Tuesday 11th May 2021, 5:15-6:30pm 

Online

Claire Jeantils (CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle-Maison Française d'Oxford) - From the Arts: On the Theatrical Motif in Contemporary Epilepsy Narratives

Historical motifs of epilepsy are still embedded in contemporary epilepsy narratives (Clément, 2017; Findley, 1995, etc.). From religiosity to madness, they influence our perception of this common but still misunderstood neurological chronic illness. The representation of the seizure as a show is another widely spread motif.

Contemporary fictions and non-fictions are no exception on that matter. Theatricality impacts the perception of the disease but also of the illness narrative itself. Then, I wonder, how far does this motif change these narratives on the diegetic level? What are the ethical implications of such a metaphor? And, by the way, is it merely a metaphor?

With a corpus of both French and British texts, I will put into dialogue the contemporary representations of epilepsy, trying to navigate with and tackle this important and stigmatizing vision of epilepsy. 

I will argue that if seeing the epileptic seizure as a show is highly stigmatizing, contemporary literature can also empower people with epilepsy by creating new images to describe their lived experiences. Thus, I will make a case for a cautious practice of reading in the healthcare setting for both patients and caregivers.

Keywords: epilepsy -- illness narratives -- theatricality -- stigmatization

Samantha Seto (King's College, London) - The Female Role in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction: French Stories by Guy de Maupassant and a British-American Novel by Henry James

The French and British-American authors, Guy de Maupassant and Henry James, establish a revolutionary portrayal of female characters at the turn of the century. In a close reading of Maupassant’s “A Parisian Affair” (1881) and “A Woman’s Confession” (1882) in addition to James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), my research focuses that my analysis of the female character provides a lens through which to study the female gaze and social class. heroines are constructed with avant-garde attributes that reveal a nuanced progressive nature in their character that indicates that they are ahead of their time. I analyse narrative themes of marriage, the female desire for liberation from conventional position, and modern elements in addition to the representation of aristocratic women during the historical period of the nineteenth century. The novels illustrate women within a historical context who challenge living according to the social conventions. My thesis aims to study the author’s creation of the female role via narratology and portrayal of the unconventional heroine. I propose that the heroines in Maupassant's stories and James's novel emphasise a shift from the present historical period toward modernity. The authors pioneer the unveiling of a unique female character with French and American origins. The divide between the three countries, France, England, and America, during the historical past is critical to the portrayal of the female character rooted in transnational identity and a traditional cultural setting in the literature. My character analysis extends to Maupassant’s “La Maison Tellier” (1881) and “Rosalie Prudent” (1886) in addition to James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Wings of the Dove (1902). Furthermore, I compare Maupassant’s and Jamesian fiction to French literature such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1859), Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), and George Sand’s Elle et Lui (1859) as well as American literature including Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Reef (1912), and other forms of literary criticism and scholarship to reflect on Wharton’s genesis of the bohemian female character. The female character in Maupassant’s and Jamesian fiction exemplifies a revolutionary portrayal of women, gender role via the progression towards liberating women from their conventional position, and power relations through the empowerment of women in nineteenth century American and French literature.

 Tuesday 2nd March 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Lili Owen Rowlands (University of Cambridge) - 'Je désire donc je suis': From Autofiction to Autotheory in Recent French Life Writing

'Autotheory', the blending of autobiographical and theoretical modes, has been figured as a new, North American generic innovation, with Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) perhaps the best-known example. Yet the genre's proximity to 'autofiction', which enjoys critical purchase in the French context, has been entirely unexplored. In this paper, I follow recent moves in French life writing away from the predominance of autofiction, whose focus on confession, desire and interiority I argue tacitly evince a psychoanalytic theory of the subject, towards 'autotheory', whose theoretical investments convey a more constructivist and materialist account of subjectivity. To do this I trace the imprint of Anglophone queer and feminist theory in two works of autotheory: Anne F. Garréta's Pas un jour (2002) and Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie (2008). These authors, I conclude, refuse the notion that desire is a well of truth marked by sexual difference and instead show how desire is shaped by social violence and exclusion.

David Ewing (University of Cambridge) - Metaphor and its Antitheses in Henri Lefebvre's Postcolonial Imaginary

In the second volume of his Critique de la vie quotidienne, Henri Lefebvre writes that 'la vie quotidienne, selon l'expression énergique de Guy Debord, est littéralement "colonisée".' Lefebvre cagily attributes the idea of the colonization of everyday life to Debord, although the pair had elaborated the concept in tandem and Lefebvre had provided the bulk of the intellectual ballast. What is invoked is not only the phenomenon of colonialism, understood as the conquest and control of overseas territories by a colonial power, but the process and project of colonization; as Lefebvre was only too aware, this term could not but invoke the history of settler colonialism. While metropolitan France underwent considerable demographic, territorial, and environmental transformations after the Liberation, it is not at all apparent how such changes can be understood as an extension of the French state's settler-colonial project in Algeria or of French colonialism tout court. Despite Lefebvre's plea, then, the colonization of everyday life resists literal understanding. Indeed, the concept works through metonymy and metaphor and, in positing everyday life in the metropole as the final frontier, reproduces the spatio-temporal dimensions of those figures of speech. As such, the idea enacts a theory of history in which capitalist modernity radiates outward from Europe, only to fold back on itself in the midst of decolonization. We might nevertheless understand Lefebvre's project as having produced a postcolonial imaginary insofar as it displaces the analytical frame of the Westphalian state in its historicization of everyday life. Attending to his use of his language may bring into focus the contours of possibility for relating the everyday as a level of social reality to the history of colonialism.

Tuesday 16th February 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Raphaëlle Errera (Sorbonne Université) - Real-life Poets on Parnassus: Early Modern Fictions and the Alternative Making of Literary History and Criticism

À partir du XVIe siècle apparaissent en Europe des dizaines de fictions pour le moins curieuses, qui font figurer quelques personnages imaginaires -- essentiellement des divinités de la mythologie gréco-latine comme Apollon et les Muses --, et de nombreux personnages "réels", sur une montagne elle-même à demi-imaginaire, le Parnasse. Qui sont donc ces personnages ? Des "poètes" antiques, vieux vernaculaires et modernes. Que font-ils là ? Cette communication se propose de montrer l'intérêt qui pousse des auteurs divers à écrire de telles fictions, à travers deux pistes de lecture. Ces textes réunissent de façon synchronique les meilleurs auteurs de tous temps ; je monterai d'abord qu'ils constituent une forme originale de l'histoire littéraire alors naissante. L'inclusion d'auteurs contemporains suppose en outre de faire des choix, voire justifier ou de débattre de ces choix : il s'agira de voir ensuite qu'à l'histoire se combine la critique littéraire, qui s'y exerce de façon souvent plaisante, et même parfois franchement comique et satirique. Ces œuvres mêlent ainsi au plaisir de la fiction celui de la réflexion sur le passé et le présent des belles-lettres.

Rowan Anderson (Trinity) - Retranslating Euphemism in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu

Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is most famous for its exploration of time and memory, as emblematised by the madeleine sequence. However, Proust's novel is also ground-breaking in its presentation of taboo topics, such as lesbianism and sex work. My overall project is therefore a comparison of the original text with its English translations in order to analyse how differences in translation reflect cultural attitudes to social transgression. In this presentation, I focus on translations of euphemism and slang in the Recherche, in order to analyse how different English editions of the text have translated covert and vague references to homosexuality. By examining how editors and translators have taken different approaches in translation, editing, and use of paratextual material, I explore how translators act as co-creators of the text. Furthermore, I use Karen Emmerich's argument that 'original text' is a misnomer in that originals are not completely stable, thus calling into question the stability of meaning in interpretations of euphemism and slang. Through this line of argument, I argue that variance in translation may shed light on new possibilities of meaning generated through different readings of the text, thus mimicking how we interpret euphemism and slang in day-to-day life.

 Tuesday 2nd February 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Justine Feyereisen (Wolfson) - Afrotopia: Léonora Miano's Utopian Poetics of Repair for a Postcolonial Politics of the Living

Over the past few years, utopian proposals have increasingly emerged from the Sub-Saharan Francophone literature to challenge the current dominant social relations in a resolutely pragmatic approach. With the power of the imagination, "afrotopias" operate a shift in cultural, historical, media and political representations for an inclusive society. What counter-narratives do these emancipatory utopias oppose to the logics of exclusion? What would a relational, post-imperialist and post-racist political project for a non-colonial society consist of in literature? This presentation will explore the ways in which the Cameroonian writer, Léonora Miano, delivers an afrotopia in Rouge impératrice (2019) and Afropea (2020) through a poetics of repair focused on a postcolonial politics of the living. Promoting a cosmopolitan condition opposed to nationalist ideologies and protectionist policies, the Afrotopian perspective aims to rebuild an imaginary mobilising an "atopos", -- a place that does not yet exist --, which not only rehabilitates Africa to its inhabitants and its diasporas, but which reimagines and common home for all forms of life.

Clara Baudet (Worcester) - Culture, Nature and Unity: an Ecocritical reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau dissected the layers of human nature in his Second Discourse and embraced the beauty of the natural world in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. This presentation seeks to ascertain how Rousseau's corpus reveals a nascent ecocritical intuition, and conversely, how the multifaceted aspects of Ecocriticism (Deep Ecology, Ecopoetics...) can shed light on his writings.

Throughout his corpus, Rousseau addressed the fact that the civilised individual is not "unproblematically embedded in physical nature". To map out the philosopher's pervading influence on the critical field of literary ecocriticism; this paper connects an analysis of his philosophical and literary works, while referring to both French and English articles. Rousseau's major ideas on the State of Nature, modern alienation, and the critique of progress fuel debate on human nature, land ethics and animal rights. Together, these ideas rephrase the epistemological framework of Ecocriticism. On the other hand, applying the ecocritical lens on Rousseau's Reveries reveals the originality of his approaches to botany, to a forever-lost wilderness, and to the tension between an eco-centred and a subject-centred narrative voice.

 Tuesday 24th November 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College, London) - Nelly Arcan's Autopathographies

Quebecois writer Nelly Arcan (1973-2009) is known for her first work Putain (2001) in which the autofictional narrator writes of her sex work in addition to her alienation from others due to a patriarchal logic of female competition. She simultaneously participates in this competition of beauty and youth while also criticising it. Subtending her implication in this logic is an increasing sense of alienation while signs of psychological suffering are revealed throughout the text. She also writes of an illness and suicide determinism throughout the text, which is further elaborated in her second autofictional work, Folle (2004), an extended suicide note to an ex-lover before her self-determined suicide date at the age of 30. This determinism that runs through the two texts is retrospectively shadowed by Arcan's suicide at the age of 36. In this paper, I will investigate the extent to which Arcan's two autofictions are autopathographies (patient-authored narratives) and what they autofictionally reveal about psychological suffering.

Joanne Hornsby (King's College, London) - Sex Work and Subjectivity in George Bataille's Madame Edwarda

Georges Bataille is an ambivalent figure; he has exercised an enormous influence over deconstructive theory, been celebrated for his 'transgressive' theory of waste and excess as the fundamental truth of humanity, and his rejection of the 'restricted' utilitarian economy of investment and return (Baudrillard, Hollier, Stoekl). However, he has also been criticised as obsessed with masculinity, dangerously attached still to a masculine ideal which keeps him rooted within a heterosexist hierarchy of value (Carolyn Dean, Susan Sulieman). What I intend to explore in this paper is the connection between these two positions, understood through the deployment of the sex worker as a figure in Bataille's texts, particularly Madame Edwarda. Edwarda herself, who embodies the figure of the mad and nymphomaniacal prostitute, acts as the vector for the 'impossible', excessive experience the narrator of the text seeks; but that experience, which declares itself anti-utilitarian, therefore depends on the utilisation of Edwarda to signify the 'prostitute', on her material labour as a sex worker (she is there because she is being paid) and on the absence of her recognition as an 'autonomous desiring subject' (because she is given a priori as 'mad'). This, I will argue, raises serious problems for the credibility of any deconstructionist understanding of Bataille's work, and must furthermore cause us to ask if deconstruction itself invariably comes at the cost of a certain subjectivity or 'voice consciousness' (Spivak).

This session was recorded for those unable to attend.

 Tuesday 10th November 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Nora Baker (Jesus) - "Distingués par leur piété": The Social Value of Suffering in Huguenot Memoir

The late seventeenth century saw a renewed wave of hostilities against Protestantism in France, culminating in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. State persecution led a large number of French Protestants, or 'Huguenots', to escape their homeland and start new lives elsewhere, though some were captures during their attempts to flee and then subjected to lengthy periods of confinement. Many Huguenots wrote memoirs detailing their experiences during these troubled times. My work looks at accounts penned by those who faced three different kinds of hardships: women imprisoned in convents, men forced to work as galley slaves, and refugees who struggled to negotiate their identities after settling in new lands. We know that these 'life stories' were often read aloud in refugee and social spaces or circulated to the wider Protestant community in Europe thanks to clandestine networks such as that of Pierre Jurieu's Lettres Pastorales. My work investigates the identities the authors sought to establish for themselves when composing their autobiographical accounts. I argue that these memoirs could be used as tools to win the approval of co-religionists, as they showcased their authors' intelligence, charisma, and dedication to their faith, even in traumatic circumstances. I will contend that the form and content of the memoirs discussed in this paper were influenced not only by Biblical exegesis, but also by the continuing legacy of early Huguenot martyrological writing.

Caroline Godard (University of California, Berkeley) - Being Time-Bound: Montaigne on Touch, Contagion, and the Contemporary

In this presentation I will read from a portion of my MSt dissertation, which looks at how various forms of touch and temporal presence illuminate the intersubjective nature of Montaigne's Essais. Working against the assumptions towards individuality that often emerge in readings of Montaigne, I ask how the confluences of contemporaneity, contagion, compassion and community can offer alternative ways of understanding the relations between self and other. Ultimately, the essay questions how Montaigne does (or does not) perceive himself to be part of his contemporary moment, as well as what it means to read Montaigne now in a contemporary way; in so doing, it amends existing definitions of the contemporary as an individual concern.

Finally, I will end this presentation by discussing how and in what ways this work at Oxford is following me into the first year of my PhD program at UC Berkeley.

This session was recorded for those unable to attend (please see below):

Tuesday 27th October 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

McNeil Taylor (St John's) - "Marcher au désert": Claire Denis' Perverse Ecologies

Summarizing Deleuze's aesthetic philosophy, Jacques Rancière states, "L'œuvre est marche au désert." The artwork reformulates time and relationality, as narrative desire for an object is replaced by an impersonal drift. Deleuze most strikingly outlines this orientation in the essay "Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui", in which the geographical isolation of a desert island enables the complete dismantling of Freud's anthropomorphic model of narrative desire. Cutting out the detour of desire for the Other, bodies regress to a perverse intertwining with the "Terre-Mère" as boundaries of self and other, animate and inanimate collapse.

This aesthetic mode is exemplified in Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999) a film that stages its own literal and figurative march into the desert. The hermetic community of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti becomes a petri-dish experiment with new modes of inhuman desire, as subjective intentionality gives way to the distillation of deep ecological time. My reading will therefore bring together two approaches to the film -- psychoanalytic and ecological -- that have yet to be put in conversation with one another. I will argue that the legionnaires' diffusion into the landscape functions as an impersonal rebirth, as the snuffing out of neurotic, Freudian desire enables a new perverse sociality.