we can see the role of editors in shaping narratives to fulfil their readerships’ prejudices.

Khalid Lyamlahy (St. Anne's College)

‘Un Désir d’écriture: Flaubert, Barthes et la pratique de la notation dans le Voyage en Italie'

Dans le long voyage littéraire et critique de Roland Barthes, Flaubert a été un compagnon utile, une présence dans l’écriture, jusque dans les derniers cours au Collège de France, sur le chemin qui mène à la Vita Nova. En relisant les fragments du Voyage en Italie de Flaubert à la lumière du projet barthésien de la préparation du roman, cette contribution cherche à montrer que dans la notation flaubertienne réside un désir, une volonté, un élan vers le Roman comme pratique absolue de l’écriture.

 --
Throughout his critical and literary work, Roland Barthes considered Flaubert as a helpful companion, a presence in writing, including in his late lectures at College de France dedicated to the preparation of his desired novel Vita Nova. By reading Flaubert's fragments from Voyage en Italie in light of Barthes's reflections on the preparation of the novel, this paper aims to demonstrate that Flaubert's practice of notation reveals his desire for the Novel as an absolute form of writing.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar

Michaelmas Term 2017

Tuesdays 5.15 – 6.30 pm

All Souls’ College, Hovenden Room

October 17th (2nd Week)

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln College)

'The Self-Translation of Mental Verbs in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy'

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’

October 31st (4th Week)

William Clement (St. John's College)

'A Bar Crawl, a Scandal, and Fake News: Tracing a Religious Outrage from Northern France to the International Press in 1874'

Khalid Lyamlahy (St. Anne's College)

'Un Désir d’écriture: Flaubert, Barthes et la pratique de la notation dans le Voyage en Italie'

November 14th (6^th Week)

Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College London)

'The Representation of Clinics, asiles, and maisons des femmes in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Writing'

Hannie Lawlor ( Wolfson College)

'Ventriloquising Voices in (Auto)Fiction of the Extrême contemporain'

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.