Tuesday 22nd May
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Alice Bibbings (St. Hugh's) - 'Theories of the Comic in 19th-Century France'

Stendhal was not alone in predicting an uncertain future for laughter when he declared: ‘La comédie est impossible en 1836’. An absence of gaiety, malignant derision, a lack of simple amusement – such were the commonly located symptoms of what scholars have since diagnosed as la crise du rire of the nineteenth century that gave rise to a distinctly modern form of laughter. The period that saw the crystallisation of le rire moderne also saw writers and philosophers attempt to theorise laughter on multiple occasions. In this seminar, I shall present three examples of such theorisations, each quite different in terms of scope as well as historical and artistic contexts: Stendhal’s ‘Le rire’ in Racine et Shakespeare (1823-25); Paul Scudo’sPhilosophie du rire (1840); and Baudelaire’s ‘De l’essence du rire’ (1855). While these texts all draw on pre-existing notions of laughter (e.g. laughter as profoundly human, as a demonstration of relative superiority, as a response to perceived disharmony), I shall argue that these ideas take on a new significance in a society of mass culture in which laughter is understood as a telling social marker and questions of aesthetic value are considered persistently in terms of their social dimensions. Examining how these works attach aesthetic and moral values to different types of rire, I shall propose that the hierarchisation of laughter is key to understanding the ambivalent position occupied by comedy as a literary genre at different moments during the nineteenth century.

Rebekah Vince (University of Warwick) - 'Beyond the Récit de filiation: Affiliative Memory in Valérie Zenatti's Mensonges [Lies](2011)'

Valérie Zenatti’s novella Mensonges [Lies] (2011) combines biography, autobiography, and fiction in its account of Ukranian-Israeli Aharon Appelfeld’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and the author’s own mediatized encounter with the catastrophe through the American television series Holocaust (1978). As well as their mutual connection to the Holocaust, albeit once removed for Valérie, a link can be made between Aharon’s experience upon arrival in British Mandate Palestine in the 1940s as a young Holocaust survivor and Valérie’s experience upon arrival to Israel in the 1980s as a French Jew of North African descent. Both had to denounce their diasporic identity and assume the Zionist ideology of the “New Jew”with its mandate to forget the past. Paradoxically, it is Valérie’s lack of connection to the catastrophic past of European Jews that excludes her from the Israeli collective which by the 1980s had absorbed Holocaust memory into its national identity, whereas Aharon was marginalized for having such a connection. In this article, I employ Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, particularly her theorisation of “filial memory” and “affiliative memory” (2008: 114). In so doing, I argue that Mensonges can be read as a récit d’affiliation, an extension of the récit de filiation, which encompasses the autobiographical narrator’s appropriation of Aharon Appelfeld’s memory alongside her own family story, raising ethical questions while demonstrating the creative potential of transgenerational and cross-cultural encounter.

Tuesday 8th May
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Sam Gormley (Merton) - 'Antoine Volodine, Dead or Alive'

In this rough paper, I sketch out briefly some of the ways in which we might think through the question of “life” in Antoine Volodine’s Terminus radieux (2014). The explicitly magical elements of this novel are present chiefly in the form of mutated life-forms, transformed through centuries of exposure to nuclear radiation. Possessing uncanny abilities over life itself, the novel’s antagonist positions himself as a sovereign force with the power to both kill and reanimate others at will. The ensuing flattening of the difference between life and death, common throughout Volodine’s “post-exotic” universe, nonetheless opens up a space of potential dissidence against this domination, in which the creativity of fiction itself plays a significant role.

Sarah Jones (Oriel) - 'Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France'

This paper brings together the medical humanities, the socio-cultural history of late eighteenth and early nineteenth medicine, and nineteenth-century French literary studies to examine the importance of narrativity in both the philosophy of medical science and in the novel. Beginning with the narrative turn in twentieth- and twenty-first century in the medical humanities, I outline the newfound emphasis placed on the patient’s illness narrative. I then argue that a similar narrativity is present in the quasi-science of mesmerism, the eighteenth-century antecedent of hypnotism and psychoanalysis. Analysing the historical documents of Franz Anton Mesmer, his followers, and detractors, I suggest the eroticization of the medical rapport between practitioner and subject as central to the medical phenomenon of animal magnetism. I then turn to the role played by mesmerism in the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), with a particular focus on the Vautrin trilogy (Le Père Goriot (1830), Illusions perdues (1837-43), and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-47). Despite the direct influence of mesmerist ideas on Balzac’s work, I point towards how Balzac’s novels represent a significant departure from the heterosexual matrix commonplace to contemporary criticisms of Mesmerism. In contrast to critical scholarship that usually places the nineteenth-century novel alongside the modernization and scientization of medicine from the Enlightenment onwards, I thus argue that both modes are in fact deeply invested in how narrative points towards, but fails to elucidate, the unknowable and unsayable aspects of life, gender, sex, and power.

French Graduate Seminar
Trinity 2018

5.15pm-6.30pm, The Hovenden Room, All Soul’s College

Tuesday 24th April

5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Olivia Madin (Wadham) - Frolicks and «frotterie»: Staging Rabelais in the French Court (1628-1643)

The early seventeenth-century saw the production and performance of two ‘ballets de cour’ inspired by Rabelais’ work: Le Ballet des Andouilles (1628) and Le Ballet de la Sibylle de Panzoust (1643). These two ballets, which exist now in the form of their accompanying scripts, drew on and adapted episodes from Rabelais’ work. What is particularly interesting about them, however, is that both ballets specifically address a predominantly female audience, employing the language of secrecy, temptation and moderation in order to guide women in their interaction with Rabelais’ text. Much like the rest of the evidence surrounding Rabelais’ reception amongst women in early modern France, these ballets have been neglected by criticism. Such instances of re-appropriation not only help us to re-examine the history of Rabelais’ reception, but also help us to reconsider the rhetoric of gender in Rabelais’ original text.

'Graduate Students Anonymous': A roundtable Q&A