Tuesday 20 November
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Jasmine Cooper (New College, Cambridge) – ‘An Exploration of Queer Childlessness in Contemporary French Women's Writing’

When we talk about LGBT+ parenting, we are always already talking within  a context of privilege – a first-world context. Despite some remarkable  gains for the queer community, primarily in Western democracies, basic  human rights and attaining a political legitimacy and visibility are not yet universal complacencies that we can boast as a global community.

Looking through an intersectional framework, I am interested in the emergent voices which articulate the anxieties of what not becoming a  mother / parent would mean. Given the ongoing normalisation and growing  potential of queer couples to access (although not always, and not in every country) fertility treatment, I am interested in how a latent fear of childlessness operates within queer stories and struggles of  “wanting” to become a mother. One argument might be that with more  rights and access to becoming a parent, queer couples are now able to  fulfil a “natural” desire for children; yet an emphasis on the natural  desire of becoming a parent sidesteps the issue of challenging a notion  of naturalised desire to reproduce in all subjects. If condemnation to childlessness was once the queer condition and fear of childlessness was/is a heterosexual anxiety, then we can see quite clearly how it is  that queer parenting is moving towards a heterosexual model of deriving  legitimacy from within the family and all of the constructs that the family portends (kinship, inheritance, nationhood, etc.). This move from condemnation to fear reveals an insidious aspect of agency, which is tied up in questions of legitimacy and social currency that still turn  on the axes of children and reproduction. I look at childlessness and  the question of (in)fertility, reproductive technologies and the queer experience of these phenomena in two novels by French writers:  Désorientale by Négar Djavadi (2016) and Gabrielle by Agnès Vannouvong (2015) to explore these questions.

Katie Pleming (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) – ‘Reading the Body with Deleuze in the Films of Marguerite Duras’

What is the value of re-interrogating our immediate, direct, often  inarticulable experience of a the world, the text or the artwork? How  can we in turn “read” those initial responses, and what can those  responses tell us about our conception of our own faculties? This paper seeks to respond to questions regarding the link between  spectatorship, experimental cinema, and Deleuzean philosophy. At the  same time, it looks at questions raised by a historical reading of  Duras’s cinematic work: namely, what might Duras’s filmmaking moment have to do with the strategies of representation she puts to work? I’ll  be looking at these questions through the prism of the viewing mode Duras’s films invite, thinking about the challenges Duras’s bodies pose to readerly or spectatorial hermeneutic impulses. At the same time, I  will attempt to respond to one obvious question: why Deleuze for thinking the challenges represented by Duras’s bodies?

Tuesday 6 November
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Dr. Hugues Marchal (Assistant Professor, University of Basel) - 'Jacques Delille (1738-1813), poète de la performance?, Défis et enjeux d'une histoire de la récitation orale'

Tout au long de sa carrière, Delille s’est distingué comme un lecteur hors norme de ses propres vers. Dans le cadre privé des salons et demeures particulières, comme dans le cadre public des grandes institutions où il est appelé à réciter (Académie, Collège de France, Lycée), Delille émerveille, au point de recevoir le surnom de « dupeur d’oreilles ». On se bat pour l’avoir chez soi, les séances publiques sont prises d’assaut (on parle de centaines de personnes restant à la porte), les étrangers de passage tentent de ne pas quitter Paris sans l’avoir entendu. Partout l’assistance applaudit, crie, pleure, etc., et ces lectures, qui jouent un rôle essentiel dans la renommée du poète, ont encore la particularité de diffuser longtemps à l’avance des fragments d’oeuvres encore inédites, car Delille commence à en lire des extraits jusqu’à 25 ans avant la publication – ce qui explique une boutade de Gilbert : c’est un poète dont, paradoxalement, « on récite déjà les vers qu’il fait encore ». Or, bien qu’une telle pratique de l'oralité n’ait rien d’exceptionnel dans la vie littéraire de son temps, le statut de virtuose hors norme accordé à Delille a conduit les contemporains à consacrer de très nombreux textes à ses lectures : un vaste corpus de témoignages, dans la presse, les correspondances, les journaux intimes, voire la fiction, s’y rapportent, et cet ensemble offre un matériel privilégié, et jusque là quasiment pas étudié, pour suivre et tenter de reconstituer une forme non écrite de pratique culturelle, relevant de la performance. Dans mon intervention, c’est donc sur ces lectures – qui se sont étalées sur plus de soixante ans – que j’aimerais me concentrer, pour soulever diverses questions méthodologiques. 

French Graduate Seminar

Michaelmas 2018

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

Week 3 (Tuesday 23^rd October)

Alison Marmont (University of Southampton) – (In)Visible "Others" in the Hexagon: Defying (Mis)Representation and its Consequences for Racialised Women in Linda Lê's Voix and Marie NDiaye's Mon coeur à l'étroit

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln) –  The Self-Translation of Personal Pronouns in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy 

Week 5 (Tuesday 6th November)

Hugues Marchal (Assistant Professor, University of Basel) – Jacques Delille (1738-1813), poète de la performance?, Défis et enjeux d'une histoire de la récitation orale 

Week 7 (Tuesday 20^th November)

Jasmine Cooper (New College, Cambridge) - An Exploration of Queer Childlessness in Contemporary French Women's Writing

Katie Pleming (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) – Reading the Body with Deleuze in the Films of Marguerite Duras 

Tuesday 23rd October
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Alison Marmont (University of Southampton) - '(In)Visible “Others” in the Hexagon: Defying (Mis)Representations and its Consequences for Racialised Women in Linda Lê’s Voix and Marie NDiaye’s Mon Coeur à l’étroit'

Edward Said’s Orientalism has been fundamental in shaping postcolonial attempts to tackle racial inequalities through analyses of colonial discourses in which a superior Occident is constructed through the creation of a mythical and inferior Orient. However, racialised misrepresentations are not just applied to those beyond the nation’s borders but also to those deemed as foreign on French soil, even if they are French citizens. The recurring motif of the creuset français (French melting pot) would suggest that everyone, no matter their background, can be fully assimilated into French society. Yet, Linda Lê’s novel Voix and Marie NDiaye’s Mon Cœur à l’étroit portray characters who are expected to comply with stereotypical images based on their gender and ethnic backgrounds in order to be accepted. The reward offered for this behaviour is not equality and the breaking down of the multiple internal borders they face but, rather, the ability to go unnoticed. Conversely, if the characters refuse to conform to these stereotypes, they are marked as dangerous and attempts are made to exclude them physically and socially. Tevanian’s concept of the “Corps d’exception” will be applied here as the former can be seen as an example of the “Corps Invisible” whilst the latter suggests the “Corps Furieux”. This paper will therefore examine this dynamic of invisibility/visibility to illuminate how the “othering” of racialised women is multi-tiered and intersectional.

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln) - 'The Self-Translation of Personal Pronouns in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy'

Very few critics have truly submitted the French and English versions of Molloy,Malone Dies and The Unnameable to comparative close readings. This paper compares the translation of personal pronouns in relation to the narrators in The Trilogy; it also analyses its repercussions on the representation of the mind. I argue that Beckett's choices regarding pronominal translations account for major differences in meaning between both versions of the text on the level of the narrative voice: they emphasize its fragmented self and portrayal as a figure more inclusive of the narratee. Indeed, the ‘weakening effect’ Beckett attributed to the French language in his letter to Herbert Blau could very well apply to the use of pronouns in both languages, and the way they serve to assert the self.

Would you like to present at the

French Graduate Seminar in 2018/19?

Get in touch with us if you are interested in potentially presenting a short paper about your work, or a related research interest, in Michaelmas or Hilary term!

What? A 20 minute paper, on any aspect of your work in the area of French studies. You can present on any period (from medieval to the present day); any media (past papers have focused on French cinema, music, politics, literature, art, and theatre); and you can be at any stage of your graduate studies.

When? All seminars take place on Tuesdays, 5-6.30pm, in All Souls College (Hovenden Room). The dates for the next two terms’ seminars are:

Michaelmas Term 2018

3rd Week - Tuesday 23rd October

5th Week – Tuesday 6^th November

7th Week – Tuesday 20^th November

Hilary Term 2019

3rd Week – Tuesday 29^th January

5th Week – Tuesday 12^th February

7th Week – Tuesday 26^th February

Why? The seminar is a great chance to meet graduates at Oxford and from other institutions, and allows you to practice presenting your research in this friendly and encouraging setting. If you would like it to be, your name and paper will be advertised on the All Souls website, on our blog, and through other prominent French research publication channels - so it’s an excellent way to publicise your name and your research.

We welcome informal expressions of interest, or requests for more information.

You do not need to have a fixed topic or title that you would like to present: we are very happy to discuss it with you.

Drop us an email with your research interests, or an idea for a paper, at vittoria.fallanca@pmb.ox.ac.uk  or hannie.lawlor@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Co-convenors: Vittoria Fallanca (Pembroke) and Hannie Lawlor (Wolfson)

With the support of Professor Catriona Seth (All Souls)

www.oxfordfrenchgrad.blogspot.co.uk

Tuesday 22nd May
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Alice Bibbings (St. Hugh's) - 'Theories of the Comic in 19th-Century France'

Stendhal was not alone in predicting an uncertain future for laughter when he declared: ‘La comédie est impossible en 1836’. An absence of gaiety, malignant derision, a lack of simple amusement – such were the commonly located symptoms of what scholars have since diagnosed as la crise du rire of the nineteenth century that gave rise to a distinctly modern form of laughter. The period that saw the crystallisation of le rire moderne also saw writers and philosophers attempt to theorise laughter on multiple occasions. In this seminar, I shall present three examples of such theorisations, each quite different in terms of scope as well as historical and artistic contexts: Stendhal’s ‘Le rire’ in Racine et Shakespeare (1823-25); Paul Scudo’sPhilosophie du rire (1840); and Baudelaire’s ‘De l’essence du rire’ (1855). While these texts all draw on pre-existing notions of laughter (e.g. laughter as profoundly human, as a demonstration of relative superiority, as a response to perceived disharmony), I shall argue that these ideas take on a new significance in a society of mass culture in which laughter is understood as a telling social marker and questions of aesthetic value are considered persistently in terms of their social dimensions. Examining how these works attach aesthetic and moral values to different types of rire, I shall propose that the hierarchisation of laughter is key to understanding the ambivalent position occupied by comedy as a literary genre at different moments during the nineteenth century.

Rebekah Vince (University of Warwick) - 'Beyond the Récit de filiation: Affiliative Memory in Valérie Zenatti's Mensonges [Lies](2011)'

Valérie Zenatti’s novella Mensonges [Lies] (2011) combines biography, autobiography, and fiction in its account of Ukranian-Israeli Aharon Appelfeld’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and the author’s own mediatized encounter with the catastrophe through the American television series Holocaust (1978). As well as their mutual connection to the Holocaust, albeit once removed for Valérie, a link can be made between Aharon’s experience upon arrival in British Mandate Palestine in the 1940s as a young Holocaust survivor and Valérie’s experience upon arrival to Israel in the 1980s as a French Jew of North African descent. Both had to denounce their diasporic identity and assume the Zionist ideology of the “New Jew”with its mandate to forget the past. Paradoxically, it is Valérie’s lack of connection to the catastrophic past of European Jews that excludes her from the Israeli collective which by the 1980s had absorbed Holocaust memory into its national identity, whereas Aharon was marginalized for having such a connection. In this article, I employ Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, particularly her theorisation of “filial memory” and “affiliative memory” (2008: 114). In so doing, I argue that Mensonges can be read as a récit d’affiliation, an extension of the récit de filiation, which encompasses the autobiographical narrator’s appropriation of Aharon Appelfeld’s memory alongside her own family story, raising ethical questions while demonstrating the creative potential of transgenerational and cross-cultural encounter.

Tuesday 8th May
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Sam Gormley (Merton) - 'Antoine Volodine, Dead or Alive'

In this rough paper, I sketch out briefly some of the ways in which we might think through the question of “life” in Antoine Volodine’s Terminus radieux (2014). The explicitly magical elements of this novel are present chiefly in the form of mutated life-forms, transformed through centuries of exposure to nuclear radiation. Possessing uncanny abilities over life itself, the novel’s antagonist positions himself as a sovereign force with the power to both kill and reanimate others at will. The ensuing flattening of the difference between life and death, common throughout Volodine’s “post-exotic” universe, nonetheless opens up a space of potential dissidence against this domination, in which the creativity of fiction itself plays a significant role.

Sarah Jones (Oriel) - 'Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France'

This paper brings together the medical humanities, the socio-cultural history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth medicine, and nineteenth-century French literary studies to examine the importance of narrativity in both the philosophy of medical science and in the novel. Beginning with the narrative turn in twentieth- and twenty-first century in the medical humanities, I outline the newfound emphasis placed on the patient’s illness narrative. I then argue that a similar narrativity is present in the quasi-science of mesmerism, the eighteenth-century antecedent of hypnotism and psychoanalysis. Analysing the historical documents of Franz Anton Mesmer, his followers, and detractors, I suggest the eroticization of the medical rapport between practitioner and subject as central to the medical phenomenon of animal magnetism. I then turn to the role played by mesmerism in the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), with a particular focus on the Vautrin trilogy (Le Père Goriot (1830), Illusions perdues (1837-43), and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-47). Despite the direct influence of mesmerist ideas on Balzac’s work, I point towards how Balzac’s novels represent a significant departure from the heterosexual matrix commonplace to contemporary criticisms of Mesmerism. In contrast to critical scholarship that usually places the nineteenth-century novel alongside the modernization and scientization of medicine from the Enlightenment onwards, I thus argue that both modes are in fact deeply invested in how narrative points towards, but fails to elucidate, the unknowable and unsayable aspects of life, gender, sex, and power.