Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

23^rd February 5-6.30pm

Textbook Structure and the Framing of Descartes’ Arguments

Jon Templeman (St John’s College, Oxford)

It's common to find Descartes presenting the same argument in a variety of formal settings. The paper argues that formal variation in Descartes' work tracks, in part, his shifting attitude towards teaching. In particular, it tracks the varying influence of contemporary textbook styles on Descartes' own methods of presentation. I look briefly at four projects: the /Discours de la méthode/, the proposed Eustachius commentary, the /Principia philosophiae/, and Henri Regius's /Fundamenta physices/. The first three projects seem to describe a gradual simplification in Descartes' style of presentation, and an increasing conformity to late scholastic academic norms. I think that is right, with heavy qualification. To develop that qualification, I compare the /Principia/ with Regius's text, which is from the same period but is substantially less daring both in terms of form and argument. That brings out the distance that remains, at the end of Descartes' career, between his style and that of more conventional textbook-writers.

A DPhil ‘through the ages’

Emma Claussen, Olivia Madin, Cameron Quinn & Gemma Tidman

In this session, four graduate students at varying stages in their DPhil research will talk briefly about their experiences of DPhil life – applications, challenges, strategies, methods etc. There will then be an open discussion during which people are invited to ask questions and to share their own experiences and thoughts. We hope that this will provide an opportunity for people who are already doing a DPhil or are thinking about applying to do a DPhil, to talk about research in a relatively informal and constructive environment.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls’ College (Hovenden Room)

Tuesday 9^th February, 5-6.30pm

The Body of Ourika: The Doctor, the Patient and the Text

Sarah Jones (Oriel College, Oxford)

Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) is a powerful exploration of the psychological effects of social exclusion upon the novella’s eponymous heroine. This exclusion is justified with reference to Ourika’s body and the ways in which it is coded and deciphered by society: Ourika’s blackness debars her from fulfilling her supposedly natural role of maternal reproduction. Against this background of the body’s primacy, it is surprising that limited critical attention should have been paid to the frame-narrator of Ourika, the young doctor who encounters the protagonist on her death-bed and procures her story from her. My paper will argue that the body of the text and the body of the heroine are intimately linked, and that this connection brings the role of the doctor to the fore. I shall suggest that medical narratives of the body, and the characters who incarnate them, form an ideology which must perpetually be negotiated within the social relations that encircle and engender it. The doctor shows remarkable sympathy for Ourika which draws him into the nexus of social forces that centre on Ourika’s body. This demonstrates a complex web of relations between his sympathetic attitude towards his patient, the permutations of his medical discourse within Ourika’s narrative, and the ways in which Ourika can use her body, the instrument of her own marginalization and source of the doctor’s sympathy, to resist attempts to subject her narrative to the authority of the doctor’s.

Points de re-père: Paternal Hauntings in Marie Nimier’s Works

Adina Stroia (KCL)

At the age of five, Marie Nimier loses her father, writer Roger Nimier, in a tragic car accident. Nimier’s mourning process is problematized and deferred by the ontological uncertainty of the paternal figure who was ‘ni vraiment là quand il était présent, ni vraiment absent quand il nous quitta’ (Reine du Silence, 37) and is thus (dis)placed outside of a Freudian understanding of Trauerarbeit as finite. The ghostly materiality of the father as a figure of the entre-deux haunts Nimier’s writing through the point de re-père, a term the author advances in her debut novel, Sirène (1987), whose manifestations take the shape of a series of paternal avatars and attributes woven throughout the textual fabric of her corpus. I argue that the point de re-père is coherent with Derrida’s logic of spectrality through its dispersive qualities and repetitive structure. This paper will analyse the means through which the paternal hauntology refracts and insinuates itself in the interstices of the narrative in two autobiographically inflected works, Sirène and La Reine du silence (2004). I will trace the disorienting effects of the temporal shifts and of the gestures of material dislocation and analyse the means through which the spectral paternal configurations in the form of the re-père contaminate Nimier’s narrative and linguistic practices, installing a presence/absence aporia which traverses the author’s œuvre.

As you know, we are holding our French Graduate Seminars this year in conjunction with the IMLR. Check out details of their events in London by following this link:

https://www.fabula.org/actualites/the-french-postgraduate-seminar-series-at-the-imlr-london_72196.php

French Graduate Seminar 

Tuesdays, 5-6.30pm, All Souls' College (Hovenden Room)

Co-convenors: Olivia Madin (Wadham) and Gemma Tidman (Wolfson)

In conjunction with the IMLR, and with the support of Dr Dominic Glynn (IMLR), Dr Jessica Goodman (St Catherine's) and Professor Catriona Seth (All Souls')

All Welcome! 

Hilary Term 

9^th February (4th Week) - in conjunction with the IMLR

Adina Stroida, KCL: 'Points de repère: Paternal Hauntings in Marie Nimier’s Works’

Sarah Jones, Oriel: ‘The Body of Ourika: The Doctor, the Patient, and the Text’

23^rd February (6^th Week)

Jon Templeman, St John’s: ‘Textbook Structure and the Framing of Descartes’ Arguments’

8^th March (8^th Week)

Vanessa Lee, SHE: ‘Performing and Exploring Gender in the Plays of French Caribbean Women Writers’

Amy Steinepreis, Merton: ‘The (dis)appearance of nothing in Beckett’s L’Innommable’

Trinity Term

26^th April (1^st Week) – in conjunction with the IMLR

Oliver Kenny, QMUL: ‘Questions of Duration and Ethics in New Extreme Cinema’

Ruggero Sciuto, Merton: ‘Does Madness Represent a Threat in a Deterministic Universe? Diderot and d’Holbach answer’

10^th May (3^rd Week)

Rodney Mearns, St Cross: ‘The Interface Between Literature and History in the Late Writing of Marguerite Yourcenar’

Sophie Turner, Worcester: ‘Errant Friendships in Libertine Literature’

24^th May (5^th Week)

Cédric Ploix, St Hugh’s: ‘The Dramatic Quality of Verse in Translations of Molière’s Comedies’

Jordan Phillips, Oriel: ‘Ça craint, ça fait trop retour aux sources’: Immigrant Writers and the (Impossible?) Quest for Origins’

Call for Proposals for 2016

We’re very pleased to announce that the Oxford French Graduate Seminar will be re-launching next term, with the support of Professor Catriona Seth and Dr Jessica Goodman. These seminars are intended to provide graduates in French with the opportunity to present and discuss their work with other graduates in a relaxed environment. There will be three seminars per term, held on Tuesdays, 5-6.30pm, at All Souls’ College. Each session will feature two 20-minute papers, plus time for discussion. We welcome papers on any topic relating to French language, history, literature and culture. We are currently looking for graduate students who are interested in speaking in Hilary or Trinity term, 2016. The seminars will take place on the following dates:

Hilary Term (Spring)
Tuesday 9th February (4th Week)
Tuesday 23rd February (6th Week)
Tuesday 8th March (8th Week)

Trinity Term (Summer)
Tuesday 26th April (1st Week)
Tuesday 10th May (3rd Week
Tuesday 24th May (5th Week)

If you are interested in speaking, please send us an email by Friday 11th December, 2015 with an outline of what you propose to present (no need for a fixed abstract at this stage), and any date preferences you may have. Though we will aim to group together papers on related themes or periods, we will try to accommodate requests for particular dates.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Gemma & Olivia

gemma.tidman@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
olivia.madin@wadh.ox.ac.uk

WEDNESDAY 20 FEBRUARY: IRENA ARTEMENKO (WADHAM COLLEGE) AND SARA-LOUISE COOPER (BRASENOSE COLLEGE)

JOINT SESSION

CONFERENCE ROOM @ TS ELIOT THEATRE, MERTON 

17:00 - 18:30

DRINKS AND NIBBLES PROVIDED

Irena Artemenko (Wadham College)

Emmanuel Levinas: Being, Death and Infinity

Abstract

The truism of no contact between life and death implies that it is impossible for us to experience our own death and that the only relation we can have with death is built out of emotional and intellectual repercussions after the death of the other and provides a rich matrix for a philosophical reflection on the role of ethics in the quest for meaning.  Emmanuel Levinas notes that we gain knowledge about death from experiencing and observing the behaviour of others near death or simply the behaviour of others as mortals who are aware of their finitude and oblivious to it at the same time.  But the consciousness of one’s finitude implicates the idea of time, which leads Levinas to pose a question about the function and significance of time in one’s being - now from the vantage point of the involvement of the self with the other.  Because, for Levinas, if the only way one can be affected by death is through the death of the other, the notion of finitude translates into the realisation of time not as the limitation or annihilation of one’s own being but, first and foremost, into the understanding of time as the experience that is attainable solely through the other and, only then, as the context within which the relationship of the self with the other unfolds.  Should we accept this proposition, it does not matter whether time indeed organises, totalises or gives continuity and meaning to our own finite existence as long as it allows us to exit our self-centred, self-enclosed being and try to aim beyond it – at infinity.

Sara-Louise Cooper (Brasenose College)

‘Une assise prismatique de l’être’: Spectra in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une enfance créole

Abstract

In this paper, I show how the fluidity of the spectrum and its capacity to bring together seemingly separate phenomena allows Chamoiseau to re-establish the linguistic, temporal and spatial continuities he knew as a child and which were broken upon his entry into the adult world.

The schooling system Chamoiseau experiences institutes a vertical, hierarchical relationship between French and Créole, whereas before he had not realised there was any distinction between the two languages. The association of French with learning and the dismissal of Créole as backward installs a separation between the young Chamoiseau’s intellectual life and his bodily life, his lived worlds and his learned worlds. The adult Chamoiseau comes to see this separation as damaging, so his autobiography emphasises the porous boundaries between mind, body and world. He wishes to convey that his pre-school freedom from colonial hierarchies is not irrevocably lost to him and to do this he must demonstrate how past and present are not sealed off from each other, but are joined in constant interaction on a temporal spectrum.

Une enfance créole is generically situated between fiction, autobiography, and theoretical work, as the author uses his childhood to make political points, meditates on the structures of memory, and slips seamlessly from historical fact to fantastic and dream-like episodes. This exploration of the generic spectrum lets Chamoiseau show how memory, invention and political action are bound up with each other.

WEDNESDAY 6 FEBRUARY: CLARISSE ZOULIM (WADHAM COLLEGE) AND ALICE HOLT (WADHAM COLLEGE)

JOINT SESSION

FITZJAMES II, MERTON
17:00 - 18:30
DRINKS AND NIBBLES PROVIDED

Clarisse Zoulim

The self and language : Ricoeur's narrative theory of the self vs. Stéphane Chauvier's linguistic account

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur'’s narrative theory of the self, developed in Soi-même comme un autre has attracted a lot of attention since its publication in the 1990s and is still considered by some as providing a solution to several questions concerning the true nature of the self. But, however appealing this theory might be, the highly metaphorical, and therefore not so explicit, dimension of its content, cannot be denied. For this reason, this paper’'s aim will be precisely to attempt to strip this theory of its metaphorical dimension in order to reveal its very theoretical core on the one hand, and, on the other, to propose a critique of this theoretical core  by setting up a fruitful confrontation with Stéphane Chauvier’'s linguistic theory of the nature of the self, set out in his 2001 seminal book Dire « je ».

Clarisse Zoulim is teaching French at Wadham. She is agrégée in philosophy as well as a student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and of the Sorbonne (Paris I), where she is undertaking a PhD in contemporary philosophy.

Alice Holt 

'Un temps habitable à l'homme': A comparison of Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin's Philosophies of Time and Industrial Modernity

Abstract

This paper will seek to offer a new perspective on French philosopher Simone Weil's (1909-1943) account of inter-war industrial work, suggesting that it can be read as more than a commonplace account of the dehumanisation inherent to modern industrial labour, but also as a distinct philosophy of time. Using her own experience as a factory worker as the basis from which to critique industrial practices, Weil sets out a vision of the inter-war factory worker as torn out of "habitable" time and hurled into the "tumulte glacé" of the mechanised production line with devastating psychological and physical consequences. This paper will show how Weil in her Cahiers, in her articles on industrial life and in L'Enracinement (1943), undertook to prove that industrial reformer F.W. Taylor and his disciples had confused the distinct temporal orders separating men and machines. With this in mind, she elaborated a conception of time, set out diffusely across a series of texts, which, this paper will argue, is related to Walter Benjamin's representation of time in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939), where mechanised factory work provoked a fragmented "isolated experience" of time (Erlebnis) that lacked embeddedness within tradition-bound long-experience (Erfahrung). These approaches unite a conception of time estranged from rational, modern and scientific 'clock time' and favour an understanding of time determined by memory, experience and imagination.

Alice Holt is a second year Dphil student at Wadham. She did her BA in French and German at Pembroke College, Cambridge and her masters in political science at the London School of Economics.