Tuesday 23rd January 2024, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Olivia Russell (St Hugh's College, Oxford): 'Dissecting the Written Body: Gaze, Violation, and Shame in Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Isabelle de Charrière's Lettres écrites de Lausanne'

In letter 12 of Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), young Incan princess Zilia is adorned in French clothing for the first time. When Déterville – the Frenchcaptain who rescued her from Spanish captivity – sees her new appearance, Zilia describes his reaction: “les yeux attachés sur moi, il parcourait toute ma personne avec une attention sérieuse dont j’étais embarrassée, sans en savoir la raison.” His face becomes enflamed and he clasps her hand, before pulling away and throwing himself on a chair at the opposite side of the room. A similarly dramatic scene arises in letter 12 of Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres écrites de Lausanne (1785). Young Cécile is playing chess with a male suitor when, in a moment of passion, he grabs her hand and “sembloit la dévorer des yeux.” She pulls back, hides her face, and then leaves the room. 

In both scenes, Graffigny and Charrière rely on a specific language to make desire and, arguably, violation more visible to the reader. My paper will show how they each use the language of physicality to demonstrate an unspoken transgression of boundaries, but in such a way as to avoid calling the virtue of their female characters into question. Offering a comparative close reading, I will argue that they foreground certain body parts to express the destructive and violent force of gaze, and use affect to accentuate the presence of intangible forms of violation. Ultimately, this paper will show how Graffigny and Charrière use the body in their writings not only to comment on gender power dynamics, but also to criticise the expectations and education of women in eighteenth-century French society. 

Ramani Chandramohan (The Queen's College, Oxford): '"De trop parler est vilonie/Et de trop taisir est folie": Weaponising Speech and Silence in 13th-century manuscripts of Les Sept sages de Rome'

The premodern narrative tradition of Les Sept Sages de Rome stretched from Asia to the Middle East and Europe, encompassing more than thirty languages over a period of five centuries. Anchored by the retelling of a trial in which a mute prince is falsely accused of rape by his stepmother, the manifold adaptations of the Sept Sages typically use binary forms of speech to marginalise both characters from the courtly sphere. The text-world thus constructs and understands questions of gender and bodily impairment via the opposing axes of calumny and silence. This paper will focus on Herbert’s thirteenth-century Roman de Dolopathos, which belongs to one of the earliest branches of the Sept Sages cycle in western Europe, in order to examine how the romance uniquely shapes the weaponising of the verbal and non-verbal within its clerical and Cistercian framework. Through consideration of the Dolopathos’ understudied codicological context, I will show how medieval compilers, who incorporated the work into multi-text and multi-generic manuscripts, opened up the possibility of redressing the Sept Sages’ polarised treatment of speech. Whilst the inclusion of the Dolopathos alongside romans antiques and romans de chevalerie in MS BnF fr. 1450 arguably facilitates a recovery of the female voice, the didacticism of MS BnF fr. 24301 highlights a middle ground which questions the very need to either ‘trop parler’ or ‘trop taisir’.

Tuesday 14th November 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Zak Eastop (Durham): 'Anatomy of a Scandal: Reading, (Re)writing, and Restricting Rabelais on the 19th-century lyric stage'

On Christmas Eve of 1855 the Paris Opéra was embroiled in a scandal. That night, Pantagruel, a newly written two-act opera based (loosely) on the works of François Rabelais, received its first performance. Unfortunately, it was not the rip-roaring success that everybody had predicted: the piece caused such a stir among the audience that its run was immediately cancelled. The production disappeared from public view overnight and has never been performed since. We still don’t really know why.

In my talk I will sift through what is known about Pantagruel’s implosive premier, asking whether disagreements about how to read Rabelais’s texts played a part in the demise of their operatic afterlife. How did the composer, librettist, and those involved in the piece’s production - as readers of Rabelais themselves - reformulate and represent aspects of his texts on stage, and how might this have rubbed the Second Empire’s audience or authorities up the wrong way? What might this negative reaction tell us about how they understood Rabelais? And what can this, in turn, reveal about the curé’s texts themselves, or their potential to be read plurally, divergently, and in ways that often seem incompatible with one another? 

Though extremely patchy archival records, wildly divergent published accounts of the evening, and the ever-snipping sound of the censor’s scissors mean that there is simply no way of knowing for certain what went wrong at Pantagruel’s premier, I contend that this scandal represents more than a merely musical misjudgement. It is an example of a historical community reading and disagreeing about the meaning and status of a text. So who, then, was Rabelais to these people? And why all the fuss? 

Hestia Zhang (St Peter's College, Oxford): ‘When the Flâneurs Sit Down: The Haussmannian Benches and Urban Storytelling’

In the 1850s, as part of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the French architect Gabriel Davioud designed the iconic dark-green public benches that are still seen in Paris today. Wooden benches and chairs had been installed on the walkways in royal gardens in the ancien régime, making them more than merely a place for strolling. It was not until the French Revolution that the gardens and parks in Paris were opened to the general public, which, throughout the century, developed into a sort of outdoor salon for social mingling and licit encounters among people of different socioeconomic status. Conforming to Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s political ambition of social integration, Davioud’s public benches pervaded the new boulevards and public parks and provided the untiring flâneurs a moment of rest. By settling people, sometimes even strangers, in close proximity, the benches also created more potential for urban meetings. In this paper, I will look closely into some nineteenth-century Parisian writings and paintings to see how, by juxtaposing characters of various social types in one line and staging them facing the audience, the artists exploited the bench’s theatrical effect and narrative potential to present a microcosm of nineteenth-century Parisian society.

Tuesday 31st October 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Abel Delattre (Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne): 'Daughters, Sisters, and Partners: The Filiation of Women Artists in the Musée national d'art moderne (Paris)'

In 1989, New York’s Public Art Fund commissioned advertising posters to the Guerrilla Girls, a group of feminist women artists’ known for their fight against sexism and racism in the art world. Their posters and slogans are now famous: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”, “Less than 3% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 83% of the nudes are female.” Another question that they could have asked is: do women artists need to have a filiation to a male artist to be acquired and exposed in museums? This question of filiation is one that arises in my study of women artists’ artworks in the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Paris). Does filiation – by blood, marriage, or simple partnership – of a woman artist to a male artist affect her being acquired? Is she showcased the same way as her male counterpart? Can a male artist’s name give more value to a woman artist’s, to her work? Or, on the contrary, does his name completely erase hers, her work, and her status as an artist? This paper dwells on all theses questions and tries to answer them by focusing on several examples of acquisitions and exhibitions of women artists’ in the Musée national d’art moderne, some of them well-known (Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber and Suzanne Valadon), others less-known (Juliette Roché, Françoise Gilot, Alice Halicka). 

Megan Williams (Surrey): '"Je ne sais d'autre bombe qu'un livre": French Anarchism in English Literature'

On the 17 February 1894, The Times reported “take me home” as the final words of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who had died two days earlier as a result of the accidental detonation of the bomb he was carrying in Greenwich Park, close to the Observatory. ‘Home’ is ambiguous: Bourdin provided no indication of context. He could have been talking about his home in London (a room in Fitzroy Street) or perhaps he meant to be taken back to Tours, where he was born. There is something deeply elusive about the spatiality of exiled anarchists, whose belief that anarchism ‘must be realised immediately’, in the words of Errico Malatesta, impacted how they thought about borders and boundaries. Eve Sedwick’s spatial metaphor of peri-performativity provides a vital point of analysis from which to consider these disorienting ideals. Where performative language requires the ‘presumption of consensus’, anarchists displace this consensus through alternative ways of conceiving and living in space. In this paper, I look at the reverberations of Bourdin’s death in the language that was used to explain it - xenophobic representations in the media, obituaries in the anarchist press, and revealing details in diary accounts of the time. I then look at literary responses including Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘The Informer’ (1906) and ending with TS Eliot’s poem Animula (1929).

Tuesday, 17th October 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Aditi Gupta (Exeter College, Oxford): 'Networks & Roots of Early French Indology: A Catalogue of Indian Manuscripts in 18th-century Paris'

Knowledge-power structures have been extensively studied for nineteenth-century British-colonised India. Lesser known is the fact that a century earlier France too was a contender in the race to colonise the people. This paper will shed light on the process of knowledge production on India in eighteenth-century France. Early French Indology developed under Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), a scholar and linguist celebrated for the first translation of Zend-Avesta, a Zoroastrian scripture. I will analyse a catalogue of Indian manuscripts sent to Anquetil-Duperron by Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-1799), a Frenchman who came to India in 1752 as a junior officer in the French East India company, and later served as a military advisor to Indian princes.

In the list that he drew up, Gentil provides titles and brief notes on the manuscripts he had sent to the scholar at his residence in Marly, a Parisian suburb. On the same pages, Anquetil-Duperron thematised the titles and scribbled notes along the margins. This catalogue stands witness to the knowledge exchange between two Frenchmen sharing a common interest: understanding India.

Rebecca Boyd (St Hugh's College, Oxford): 'Monsters out of the closet? Nightmarish lesbian identity in fin-de-siècle France'

‘Lesbos se trouve à chaque coin de rue…’ Written in 1884, these words of Henry Fouquier summon the vision of a fin-de-siècle France engulfed by legions upon legions of women-loving women. Such a claim may not have reflected the historical reality of the streets of Paris, but it does give an idea of the cultural landscape at the time. Lesbians were indeed to be found everywhere, whether in the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine, the sculptures of Rodin, the novels of Balzac and Zola, or the paintings of Courbet and Klimt – not to mention swathes of pornographic productions. Yet almost without fail, women who love other women were represented by these men as monstrous, vampiric creatures, belonging to the shadows. Towards the turn of the century, however, a new tendency emerged. Self-professed lesbians such as Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien began actively to embrace this discourse, styling themselves as nocturnal femmes fatales and using nightmarish imagery to signal their queerness to others like them, in their writing as well as in real life. How did they go about reclaiming the fin-de-siècle nightmarescape for themselves? How did this endeavour contribute to the broader development of lesbian identity as we understand it today? And what can it tell us about the perks and perils of accepting a notion of queerness founded on monstrosity and fear?

 

Tuesday 30th May 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Ian Boyd (University of Cambridge): ‘Of Underworlds and Other Worlds: The Subterranean in Eighteenth-Century French Literature’ 

The subterranean voyage is most often considered to be part of the nineteenth-century “adventure fiction” tradition. In this paper, I will propose that there are eighteenth-century roots for the genre and that an interest in the subterranean goes deeper than it seems at first glimpse as well as travels across genres such as gothic fiction, satire, and proto-science-fictions. In this paper, I will take a close look at Casanova’s 1787 novel L’Icosameron, which tells the story of a brother and sister who fall into a subterranean world populated by polychrome half-sized people known as mégamicres. I will consider Casanova’s colorful world as demonstrative of the “slipstream”, a notion from twentieth-century science fiction and Indigenous stories that unpacks the idea of linear time streams. I will also dig into Madame de Genlis’ 1782 novella Histoire de la Duchesse de C***, a gothic story about the harrowing survival of a Duchess locked away in an underground cavern. This story will also be considered as a part of the slipstream as I build towards an understanding of subterranean fictions that revolve around the underground as womb. Finally, I will take the ideas hailing from the underground and the imagination of it and see what it can do for the ability to imagine another world in the eighteenth-century as well as what the subterranean can do for us today, as we struggle to imagine other worlds that we might like to live in.

Isabel Maloney (University of Cambridge): ‘“C’est Classique!”: Defending Naturalism in the Trial of Lucien Descaves’  

In March 1890, the young Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves found himself in court, charged with ‘injures à l’armée’ and ‘outrages aux bonnes mœurs’ for his anti-military novel Sous-Offs, which depicted misconduct, sexual debauchery, and poor living conditions in the French army. He cannot have been comforted by the fact that the person presiding over the trial was Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who had a productive side-career as the author of Idealist novels and who had publicly professed his hatred of Naturalism. Naturalist fiction had crossed into the legal arena, where it was scrutinised as a threat to national security. Although underexplored in existing scholarship, the Sous-Offs scandal was one of the most high-profile clashes between the Third Republic and its artists, dominating the front pages of newspapers and triggering polarised reactions from the gamut of significant contemporary figures, from General Boulanger to Zola. I argue that Sous-Offs provoked such a scandal because it turned the Naturalist method to a sacrosanct symbol of the state, the army. I also provide a close reading of the novel alongside its trial to explore how sexual obscenity became a site of political contestation. What, I ask, can Descaves’s trial tell us about how aesthetic and political anxieties were intertwined in the late 1880s in the lead up to the Dreyfus Affair? And how was Naturalism’s ambiguous relationship with patriotism funnelled through contemporary discourse about sexual politics? 

   Tuesday 16th May 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Amber Bal (Cornell): ‘Chants de la terre: a pastoral reading of Léopold Sédar Senghor's poetic oeuvre’

In our next FGS meeting I will discuss the poetic oeuvre of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, reading his poetry through the lens of the pastoral tradition. The topos of the royaume d’enfance in Senghorian poetry (which is constructed from references to his Serer identity, to the paysan serer and the landscape they inhabit) is almost always read in terms of its import for “African identity”. In other words, this highly localized setting is interpreted in relation to a broader set of “African” values, or “ways of seeing and knowing” that Senghor founds his négritude upon. However, here, I would like to redirect focus towards the littoral section of the Serer-Siin region (Joal-Fatick) -Senghor’s royaume- as a particular place. The principal question I ask in this chapter is how the material realities of agrarian Serer society appear (or are omitted) in Senghor’s poetry and what relation they bear to a broader literary tradition of philosophizing about life and love in rural settings. To begin to answer this question, I point to the “rapport spécial au terroir” associated with the Serer paysan and the tension between this praise of the paysan serer’s way of life in Hosties Noires (1948), Chants d’ombre (1956) and Nocturnes (1961) and Senghor’s abolition of Serer land tenure through La Loi sur le domaine national (1964). The movement by which ascriptions of “tradition” and “attachment to the land” obfuscate this community’s continued and involuntary adaptation to external, “modern” structures is manifest. Finally, the cascading series of affective attachments between Senghor and his Serer identity, the land, the spiritual realm, and the groundnut economy are a nexus traceable back over several centuries in ethnographic documents and agricultural initiatives of the French colonial administration.  

Jack Nunn (Exeter): ‘Cosmetic Surgery? Gathering the (In)Complete Works of Jean Molinet (1531)’ 

In Paris, the first decades of the sixteenth century saw an unprecedented boom in the publication of books that were labelled as ‘œuvres’, referring to the ‘collected works’ of a single author. A significant but little-studied moment in the history of authorship, the 1530s represent the very first time in French literary history that the collective term ‘œuvres’ is used to designate works by a vernacular writer. 

This paper takes as its case study a substantial anthology of works by the Burgundian rhétoriqueur Jean Molinet (1435–1507). I ask questions like: why did bookmakers decide to compile and print a new anthology of Molinet’s poetry over two decades after his death? Why were Parisian publishers so confident in a poet whose political loyalties were pro-Burgundian and often virulently anti-French? To answer these questions, I engage with material aspects of the anthology, including paratexts, the ordering and selection of poems, as well as patterns of textual editing. By unravelling the production history of this under-studied book, we will encounter a whole host of agents involved in the print trade: a pair of clever publishers, a pro-French reviser, and even a compiler with a hidden agenda. 

 Tuesday 2nd May 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

 Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Rachel Hindmarsh (Trinity): ‘Dolet, Rabelais, Paré: Medicine and Literature in Early Modern France’   

The most common articulation of the relation between medicine and literature in early modern studies is that of dissecting the text. My paper brings together three early modern moments that coalesce around this conceptual mainstay. The first is Etienne Dolet’s poetic representation of François Rabelais’s own public anatomical demonstration in 1537 at Lyon’s Hôtel-Dieu, which seemingly invites this critical practice before opening up cracks in its analogical power by asking new questions of testimony and temporality. The second moment takes place in Rabelais’s fictional text, as I trace how Dolet’s tensions are reworked by Rabelais in the testimony of a character who loses his head in battle, takes a trip to the underworld, and is resurrected by suturing hands. Rethinking the practice of dissection in Dolet allows for, here, a reconsideration of the analogical value of dissecting a text; I put forward an alternative lens of reanimation and suggest that it is the tools of interdisciplinary study that can make this happen in Rabelais’s text. Finally, this paper visits the medical world proper; surgeon Ambroise Paré’s case history about a patient who, just like Rabelais’s fictional one, speaks after suturing –this time to exonerate his servant who has been wrongly convicted of his murder. This third moment allows for a reflection on how we can understand medicine and literature to reciprocally inform and challenge each other in this period; thus concretising the new model of multidisciplinary scholarship –beyond dissecting the text– that this paper puts forward.   

Sarah Leanne Phillips (École Normale Supérieure, Sorbonne Université): ‘The Importance of Interdisciplinarity: Working with Disability Studies and Crip theory’  

This paper will provide an introduction to disability studies and crip theory. I will be discussing the importance of engaging with these two fields of critical theory and their relevance within the realm of French studies. I will begin my paper by discussing the social model of disability; I will follow this up with summaries of the most interesting critical theories I have encountered in my research, including, but not limited to, crip theory, crip time, masking, disability as masquerade and culture “as” disability (R. McDermott & H. Varenne, 1995). My paper will end with a personal reflection on the teaching of disability studies. I will also (briefly) touch upon research issues relating to literary and historical disability studies.