Tuesday 1st March 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Anna Wilmore (St Anne's) - ‘Cité de dieu en tout temps pure et belle’: The Virgin Mary as City in Oxford MS Douce 379

Douce 379 is a manuscript sitting in the Bodleian library containing 91 poems about the Virgin Mary presented at the Rouen Puy in 1511. During the late medieval period, many of the cities in Northern France had their own Puy, a confraternity dedicated to the Virgin Mary which organised poetry competitions in her honour. Rouen's Puy, specifically devoted to Mary as the Immaculate Conception, grew in grandeur and increasingly attracted poets from across France. In 1511, the year of this recueil, the King's Secretary, André de la Vigne, competed and won the most prestigious prize, but perhaps more interesting is that most of the entrants were local 'amateur' poets, committed to poetic production within the urban institution of the puy. In this presentation, I will use the collection of lyric in Douce 379 to examine how Marian poetry could be used as a vehicle for exploring urban identity and reflecting the urban space in which the competition took place. In particular, I will consider the importance of images of enclosure and the use of artisanal language within the poetry of the Puy to argue that the figure of Mary was particularly apt for such urban poetry and could represent the city itself.  

Roger Navas (Trinity) - The Interpretation of “Don Quijote” in France, 1790 – 1810 

In a 1673 Aristotelian treatise, René Rapin claimed that Cervantes, “ayant esté traitté avec quelque mépris par le Duc de Lerme, premier Ministre de Philippe III”, wrote Don Quijote as “une Satire très-fine de sa nation”. A satire of a prominent court figure, of the Spanish noble class in general and of the entire country, “Rapin’s Quijote” did not pose any ideological problems in early modern France: that version of Cervantes’ novel could be integrated into the dominant anti-Spanish discourse, which ran parallel to the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries. Indeed, Rapin’s ideas were hugely influential. It was not until the nineteenth century that the views on the novel substantially changed. Instead of a funny satire of Spanish nobility, a light book of entertainment that did not warrant special critical attention, it was then read as a timeless reflection on human condition, a complex work, both comic and tragic. This paper will examine texts on Don Quijote by Antoine-Vincent Arnault (1800) and Charles Marie de Féletz (1806) to argue that the concept of satire itself evolved at the start of the century, allowing for the Romantic rediscovery of Cervantes’s novel two decades later. 

 

  

 Tuesday 15th February 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Michelle Hsu (Wadham) - Romancing the Chinese Empire and Gender in Victor Segalen and George Soulié de Morant 

    Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a doctor of the French navy who taught medicine and carried out archeological missions in China. George Soulié de Morant (1878-1955) worked for the French diplomatic corps as an interpreter and is known for his introduction of acupuncture into France in the 1930s. Both of them were proficient in Chinese and wrote extensively about China, using the Chinese empire during the Boxer uprising or revolutionary upheavals as the decor of their novels. In this presentation, I look into how Segalen’s René Leys (1922) and Soulié de Morant’s Bijou-de-ceinture ou le Jeune Homme qui porte robe, se poudre et se farde (1925) stage various forms of gender crossings and alter the terms in which social and gender hierarchies are evoked through the shift of cultural perspective. I will first show how René Leys, the eponymous hero of Segalen’s novel, uses information as capital to gain leverage in his homosocial relationship with Segalen the narrator. Then, I will discuss how the effeminate masculinity of the transvestite performer of Chinese opera in Bijou-de-ceinture is endowed with nationalistic agency through the gaze of a European protector amidst xenophobic resentment. What kind of gender identities can be gleaned from these readings? Even if Segalen and Soulié de Morant belong to the same generation and share an interest in Chinese culture, their approaches to writing differ from each other significantly. They are both concerned with incorporating the culture of the Other, whether of class, ethnicity, language or sexuality. This paper explores how they position themselves within frameworks of representation marked by romance, fantasy, and sinologist knowledge. 

 

 Tuesday 1st February 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Clara Baudet (Jesus) - Les lazzaroni napolitains dans la littérature de voyage des XVIIIème et XIXème siècles/ Neapolitan lazzaroni in 18th and 19th century travel literature 

This presentation will be in French with Q&A in French and English.

Upon reaching the city of Naples - the last destination on the Grand Tour itinerary - 18th and early 19th century travellers were greeted by a picturesque crowd of lazzaroni, which seemed to be purposelessly roaming the city streets. Despite being socially and politically marginalised, lazzaroni were at the centre of Neapolitan urban life and lodged themselves in the imagination of French, English and German visitors. This paper will investigate how travel literature shaped representations of the lowest rungs of Neapolitan society. While often depicted as a dangerous and lazy mob in travellers’ accounts, representations of street people shifted towards a more positive view thanks to the rise of Romanticism. The lazzarone thus came to embody the remnant of a primitive stage of humanity still untouched by civilisation. Works by Sade, de Staël, Dumas, Nerval as well as Goethe and Hester Piozzi shaped the myth of the lazzarone. Not only do these accounts provide an avenue to explore European stereotypes and the embeddedness of nature and civilisation, but they also encapsulate an original discourse on ethnology. 

Elly Walters (Wadham) - ‘Je sentais le poids de la mer sur ma poitrine’: Marie Darrieussecq and the depths of despair 

‘The face of the sea is always changing’, wrote Rachel Carson in The Sea Around Us (1951). And just as the water’s surface surges and swells, our mindscapes are ever-shifting – they gush and flourish, crash and flounder. This paper explores the dynamic interplay between water and (body)mind in the fiction of contemporary French novelist Marie Darrieussecq, with a focus on her novel La Mer à l’envers (2019) and short story ‘Encore là’ (2006). Anchored in a corpus that treats themes of anxiety, depression, anorexia, dissociation, trauma, and grief, these two works are epitomic of Darrieussecq’s water-soaked writing of distress and disorder. Whilst ‘Encore là’ counts its protagonist’s lost kilos as she stews by the coast in post-partum depression, La Mer à l’envers tracks a mother’s disordered eating and parallel fixation (quite literally, ‘elle fixe son regard’) on the sea. Across both texts water serves as an immediate distraction from hunger and an abject reminder of crisis and mortality, such that Darrieussecq’s protagonists walk the shoreline between loss and immensity, between suffering and relief. 

   

 Tuesday 23rd November 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Anna Glieden (Oriel) - History of Polemic? The ideal ‘homme de lettres’ Voltaire in Irailh’s Querelles littéraires (1761)

Even though the Querelles littéraires, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire des Révolutions de la République des Lettres, depuis Homère jusqu’à nos jours (1761) by the Abbé Augustin Simon Irailh is considered the first history of querelles littéraires that marked the Republic of Letters and is frequently referred to as such, it has rarely been looked at in greater detail. On closer examination, the historicity of this anthology must be questioned. On the one hand, Irailh’s anthology shows that an intellectual pursuit emerged decades earlier through querelles littéraires and has conditioned the ‘gens de lettres’ ever since and, thus, corresponds to the development of a ‘literary field’ such as Bourdieu defines it a century later. On the other hand, Irailh’s anthology is not a real historical narrative; it is above all a polemical writing that engages itself in querelles littéraires. Behind the veneer of a historical anthology of quarrels and in a time where Voltaire was well known for his querelles littéraires, Irailh not only legitimises the querelleur Voltaire, but even elevates him to a mythical figure, to the ideal ‘homme de lettres’ of a new ‘literary field’.

Harriet McKinley Smith (Jesus) - 'But O! He could not speak': the mute voice in Mary Robinson's 'The Savage of Aveyron

(This paper will be given via Zoom)

In 1800, the English Romantic poet Mary Robinson learned of a French feral child found living in the woods near Saint Sernin. The real-life boy’s discovery inspired her to write the ballad ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ and the poem raised several questions about the child’s rudimentary existence: who, or what, was he? How did he come to be in the woods? How can he communicate his story if he could not speak? The boy’s mutism is central to his characterisation within the poem, reflecting simultaneously his natural innocence, but also his experience of trauma; his mother is murdered by ‘ruffians three’ and he is then forced to live a solitary life in the woods. This paper examines how Robinson portrays the feral child’s identity to navigate the complex relationship between mutism and narrative voice.   

  

 Tuesday 9th November 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nicola Holt (Wolfson College) - What can literature do that philosophy can’t? Entering the hybrid worlds of Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch

The notion and value of literature has of course been contested ever since the days of Plato’s ‘ancient quarrel’ and his (very poetic) banishing of the poets. What makes literature distinct from philosophy? What can literature do that philosophy can’t? Why might a philosopher choose also to write literature? And who decides – whose quarrel is it anyway? My project approaches this ‘ancient quarrel’ through the specific lens of two hybrid ‘novelist-philosophers’ of the twentieth century: Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch. In this presentation, I shall begin to explore some of the key metaphors or fundamental symbols used by these two hybrid practitioners in their lectures and philosophical discourse to convey their own thinking on the nature of literature. What do these metaphors tell us about their conception of literature as an art form?

Tristan Alonge (Université de la Réunion; Maison Française d'Oxford) - Les origins grecques de la tragédie française : une occasion manquée / The Greek origins of French Tragedy: a missed opportunity

(This paper will be presented in French with questions in English and French)

Despite a promising start, the return of Greek tragedy to France abruptly faded from 1550, leaving the way open for Seneca as the only ancient model in the birth and development of French tragedy. How to justify the astonishing silence which separates the first translations of Sophocles and Euripides, under François I^er, from the success of Racine’s Phèdre in 1677? The explanation sketched out by Alonge’s recent book (Paris, Hermann, Nov. 2021) decompartmentalizes the fields of research to show that the fluctuating interest in Athenian theatre stems from extra-literary preferences: behind the passion for Greek hides another, unavowable passion for the reading of the Bible in the original language. A dangerous passion that the Council of Trent was quick to erase for more than a century, thus delaying the outbreak of a French tragedy inspired by Athenian models. The story of a missed opportunity.  

 

 Tuesday 26th October 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Alex Lawrence (Keble College) - 'Un maistre bec': confessional appropriations of the Toucan in seventeenth-century France

The ‘discovery’ of the Toucan by European explorers in the sixteenth century sparked a series of imaginative responses across literary genres and cultural media. First appearing in the texts of travellers and natural historians, the bird became a subject of interest for confessional writers -- both Catholic and Huguenot -- by the turn of the seventeenth century. How did these writers interpret this bizarre creature? In what kinds of context did they place it? Importantly, what were the principal differences between Protestant and Catholic representations of the bird, and how might these inform our understanding of the confessional conflict in the broader sense? This paper addresses such questions through a selection of sources, including those of the Reformist pastor Jean de Léry, the Capuchin friar Claude d’Abbeville, and the Jesuit emblematist Nicolas Caussin.

Following Q&A and a short break, we will move to a roundtable which will give all attendees the change to introduce themselves and their research topic. 

 Tuesday 8th June 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Kristina Astrom (University of Glasgow) - '[P]li sur pli, pli selon pli': The folding of epistolary and pictorial space in Stéphane Mallarmé's Les Loisirs de la poste and James McNeill Whistler's Thames Set

The nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his friend the painter James McNeill Whistler were both fascinated by the limits of poetic and aesthetic form and sought to experiment with the contextual and framing elements of their respective works. In particular, Mallarmé's collection of octosyllabic quatrains, Les Loisirs de la poste (1894), grapples with the different addresses of a poetic work, as the poems were written on envelopes and sent through the post, with the quatrain replacing the address of the letter. The letter has this been folded inside out, transposing the subject content with the frame or carrier of the poem. In a similar vein, Whistler's Thames Set etchings The Lime Burner (1859) and Old Putney Bridge (1879) manifest a folding aesthetic through their portrayal of blank spaces and vertical lines, in which it could be argued that the frame becomes the central subject of the etching. Here, Gilles Deleuze's notion of the fold, as inferred from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's concept of the 'Baroque', makes visible a constant folding as central to poetic and aesthetic signification in that the fold generates a new meaning between text or artwork, reader(s) or viewer(s) and context(s), each time that it is read or viewed. In this paper, I will contend that Mallarmé's postal poems and Whistler's Thames Set etchings enact a folding which disregards the distinction between poem and addressee, subject and frame, and instead foregrounds their own status as verbal and visual media. This enfolding of text and artwork, along with their contexts broadens our understanding of modernist aesthetics, further opening up the fields of literary and art historical research to interdisciplinary enquiries.