French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday February 21st (6th Week)

All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

5.15-6.30pm

Natalie Pangburn (Lincoln College)

'Foudroiement: Wajdi Mouawad and the philosophy of Jan Patočka'

One of the most prolific and well-received French-language playwrights of his generation, Lebanese Canadian Wajdi Mouawad has authored twenty-three original plays, recently directed new adaptations of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays, and served in a number of high-profile positions in the French theatre, including his current position as Artistic Director at the Théâtre national de la Colline. Although Mouawad’s literary and dramatic sources have been the subject of numerous studies, one influence that has, as of yet, gone largely unexplored is that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. This paper argues that this is an important lacuna in contemporary scholarship. It describes how Mouawad discovered the works of Jan Patočka in 1991, the year his career began, and has frequently referenced Patočka’s writings in his exegetical texts and interviews, as well as in the plays themselves. This paper explores how Patočka’s ideas provided Mouawad with a language and philosophical framework for his artistic project and ambitions. It describes a number of Patočka’s key philosophical innovations - ‘shakenness’, the three movements of human existence, metanoia and solidarity - and demonstrates the deep impact of these ideas on Mouawad’s dramatic work. It argues that these ideas are in fact the basis for the four key philosophical and theatrical ambitions most frequently expressed by Mouawad: metamorphosis; the recognition of the other; responsibility; and  ‘solidarity of the shaken’. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how, and to what degree, Mouawad achieves his Patočkan philosophical and ethical ambitions.

Robert Pruett (St Cross College)

'Remy de Gourmont's Lilith: mythic structures of sexual pessimism'

Remy de Gourmont's work at the end of the 19th century (notably Sixtine, La culture des idées, and Le livre des masques) cemented the author as both a practitioner and analyst of Symbolism's aesthetic tactics of subjectivity and dream. Regarded as the philosopher laureate of the movement, he sought to carry these unfolding artistic concerns into the theoretical realms of idealism, the study of cultural constructs, and, central to this paper, the unwieldy subject of sexuality and its governing influences. The bulk of Gourmont's fiction explores, in one form or another, the precariousness of love and sex in a phenomenological world. Of particular note is Lilith (1891-2), a play which restructures, re-purposes, and combines elements of lapsarian lore to the effect of a lewd and parodistic origin myth of carnal desire and its flaws. I argue that Gourmont's dramatization, however ironic, adeptly personifies the forces which shape human sexual relations in a manner unique among his other works. My discussion of the archetypes which he employs will focus primarily on three main themes: Firstly, the struggle between patriarchal control and chaotic 'inutilité' in the figures of Jehovah and Satan, secondly, the principle of individuation in the figure of Adam, and thirdly, the question of ideal sexuality as a 'lost inheritance' in the figures of Lilith and Eve. 

Oxford French Graduate Seminar

Tuesday February 7th (4th Week)

All Souls’ College, Hovenden Room 5.15 - 6.30pm 

'Cet autre moy': Poetic Selves and Other Friends in Selected French Writings of the Sixteenth Century’

Vittoria Fallanca (Pembroke College, Oxford)

My paper begins by considering a line from a complainte by the French poet Philippe Desportes, written in 1581. Drawing on Terence Cave’s Pré-histoires, I identify this line as the first use of the French substantive ‘moy’. Like Cave, I take issue with the idea that what we see here is the beginning of a grand narrative of ‘selfhood’ and ‘modern’ subjectivity. I begin instead with the idea that ‘cet autre moy’ occurs in the context of Renaissance writings on friendship. These were characterised by the ‘Aristotelian-Ciceronian model’, whereby a friend was portrayed, under the shadow of Neoplatonism, as another self. I propose that alongside this well-established model of friendship, there is another, competing model. I call this model ‘anterotic’, as at its heart lies the Greek myth of Eros and Anteros. The anterotic model is characterised by strife as well as mutuality, by competition alongside imitation, and by opposition as much as communality. This other, ‘anterotic’ model, can help us to capture and make sense of some of the most salient characteristic of sixteenth-century French writings, including (but not limited to) tensions between Latin and the vernacular, localised imitative poet-model relationships and the friendships between the writers themselves. What emerges is not so much ‘modern’ identity as we know it, but a poetic identity, rooted in the double-sidedness of anteros.  

‘When water was thicker than blood: the development of Marie de Gournay's famille d'alliance in the seventeenth century'

Jess Allen (University of Durham)

Today we email, text, and phone our friends, imparting personal and private messages about all kinds of issues from gossip and social arrangements to love and loss. In the Republic of Letters, however, missives were public documents: they were exchanged by friends who aimed to praise each other's work and good qualities, promote their own, and offer mentorship. This large network contained several smaller networks consisting of alliances between scholars which were mostly elective and often transnational.

Marie de Gournay's (1565 - 1645) relationship with her père d'alliance Montaigne is already well-documented and indeed dominated Gournay scholarship until recently. Her other correspondences are comparatively much less well-known: this paper will explore the letters she exchanged with her own fille d'alliance, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607 - 1688), who went on to expand her family by adding a sœur d'alliance, Marie du Moulin (1622 - 1699). Building on existing scholarship about women in the Republic of Letters which provides a coherent account of this famille d'alliance, I will reconstruct their friendships through reading these letters, examining the extent to which they were able to control their self-fashioning and the ways in which these literary identities were subsequently received. The paper will show what we can learn about their individual circumstances and their ideas about relationships, highlighting discrepancies between how they write about themselves and how they are written about by others both during and after their lifetime.

Oxford French Graduate Seminar

Hilary Term 2017

Tuesdays 5.15 – 6.30 pm

All Souls’ College, Hovenden Room

January 24^th (2^nd Week)

Marie Chabbert (Wolfson College)‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité? Thinking Ontology, Community and Extremism with Jean-Luc Nancy’

Roundtable Discussion: ‘Graduates Anonymous’(A chance for current graduate students to share their thoughts, experiences and advice about graduate research)

February 7^th (4^th Week)

Jess Allen (University of Durham)‘When water was thicker than blood: the development of Marie de Gournay's famille d'alliance in the seventeenth century.' 

Vittoria Fallanca (Pembroke College)'Cet autre moy': Poetic Selves and Other Friends in Selected French Writings of the Sixteenth Century’

February 21^st (6^th Week)

Natalie Pangburn (Lincoln College)'Foudroiement: Wajdi Mouawad and the philosophy of Jan Patočka'. 

Robert Pruett (St Cross College)'The figure of the demon in the work of Remy de Gourmont: mythic structures of sexual pessimism'

French Graduate Seminar (5th Week)

5-6.30pm Tuesday November 15^th 

^{All Souls College (Hovenden Room)} 

Lifting the Veil: George Sand’s Mythopoetic Bodies

James Illingworth, University of Belfast

George Sand’s body is infamous. Her numerous amorous liaisons and penchant for dressing in male attire in public gave rise to a sense of scandal that has categorised her reputation both during her lifetime and particularly since her death. Subject to fictionalisation during her life and subsequently mythologised through film and biographies, her literary works tend to be overshadowed by her private life. In the era of the Napoleonic Code, which stripped women of what few rights they had gained in the wake of the Revolution and legislatively reduced them to their generative function, Sand’s defiance of social order stands out. As nineteenth-century bodies suffered ever greater scrutiny through the Code on the one hand and scientific and medical developments on the other, this paper will explore how Sand’s texts can be read as a counter-discursive response to the failure to account for female experience, sketching some of the means by which Sand used her works to confront traditional (patriarchal) depictions of the body through myth, allegory and metaphor, gesturing towards alternative, mythopoetic modes of representing bodies in the nineteenth century novel.

Individual Narratives, National Histories, and Transnational Myths in George Sand’s Jeanne (1844)

Stacie Allan, University of Bristol

The simultaneous emergence of the concept of the nation and the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century are often understood as reflecting each other in their compositional processes. The modern novel, as Benedict Anderson describes, ‘provided the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation’. The imagining of a story, taking place in bounded horizon and moving through ‘homogenous empty time’, mirrors the space in which the nation acquires meaning. George Sand’s Jeanne (1844), however, intertwines individual narratives, national histories, and transnational myths, which, as this paper argues, challenges this totalising and limited view. The novel is entirely set in Sand's native region of Berry, yet the local is shown to be inextricably linked to the Parisian centre and the wider world through the mobile bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and the arrival of foreign visitors. The central pair of Jeanne and the English nobleman Arthur connects the localised plot to the story of Joan of Arc and the Arthurian legend.

Studying the intersection of the different narrative levels of the novel, Sand's first attempt at a roman-feuilleton, offers a reflection on the tense relationship between creating fiction and writing history. This paper presents Jeanne as a fundamentally cosmopolitan text, questioning the stability of national boundaries and emphasising France's interconnected history with England.

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

Tuesday 1 November (4th Week) 5pm - 6.30pm

"Une Imagination Réglée": The Role of Imagined Paintings in Diderot's Salons

Rachel Skokowski (University College, Oxford) 

Originally published as part of Grimm's Correspondance littéraire, Diderot's Salons were ostensibly intended to provide descriptions of real paintings displayed at the Salon for readers who could not visit the exhibitions themselves. However, these descriptions of real artworks are often interrupted and overshadowed by descriptions of paintings that were never exhibited on the walls of the Salon Carré, unusual entities that masquerade as artworks, yet exist only in Diderot's imagination. 

My paper examines the phenomenon of these “imagined paintings” in detail for the first time. While scholars have noted the existence of imagined paintings, no one has yet investigated how and why Diderot constructs these strange objects, what Phillipe Déan calls "aberration[s] ontologique[s]." My paper explores the importance of imagined paintings for understanding larger issues in the Salons, such as the position Diderot takes as a writer and critic, and the role of the imagination. I will consider in particular the unusual term of the "imagination réglée," introduced in conjunction with imagined paintings in the Salon de 1767, which I argue acts as the ultimate manifestation of Diderot's quest to harness the unique strengths of poet and painter.

Redefining the Composer’s Voice in A.E.M. Grétry’s Mémoires

Jonathan Huff (King's College, London) 

The life of the Liégeois composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813) is an intriguing (if disconcerting) testament to the fragility of celebrity. Grétry is hardly a household name, and yet during his lifetime he enjoyed fame across Europe as the pre-eminent composer of opéra-comique. If, however, his opéras-comiques are yet to enjoy the status they deserve, Grétry’s Mémoires (published in three volumes between 1789 and 1797) remain all but unknown.

The obscurity of these Mémoires belies their striking radicalty: in a text which one would expect to contain a preponderance of autobiography, his commentary covers a broad range of subjects from aesthetics to psychology, with Grétry adopting the role of sociologist, architect, aesthetician, theatre director, and more besides.  This is all the more remarkable because during the eighteenth century, such subjects—and the freedom to move between them with impunity—were traditionally the prerogative of men-of-letters. They were certainly not under the jurisdiction of composers, who, according to Rousseau, were simply to ‘compose music or make the rules of composition.’

Employing the term ‘voice’ as metaphor with which to bind up the relevant issues of compositional agency, subjectivity, positionality, and responsibility, I argue that this text deserves greater recognition as a remarkable moment in the development of the composer’s voice; as a bold attempt to enlarge the composer’s authority over areas of his art traditionally considered off-limits, and in this way to redefine the composer’s profession at the dawn of a new era.

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

Tuesday 18 October (2nd Week) 5pm - 6.30pm

'La Mettrie's radical materialism in L’Homme Machine'

Audrey Borowski, (Queen’s College, Oxford)

The 18^th century emerged as the golden age of French materialism. Within this context of ‘mechanization of the world-picture’ (in the words of E. J. Dijksterhuis), the French philosopher Descartes in his Discourse on the Method and Treatise on Man postulated an essentially mechanistic take of human physiology. For him the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead one was ‘the difference between a watch or other automaton when it is wound up… and when it is broken.’ Man only differed from animals in that he had been endowed with a soul which provided him with consciousness, reasoned thought and the ability to communicate. The French doctor Julien Offray de la Mettrie simultaneously extended and vitalized what be perceived as Descartes’ ‘dead mechanism’. In the process he reconciled philosophy with medicine by naturalizing the former and displacing all metaphysical and theological accounts. A military doctor, philosopher, pamphleteer, La Mettrie was an outsider intent on observing, experimenting, deconstructing, polemicizing and reforming. With L’Homme Machine, he forged his own particular brand of radical materialism, one which paradoxically incorporated a vitalist element and veered into the sensuous.

 ‘Tableaux rapides: Théodore de Banville as lanternist and reluctant prose poet’

Natasha Ryan (St Anne’s, Oxford)

In his ‘Petit traité de poésie française’, Théodore de Banville declares that there is no such thing as prose poetry. However, twelve years later he published his own collection of prose poems, La Lanterne magique. Banville’s title demonstrates a fascination with optical devices during the nineteenth century, when lens technology improved substantially and was used in the development of photography, microscopic and telescopic research, and ultimately the cinematograph. The magic lantern, already a well-established optical device and a common domestic feature, was the natural precursor to cinema. Its ability to project images in succession, along with its cultural prominence and its association with the camera obscura, means that it contributes to contemporaneous debates about the relationship between visual art and technology, which had been shaken by the arrival of photography. By extension, these debates were applied to writing, with particular attention paid to the effect new visual technologies had on literary form: Banville’s Lanterne magique exemplifies this. I examine the relationship between poetic form and magic lantern technology in the late nineteenth century. Taking Banville’s collection as illustrative of this relationship, I explore the magic lantern as a metaphor through which Banville processed his changing attitude towards prose poetry.

French Graduate Seminar 

Michaelmas Term 2016

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

2^nd Week – 18 October

Audrey Borowski, (Queen’s College, Oxford) 'La Mettrie's radical materialism in L’Homme Machine'

Natasha Ryan (St Anne’s, Oxford), ‘Tableaux rapides: Théodore de Banville as lanternist and reluctant prose poet’

4^th Week – 1 November

Rachel Skokowski (University College, Oxford), ‘Une Imagination Réglée: The Role of Imagined Paintings in Diderot's Salons.’

Jonathan Huff (King’s College, London), ‘Redefining the Composer’s Theatre Voice in A.E.M. Grétry’s Mémoires’

6^th Week – 15 November

James Illingworth (Queen’s University, Belfast), ‘Lifting the Veil: George Sand's Mythopoetic Bodies’

Stacie Allan (University of Bristol), ‘National Histories and Transnational Myths in George Sand's Jeanne’