Tuesday 4th February 2020, 5.15-6.30pmOld Library, All Souls College

Nathalie Jeter (St Cross College)- Chronicles of Exile: Loss and Identity in the Memoirs of Early Modern Huguenot Refugees

The memoirs of Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet chronicle his adventures and misadventures across four countries as a French Huguenot refugee. What does the language in which he describes his gains and losses reveal about the identity Dumont is seeking, consciously or subconsciously, to portray? What might this language tell us concerning the role of memoir in shaping the identity of early modern Huguenots in exile? To what extent is the narrative shaping in Dumont’s account characteristic of Huguenot refugee self-writing? This paper addresses the role of memoir in the construction of community identity and argues that Huguenot refugee accounts are essentially narratives of loss in which loss, treated both materially and emotionally, is a means of regeneration. It considers notions of exemplarity and singularity in Dumont’s account against the greater corpus of Huguenot self-narratives, exploring ways in which Dumont’s framework may have influenced the redefinition of individual and cultural identity among French Protestant immigrant populations.

 Vincent Roy-Di Piazza (Linacre College)- The Visions of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) in the Context of dialogues des morts Literature 

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish civil servant, natural philosopher and mystic theologian, assessor at the Board of Mines of Sweden for thirty-one years (1716-1747). In 1747 Swedenborg retired to focus on theology, claiming to have acquired through divine grace the gift to speak with angels and the spirits of the dead. Swedenborg’s theological works subsequently drew heavily on his alleged regular conversations with the dead. Mostly remembered as a seer, Swedenborg is best known by the public for his detailed visionary descriptions of the spiritual world. However, scholarship has long neglected to contextualize Swedenborg’s conversations with the dead in relationship to other popular literary genre at the time such as the dialogues des morts, famously exemplified in France by figures such as Fontenelle, Fénelon and Voltaire. This paper will investigate to what extent Swedenborg’s visionary works featured typical characteristics of dialogues des morts literature. By doing so it will provide evidence for a drastically new picture of Swedenborg, as a versatile recombiner of literary genres determined to spread his theology to new audiences. More broadly, the paper will showcase underrated interactions between dialogues des morts literature, mysticism and satire during the 18th century.

Tuesday 26 November, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Hannah McIntyre (Pembroke College)- Leonora Carrington in French: Language, Madness and Power

Leonora Carrington’s residence in France lasted only three years of her long and varied life, yet during this time and the period immediately following it, she produced some of the most enduring artistic and literary works of her career, writing in both French and English. With the recent rediscovery of Carrington’s writing in the Anglophone world, this paper aims to bring an overview of Carrington’s work in French; questioning particularly how her use of the language intersects with the gendered power dynamics at work in the Surrealist circle.

Alex Lawrence (Keble College)- A New Order of Animal: The Transference and Transformation of the Toucan in Early Modern Travel and Nature Writing

Aesthetically appealing, bizarrely formed, and with an impossible beak, the toucans of America captivated the imagination of European travellers and naturalists in the ‘New World’. From the ‘unknown’ species of Pierre Belon’s Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, to the ‘monstrous’ creature of Ambroise Paré and its elegant depiction in the paradise landscape painting of Rubens, the bird enjoyed notable attention across a range of different genres and media in the sixteenth century. This process of transmission and assimilation into European consciousness constituted an evolutionary flight for the species, which gradually cast a different figure as it became stratified within cultural topoi and scientific discourses. This paper will underline the initial stages of this process, seeking to demonstrate how representations of the toucan developed over time, and how the bird might provide an insight into the transference and dissemination of texts, objects and information of the ‘New World’ in early modern cultures.

Tuesday 12 November, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nicola Pearson (University of Bristol) – Breaking Taboos: Embodying Self and (M)other in Fawzia Zouari’s Le Corps de ma mère

This paper explores the concept of relational subjectivity and its fictionalisation in Fawzia Zouari’s Le Corps de ma mère (2016). Written at the height of the Tunisian Revolution in 2010-2012, the text explores the author’s quest to discover the life story of her dying mother. Although we may be seduced by the title into thinking that this is a biographical story about Zouari’s mother, the narrative says a lot more about the author’s own thoughts, emotions and lived experience. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of relational subjectivity (2004), I discuss the extent to which Zouari’s sense of self becomes undone by the idea of her recently deceased mother and the degree to which grief might trouble the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘mother’ in the narrative.

At times, Zouari adopts a strategically stable and authoritative narrative persona in order to contest and affirm her difference from her mother’s patriarchal values. Alternatively, her narrative identity dissolves, merges and enmeshes with the abstract concepts of her mother and the maternal body. I argue that Zouari’s ambiguous fluctuation between essentialism and fragmentation, in her presentation of her narrative self, constitutes an alternative style of writing that transcends dominant paradigms traditionally associated with the genre of feminist life-writing, as well as existing scholarship on the author’s earlier works of fiction. Finally, Zouari’s embrace of the French language as her langue utérine, a way back to her mother through writing, signals new directions for the genre of Tunisian women’s life-writing in French.

Blanche Plaquvent (University of Bristol) – The Sexual Revolution against Orthodox Communism: Radical Sexual Politics and the Cold War in France, 1950-1968

In the post-war decades in France, intellectuals and activists rediscovered the idea of sexual revolution, which had emerged at the beginning of the century: they argued that the revolution was not only to be pursued in the economic sphere, but also was to impact and transform people’s intimate lives. In the fifties, defending the idea of sexual revolution became a way to oppose political parties on the far left which neglected sexual and intimate issues which they considered bourgeois issues. When they started to write about sexuality and discuss sexuality collectively, activists sought to oppose this orthodox communism and invent heterodox approaches to Marxism. Moreover, in defending the sexual revolution, they were opposing both the puritanical communism and the American liberalism where sex was commodified, in advertisement for instance. They envisioned a liberating use of sexuality that would pave the way for a revolutionary society. In the context of the Cold War, fighting for the sexual revolution therefore constituted a resistance to these international dynamics

Tuesday 29 October, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Sarah Bridge (St. Hilda's) – ‘Thinking Multilingually in Fourteenth-Century England: Nicole Bozon’s Contes Moralisés'

The Contes moralisés, written in the fourteenth century by the Franciscan friar Nicole Bozon, is a medieval exempla collection written in Anglo-Norman French. Although texts of this genre appear to have been enormously popular for use in preaching, it is the only example of such a text in a vernacular language. Critical attention has thus centred around the question of language choice: what was the appeal of French to the  English author and audiences of this text? This paper will attempt to nuance our answers to this question by focusing on the multilingualism inherent to the Contes moralisés, both in its manuscript context, and within the text itself. By developing a fuller picture of the ways in which the three languages of the text interact, and using Thomas Hinton’s concept of ‘thinking through multilingualism’, it will be possible to reach a better understanding of how and why French might have been used. 

Tuesday 11 June, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Yassine Ait Ali (St. Cross) – ‘Blind Writers and Writing Blindness, a counter-discourse?’

Writing about oneself as an impaired person implies this inevitable tension between expressing his or her own lived reality and attempting at the same time to debunk all the harmful myths held against this condition in the collective imaginary. In the recent field of disability studies, scholars have shown how often contradictory discourses on impairment were held at the expense of those primarily concerned: in artistic and philosophical works of Europe, seldom if ever has the focus been on their everyday or real lives. On the contrary, historians of disability tend to show that this condition has long been synonymous with social marginalisation and therefore misrepresentation. In this paper I intend to show that the visually impaired found in life-writing a powerful tool for expressing their own realities which were far from all that had been speculated about them in the past. By focusing primarily on Jacques Lusseyran’s Et la lumière fut and Le monde commence aujourd’hui, this paper shows that these autobiographies may represent an example of counter-discourse while paradoxically accentuating the very prejudice they attempt to abolish.

Tuesday 28 May, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Nicole Gadras (St. Hugh's) – ‘Painting the Nineteenth-Century City in Baudelaire and Zola’

The flâneur-artiste emerged in the nineteenth century as a specific variation of the flâneur ‘type’, the Parisian stroller and spectator famously classed by Walter Benjamin as the figure emblematic of modernity. With a focus on selected works by Baudelaire and Zola, this paper will explore how the city of Paris is depicted through the eyes of this flâneur-artiste figure as he roams its streets, as the urban topography is painted onto the page with an artist’s focus on light, colour, and form. The analysis of these literary ‘paintings’ of the city is informed by the wide range of art criticism and theory produced by both Baudelaire and Zola, as well as the backdrop of Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris during the 1850s and 60s, which thrust the city into its role as ‘the capital of the nineteenth-century’, and the near-contemporaneous emergence of a new, avant-garde style of painting in the works of Manet and the Impressionists.

Rebecca Short (St. Hilda's) – ‘Le spectateur interieur: Didactic frivolity in the work of Louis-Antoine Caraccioli'

Louis-Antoine Caraccioli is an ambivalent figure in eighteenth-century French literature. Throughout his oeuvre, the ‘moraliste mondain’ reproves the decadence of Enlightenment frivolity all-the-while conceding to its potential spiritual and moral benefits. Writing in the siècle de la légèreté, during which illusion and artifice supersede authenticity and depth, the thought of Caraccioli provides an important insight into a potential ‘middle way’. The author sets out with the explicit aim to ‘rendre la vertu aimable’, employing traditionally frivolous tropes to an overtly didactic end. This paper will consider Caraccioli’s 1757 text La Jouissance de soi-même in light of concurrent debates on the role of the theatre in moral instruction. As the moralist questions the value of pleasure, illusion, and imitation in the cultivation of virtue, he proposes a new form of spectacle which is entirely interior. The individual who develops an ordered memory and a bridled imagination is able to source moral example in the ‘theatre’ of their mind. Through analysis of the interplay between surface and depth, and illusion and reality in this work, this presentation will assess the grounding of this theory and its spiritual and moral significance.

Tuesday 14 May, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Rachel Hindmarsh (Trinity) – ‘Prosthetic Touch of Rabelais's Curing Hands’

The Rabelaisian giant is renowned for eating, drinking, and defecating its way through the texts, a folkloric body wreaking havoc across early modern French society. This paper argues that reading Rabelais in terms of the medical encounter opens up a provocative and newly productive way of understanding the early modern body, and its place in society. I will focus on two encounters between peripheral figures and the giant - the pilgrims who are unintentionally swallowed by Gargantua, and the peasants who are intentionally swallowed by Pantagruel in brass pills to clear an obstruction in his stomach - to explore how Rabelais grapples with the body in his texts in terms of the sense so readily tied up with encounters, 'touch'. It is the instruments that these peripheral figures use, and how they both extend and displace direct touch by acting as prosthetic fingers feeling their way through the giant's bodies, that will help us to understand the textures and dynamics of the curative medical encounter in Rabelais’s texts. 

Kirsty Bennett (University of Lancaster) – ‘The "Isabelle Eberhardt Complex": The Algerian Literary Legacy’

Isabelle Eberhardt was a Russian/French writer who lived in Algeria under the male identity of Mahmoud Saâdi. Since her death in 1904, in a flash flood in the desert, her life has continued to spark the literary and public imagination, and a series of epithets attest to her role as a rebel female figure: as la bonne nomade, l’amazone des sables, la Walkyrie du désert, and la Séverine Algérienne. This typecasting of Eberhardt has been theorised by Emily Apter as the acting out of the ‘Isabelle Eberhardt complex’ – a phenomenon whereby Eberhardt is perpetually (and problematically) consolidated into an historically based, feminist-Orientalist-cross-dressing icon of female empowerment. This presentation examines the latest literary manifestation of the Isabelle Eberhardt complex in the Arabic-language novel, Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle by Saïd Khatibi [2016]. Through an analysis of Khatibi, I present a fresh perspective on the Eberhardt phenomenon, a perspective that both complements and challenges the historic and recent Franco-Algerian afterlives of Eberhardt from writers such as Malika Mokkedem and Leïla Sebbar.