Wednesday 23 January: Adam Guy (Lincoln College) and James McFarthing (University of Bristol)

Joint Session
Fitzjames II, Merton
17:00 - 18:30
Drinks and nibbles provided

Adam Guy (Lincoln College)
Robbe-Grillet in space: Brian W. Aldiss’s sf nouveau roman

Abstract

In 1962, Brian W. Aldiss – an established British science fiction (sf) author – had a manuscript rejected by his publisher. At this point titled Garden with Figures, or Figures in a Garden, Aldiss’s novel is a conspicuous imitation of the early novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, at this point in Britain the exemplary figure of the contemporary international literary avant-garde. The novel was eventually published in 1968 – re-titled Report on Probability A and containing a recognisable generic apparatus to frame the original text. 

Using the Deleuzo-Guattarian pairing of de-/reterritorialisation, my paper considers Aldiss’s engagement with Robbe-Grillet, and more broadly with the idea of the nouveau roman. Viewed in the context of Aldiss’s critical statements, as well as his place within the British Science Fiction New Wave, the novel’s adoption of Robbe-Grillet is a brave deterritorialisation of the hermetic and perceivedly middlebrow genre of sf into the currents of fiction that emerged in the wake of modernism. However, Aldiss’s eventual capitulation to a more recognisable version of sf seems to reterritorialise the genre to some extent. At the same time, another movement is taking place. If, in Report, the nouveau roman is deterritorialised into the exterior terrain of sf, then concurrently, Aldiss reterritorialises his influences by evoking the theoretical coordinates that Robbe-Grillet set up for the nouveau roman. The conventionally sf sections of Report in fact develop a metalanguage for the original Robbe-Grillet-inspired text, reflecting on it – as nouveau roman – on Robbe-Grillet’s terms.   

Adam is a second year DPhil student in the English Faculty. His thesis – supervised by Valentine Cunningham – will most probably be titled ‘The Nouveau Roman in Britain, 1957–73’.

James McFarthing (University of Bristol)The Science of Experience – A Jules Verne Aesthetic

Abstract

‘L’heure est venue où la science a sa place faite dans le domaine de la littérature’ 

Pierre Hetzel, L’avertissement de l’editeur in Jules Verne, Aventures du capitaine Hatteras p. 26. (1864)

The emergence of the roman scientifique in France saw the first great popularisation of the science fiction text and the emergence of a form that would go on to irrevocably shape our engagement with questions of industry, technology and social change. Distinguishing himself from the more didactic texts of scientific popularisation, Jules Verne set out to create a form that could combine the rationalistic scientific epistemology of the sciences with a novelistic aesthetic capable of communicating complex scientific theories and terminology through means of sensual evocation, adventure narrative and social critique. In his great novel cycle the Voyages extraordinaires, Verne helps to elevate scientific discourse from a mere bulwark of verisimilitude or abstract obfuscation to a sensual discourse that helps renegotiate the sensual reception of scientific phenomena in fiction whilst providing the necessary tools for effective artistic and social engagement with science and scientific practice.  

This paper intends to outline how the scientific principle is grounded within the aesthetic core of Verne’s writing, forming an epistemological and aesthetic foundation upon which Verne can build his stories and ideas. By examining the different scientific disciplines of cartography, geometry and geology used by Verne in his works, I will demonstrate how scientific theory and phenomena are reconfigured aesthetically and spatially, creating a new kind of ‘fictional empiricism’. This approach helps ground not only the epistemological and stylistic core of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, but also helps delineate the ways in which science fiction establishes itself both as a formal genre and as a critical mode of writing.   

James is a third-year PhD student at the University of Bristol, whose research centres on Jules Verne, utopian theory and science fiction. He previously read for an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and French at King’s College London where he also received a Master’s degree in French Literature and Culture. As of 2012 he lives and studies in Paris in his capacity as a ‘pensionnaire étranger’ at the École Normale Supérieure. 

28 November: Valentina Gosetti (Balliol)

Fitzjames I, Merton
17:00 - 18:30
Drinks and nibbles provided

Valentina Gosetti (Balliol)
Aloysius Bertrand's formal choice in context: Gaspard de la Nuit and romantic generic mobility in the 1820s

 

Abstract

In French literary history the name of Aloysius Bertrand, the author of Gaspard de la Nuit. Fantaisies à la Manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (published posthumously in 1842), is still remembered as that of the author of the first canonical collection of prose poetry. In this paper I shall consider Bertrand outside of his pioneering role in the development of prose poetry in order to examine this poet's own and unique synthesis of the literary material available at his time and his own formal experimentation. I shall thus examine specific case studies of little known works circulating at Bertrand’s time to see how Bertrand's use of an unusual form fits within wider contemporary romantic generic mobility. The first goal of this approach is to offer more empirical evidence in order to understand what some critics really mean when they state that at Bertrand’s time the prose poem was already ‘in the air’. The second goal is to propose new hypotheses for the possible reasons of Bertrand’s unusual formal choice, without anachronistically thinking of later developments in prose poetry by better known authors such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. 

Valentina Gosetti (Balliol) is writing up her D.Phil. thesis entitled: 'Tradition and Poetic Experimentation in Gaspard de la Nuit: Aloysius Bertrand and Cultural Exchange in French Romanticism', while working as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Modern French Literature at Balliol College. She has spent the last academic year in Paris, in exchange with the École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). She is a postgraduate member of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes and a member of the Associationpour la mémoire d'Aloysius Bertrand.

 

Wednesday 14 November: Rebecca Loxton (Keble) and Emma Paucefort (UCL)

Joint Session
Fitzjames I, Merton
17:00 - 18:30
Drinks and nibbles provided

Rebecca Loxton (Keble)
The representation of the foreigner in panoramic literature of the long nineteenth century

Abstract
Panoramic literature was a term devised by Walter Benjamin to define the different types of literature produced in the 19th century, the objective of which was to survey the modern city and its different social types. Examples of panoramic literature published during this period include guidebooks, physiolgoies and encyclopedias. There was a proliferation of guidebooks published during the 19th century, aimed at foreigners and provincials visiting Paris during this period which saw the expansion of European travel, and in the mid-century there was a sudden explosion of physiologies, books which claimed to be able to identify the recognisable characteristics of different social types, 'the foreigner' being one of these. Some texts are accompanied by caricaturial images, which often provide an interesting addition to the text. My research will look at many different examples of panoramic literature in order to determine how the foreigner (and to a lesser extent, the provincial) is represented in texts of this time and to evaluate whether this representation changed over time, or from one text to another.

Rebecca Loxton read for an undergraduate degree in Modern Languages at the University of Sussex before coming to Oxford. She now reading for an MPhil in Modern Languages at Keble, and is in the early stages of writing her thesis.

Emma Pauncefort (UCL)
Béat Louis de Muralt’s Lettres sur les Anglois et les Francois et sur les Voïages: a literary progenitor for Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques

Abstract
In 1693, Colsoni published his Guide de Londres Pour les Estrangers dedié & offert aux voyageurs Allemands et François, offering short tours of the capital which might permit the traveller to appreciate its physical landmarks. Such a work complimented earlier ‘travel literature’ on England which predominantly sought to relate a topographical description of the country, reserving comment on the English character for the purpose of rehearsing the hackneyed and entrenched negative stereotype of English depravity and even barbarism. At the hands of the Swiss traveller Muralt, French ‘travel literature’ on England was, however, about to take a dramatically new direction. The letters written during and following his sojourn in England in 1694 and first published fully in 1725, respond and vie with both the literary and thematic traditions of the travel account. Muralt does not just eschew topography and the reiteration of unchallenged stereotypes, but demonstrates how the rélation can evidence literary flair in tackling its renewed subject matter. This paper will seek to show how exactly Muralt does this, and in turn advocate his work as a vital literary progenitor of the Voltaire’s later Lettres Philosophiques which have hitherto dominated scholarly attention.

Emma Pauncefort is currently in the first year of a PhD under the supervision of Dr Isabelle Moreau in the French department at University College London. An interest from undergraduate level in the fascination with ‘Englishness’ in eighteenth-century France revealed the absence of scholarship seeking to understand this phenomenon in relation to the accounts of those who actually travelled to England. Through the course of the PhD, it is her hope to thicken the context of Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques which are often attributed with sparking Anglomania in France, and bring ‘travel literature’, the most read genre after the novel in the eighteenth century, to the forefront. In so doing, she also seeks to supplement existing empirical studies of travel accounts by subjecting little-read texts to extended literary analysis.

Wednesday 31 October - Diana Greenwald (Wadham) and Jamie Steele (Exeter University)

JOINT SESSION
17:00 - 18:30
Fitzjames Room I, Merton College
Drinks and nibbles provided  

Diana Greenwald (Wadham)

Painting the Provincial: A Statistical Analysis of Rural Imagery at the Paris Salons, 1790-1881

 

 Millet, The Angelus, 1859

Abstract

During the 19th century, educated urban Frenchmen created thousands of books, articles and images depicting and analyzing rural France and its inhabitants. Academic analyses of this fascination and its motivation have been couched in anecdotal terms. Using quantitative methods and a previously untapped data set—catalogues of the roughly 130,000 paintings displayed at the Paris Salon between 1790 and 1881—this project charts how images of rural life developed over the course of the century. It also explores how this development related to the economic and social modernization of France.  

Diana Greenwald is a second year M.Phil. candidate in Economic & Social History at Oxford. Her dissertation applies statistical methods to the study of 19th century French art. For her undergraduate degree, she studied Art History and Economics at Columbia University.

Jamie Steele (Exeter University)

Imag(in)ed Space of the Regions: the creation of a regional cinema aesthetic in the works of the Dardenne Brothers and Bouli Lanners

 

Still from La Promesse (1996)

Abstract:

The current state of Europe is changing, as it re-discovers its roots and its regions. This is neatly exemplified by the European Union’s ‘Europe of the Regions’ mantra, which has promoted the conflicting ideals of sub-state and supra-national notions of identity. This paper therefore aims to open up the possibility of categorizing cinemas regionally, by utilizing the federal state of Belgium as a paradigmatic case study. In Belgium, the recent regionalization of film funding institutions has redrawn the cultural cartography, and has clearly signaled that the national exposition of identities is no longer relevant to the denizens of the federal state. I will hence engage with the spatial discourse of the Walloon region as a relational space of flows (i.e its relations with France, use of the French language and migration) and its effects upon the filmic opuses produced in the region. I will explore to what extent the Belgian/ Walloon culture of self-doubt and identity crisis, which is oft perceived in relation to their position under a French cultural model and the creation of a monoculture, is actually re-produced on screen. In order to nuance the notion of a Walloon regional screen culture, I will consider the alternate approaches to the region, its peoples and its landscapes by the Walloon filmmakers the Dardenne Brothers (in particular Rosetta, 1999) and Bouli Lanners (El Dorado, 2008). 

Jamie Steele is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. His area of study is interdisciplinary, blending together French language studies, and ‘La Francophonie’, with Film Studies. His PhD research focuses upon the national film production
 of Belgium to explore the transnational connections forged between nation-states in Europe predicated upon a linguistic allegiance. At Undergraduate level, he studied French at Exeter University. He was recently published in the Spring Edition of the Trespassing
 Journal, with the article entitled ‘A Cinema without Borders: exploring the notions of culture and identity in the cinema of the Dardenne Brothers’.

Wednesday 17th October - Vincent Robert-Nicoud (Lincoln College) and Jennifer Oliver (St John's College)

JOINT SESSION
17:00 - 18:30
Fitzjames Room I, Merton College
Drinks and nibbles provided

Vincent Robert-Nicoud (Lincoln College)

Turning Montaigne Upside-Down: Topsy-turvy Rhetoric in the Apologie de Raymond Sebond

Michel de Montaigne, 1532-1559 

Abstract

The importance of the theme of the world upside-down for sixteenth-century art and literature is difficult to overemphasize. The complete reversal of the world seems to be a constant source of inspiration and concern for poets, painters, writers, polemicists and philosophers. At the centre of this tradition, authors such as Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, François Rabelais and Michel de Montaigne play a difficult game in which the versatile notion of inversion bears a crucial part. Their writings, which often contradict themselves, respond and elaborate on each other, offer a fertile ground for the study theme of mundus inversus, the world upside-down from a rhetorical perspective.

This paper will focus on a short passage from Montaigne’s Apologie de Raymond Sebond, the longest and arguably most complex chapter of the Essais. I will show some of the specificities of Montaigne’s discourse of inversion. In this important essay, the topos of the world upside down is not only represented thematically, but also rhetorically and even syntactically. By disentangling Montaigne’s complex prose, this paper will attempt to identify the characteristics of topsy-turvy rhetoric and consider its relevance in Montaigne.

Vincent Robert-Nicoud is a second year DPhil student at Lincoln College. After completing is undergraduate studies at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, he studied Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Richard Scholar, focuses on the theme of the world upside down in relation to the commonplacing tradition during the sixteenth century.

Jennifer Oliver, St John's College

Shipwreck, reconfigured: the journey of a paradigm from Erasmus to Jean de Léry

Illustration from Jean Deperthe’s Histoire des naufrages […] (Paris: Cuchet, 1789)

Abstract

As Hans Blumenberg observes in Shipwreck with Spectator, ‘Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage.’ Central to this notion is the threat of shipwreck. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus’s dialogue Naufragium, a satirical account indicting the superstitious and disingenuous words and deeds of various religious figures aboard a sinking ship, set the tone for Early Modern shipwreck narratives. The influence of this work on later fictional (Rabelais, Shakespeare) and factual accounts has been widely demonstrated, but in my paper I explore the effects produced when one author, Jean de Léry, presents a shipwreck that bears none of the hallmarks of Erasmus’s model, in his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil. When transferred to another hemisphere and culture, the shipwreck functions differently, and the perceived distinctions between Old and New Worlds are articulated through the distance between Léry’s expectations and the reality he discovers. This reconfiguration of the Erasmian model casts it in a new light: rather than simply ‘othering’ the values of Léry’s ‘sauvages’, it reveals the contingent nature of the European travellers’ perspective. Some of the most important classical models of shipwreck occur in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, in which he writes ‘Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive what ills you are free from yourself is pleasant.’ ‘Shipwreck, reconfigured’ explores the implications of this statement with relation to both Erasmus’s and Léry’s shipwrecks.

Jennifer is a third-year DPhil student and the Elizabeth Fallaize Scholar in French at St John's College, Oxford, where she also studied as an undergraduate. Her thesis, provisionally titled ‘Ships of State and Authorship: Exploring national and authorial identity in sixteenth-century France’, maps diverse instances of real, metaphorical and allegorical ships across generic boundaries in the sixteenth century, a time of great technological advancement in the field of shipbuilding.

Call for Papers - Michaelmas 2012!

The French Graduate Seminar is looking for contributors for the academic year 2012-2013. If you are interested in presenting your work in a supportive graduate student environment contact us on the addresses provided on the right. The format of your contribution is up to you, it can be as broad or as narrow as you want, but should be at least 20 minutes long and no more than 45 minutes. You do not have to be at Oxford to take part. 

Wednesday 13th June - Mara van der Lugt (Corpus Christi) and Helena Taylor (St Anne's)

JOINT SESSION
17.00-18.30
Massey Room, Balliol College

Mara van der Lugt (Corpus Christi College)
Of faux savants and faux Philosophes: quarrels and morals in Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) 

Abstract

Even a cursory glance at the history of the production of Pierre Bayle’s famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique will show that the vital years of its initial genesis (1689-1696) ran parallel to the hottest years of controversy between Bayle and his friend-turned-enemy Pierre Jurieu: 1690-1697. This was only partly a coincidence: for although the idea of a dictionary was born independently of the Jurieu-debate, the work itself was deeply influenced by the years of conflict during which it was created, and each of the editions still bears the imprint of these years. Most importantly, before the polemic with Jurieu Bayle had emphasised the irenic side of the Republic of Letters in his scholarly journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres: in the Dictionnaire he reframed the ideal of this Republic in a way that stressed its polemical side while attempting to install an ethics of scholarly debate.

This paper will argue that the polemic with Jurieu, which strongly informed Bayle’s thought on the Republic of Letters and on scholarly ‘warfare’, is a crucial context for the elaboration of the Dictionnaire, and therefore essential for understanding some of its central themes. It will trace the way in which Bayle throughout the Dictionnaire is attempting to construct an ethics for the Republic of Letters through reconstructing its practice in the lives of ancient and modern scholars and philosophers: building morals on the basis of quarrels. Finally, it will examine how this ethical-polemical undertone introduced several tensions into the project of the dictionary that would remain unresolved; and how the ghost of Jurieu came back to haunt the author of the Dictionnaire.

Mara van der Lugt studied Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and as part of the Erasmus Research Master in Early Modern Intellectual History spent 6 months in Oxford to write an extended thesis on the Irish philosopher John Toland's views on religion. Based in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, she is now in the 2nd year of a DPhil in History on the 17th-century French philosopher Pierre Bayle, focusing especially on how to interpret his ‘Dictionnaire Historique et Critique’. She is supervised by Professor Laurence Brockliss (History) and Dr Kate Tunstall (Modern Languages).

Helena Taylor (St Anne's College)
Narratives of the disgraced poet: Ovid, Exile and the Court of Louis XIV

Frontispiece, C. Dassoucy, L’Ovide en belle humeur 

(Paris: Pépingué, 1653) 2nd éd. 

Abstract‘Je fus surpris de me voir si défiguré’ remarks the character, Ovide, in Guéret’s Le Parnasse Réformé (Paris: Jolly, 1669, p25) He is reacting to a burlesque translation of his work, the frontispiece of which is depicted here. This image provides a useful methodological tool: is this a picture of Ovid dressed as a seventeenth-century man, or is it a seventeenth-century man dressed as Ovid? Is this figure looking at a portrait of Ovid or is he looking at his own reflection? In this paper, I want to survey the different ‘défigurements’ of Ovid’s character—the different representations of Ovid’s life—in the second half of the seventeenth century. This was a period of noticeable interest in his poetry. Employing the argument that there was a relationship in the early modern period between how a writer’s life was constructed and the interpretation of their work, I will consider how Ovid is fashioned in the Vies that accompany his translations to suit the aesthetic purposes of his translator. Moving away from this model, I will also consider what Ovid is being used to discuss beyond the contemporary aesthetic, by surveying the representations of his life in versions that are not attached to his poetry—novels and biographical dictionaries. This paper will offer an overview of my thesis, interrogating some of the problems identified in telling Ovid’s story, and examining what these problems might allow early modern writers to discuss.

Helena is in the second year of her DPhil in French at St Anne’s College. Her thesis, provisionally entitled ‘Lives of Ovid in French Writing: 1666-1713’ looks at the representations and uses of Ovid in late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century French writing. She did her BA in Latin and French and her MA in French literature at Worcester College.