Tuesday 7th March 2023, 5:15-6:30pm 

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Elly Walters (Wadham): ‘C’est une danse de ressac, c’est un ballet de marée’: Water, Dance, and Nathacha Appanah’ 

This paper considers the symbiosis of water, dance, and traumatic memory in Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah’s Rien ne t’appartient (2021). Beginning in France, the text follows Vijaya, a recent widow in deep psychological distress. Speaking in the first-person, she relays her grief alongside an ebb-and-flow of clarity, her mental processes skewed by panic, intrusive thoughts, hallucinations, and an unshakeable sense that she has lived through this before. Then, compelled by a feeling she cannot explain, she lifts herself from the sofa, removes her clothes, and starts to dance, moving through the poses and gestures of the Bharatanatyam she was taught as a child. As the novel progresses, the reader learns of the violences defining Vijaya’s early life in Sri Lanka: the murder of her family, and subsequent years of abuse in solitude, preceding the Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck the coast on 26 December 2004. Vijaya survives these crises, and survives a husband that helped her bury memory of them. In the wake of his death, the contours of Vijaya’s traumatic past resurface – often fleetingly, emerging and retracting like the tide, undulating in ‘une danse de ressac, un ballet de marée’. In this paper, my interest lies in how the shoring of Vijaya’s memory spans trauma and nostalgia; I argue that the process of remembering takes on the rhythms and movements of both water and dance, whose mutual fluidities see mind, muscle, and mer sink into one. 

Tuesday 7th February 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Violeta Garrido (University of Granada): ‘Conditions for a Materialist Aesthetics: Consciousness and Unconsciousness in the Althusserian Reading of Brecht’  

In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson observes that the practice of “metacommentary”, that is, the re-evaluation of the interpretative methods overlaid on texts, illuminates the theoretical positions of the “commentators” themselves. In this paper, I will explore Althusser’s theorisation of ideology by studying his comments on Brechtian theatre, which he deeply admired. In particular, I will interrogate Althusser’s claim that Brecht’s theatre “produces a critique of the illusions of consciousness” in light of his thoughts on the mechanism of interpellation and the unconscious nature of ideological activity. 

Liam Johnston-McCondach (New College): Le Plaisir de Brecht: Roland Barthes and Literary Politics 

When the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht travelled to Paris in 1954 to direct his play Mother Courage, the production was heralded in some quarters as a ‘révolution brechtienne’ and dismissed elsewhere as the beginning of an ‘épidémie brechtienne’. In the years following the Mother Courage production, however, Brecht’s profound influence on French culture quickly became apparent. Brecht came to embody a strikingly modern form of literary engagement. His work not only attracted the attention of dramatists and practitioners of theatre but also provoked the interest of writers seeking to theorise and rethink the political possibilities of literature. Chief amongst the latter group was Roland Barthes who, through a series of influential reviews and essays, did much to shape the image of Brecht in France. In this paper, I will consider how the appearance of Brecht’s dramatic and theoretical work in French helped Barthes to respond to pressing political and literary concerns during the early stages of his career. With its pleasurable fusion of politics and aesthetics, Brecht’s writing provided a key reference point for Barthes’s experimentation with a variety of critical idioms and perspectives. Through an analysis of Barthes’s engagement with Brecht, I will also draw on broader processes of cultural exchange and developments in criticism during a period of national and international political upheaval. 

Tuesday 24th January 2023, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Joanna Beaufoy (University of Copenhagen): ‘Doing things with light: the soirée as a luxotope (1841-1913)’  

Both the soirée as an ‘espace de temps compris entre le déclin du jour et le moment où l'on se couche’ and the soirée as a ‘spectacle, fête, réunion qui a lieu le soir, en général après dîner’ (Larousse) depend on the possibilities of seeing during and after the setting of the sun. The semantics of soirée are therefore intimately connected to the development of lighting technologies, and the mass lighting of Paris, beginning in 1841, introduced a new luminous era for the city, generating spaces for the soirée that took form in literature. This paper will first remind the audience of scenes in Proust, Zola, and Maupassant where the authors produce the soirée with light, such as by blurring distinctions like indoor and outdoor, public and private, producing certain tones and colours through different lighting technologies, playing with time, and interiorising light as part of style indirect libre.  

The paper will then propose a new theoretical approach: building on Bakhtin’s notion of ‘chronotope’ (1978), part of a ‘geographical turn’ (Moretti, 2000), the paper proposes a ‘luxotope’. A chronotope is a meeting of time and space which is repeated across literature, for example, a village, or a castle. In the ‘luxotope’, there is a space-time assemblage that is æstheticised by light, for example, a soirée in this period of Parisian history. By identifying the soirée of this period as a ‘luxotope’, the paper argues that the development of the soirée by way of artificial lighting in this period afforded new narrative possibilities in literature and invites discussion of other ‘luxotopes’. 

Arthur Houplain (Université Rennes 2 / Université de Bâle): « Le “demi-jour”, l’Allemagne et le fantastique. À propos d’une remarque de Gautier sur Hoffmann » / ‘“Half-light”, Germany, and the fantastic. About a remark on Hoffmann by Gautier’ 

Streetlamps, Voltaire, the French language, and the press – what do these things have in common? Gautier’s answer is: light. And it is specifically the French taste for light that he deems responsible for the absence of an authentic fantastic movement in France in an article related to Hoffmann published in the Chronique de Paris of 14 August 1836. The paper aims to show that the elements incriminated by Gautier have a true consistency from the perspective of the romantic and fantastic canons. In so doing, the presentation intends to bring out the importance of light as an aesthetic criterion, with particular emphasis on the role of lamps. Far from being a purely practical issue linked to the management of lighting, artificial light also raises debates implying artistic reflections, and involves a set of problems intertwining ideology, judgement taste, art, and literature.

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

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Lynn Nguyen (St. John’s College) — ‘Recovering memory through the archival  enquête: Christophe Boltanski and Alice Zeniter’ 

From the World Wars to the Shoah to decolonization movements, major twentieth-century upheavals have informed the so-called archival turn in literature: the contemporary rise of writing inflected by engagement with the archive as not just a source for historical research, but a subject worthy of storytelling and critique in itself. The archive’s figuration in literary narratives that often depict an enquête, an investigation, implies a concern with being able to access, understand, and recover unknown histories. Through a comparative analysis of two enquête narratives within the archival turn – Christophe Boltanski’s La Cache (2015) and Alice Zeniter’s L'Art de perdre (2017) –this paper examines the relations among historical knowledge, writerly creation, and the ethical recovery of memory. The texts are concerned with reconstructing the lives of predecessors marginalized or threatened by war and forced migration, and for whom preservation of memory is now precarious, as their experiences have been overlooked by existing official documentation. Though the archive allows for contact with the past, the writers critique its incomplete, fragmented nature through the use of fractured temporality and self-reflexive narration. Where the historical archive is silent, alternative archives of fiction that provide historical knowledge via analogy substitute, albeit imperfectly, for what is missing. Attuned to the nuanced capacity of these substitutions to capture lived realities, the writers incorporate silences into their narratives, their opacity revealing the illusion of overly simplified reconstructions of history. 

Tess Eastgate (Keble College) — ‘Trust or “confiance” in Marie-Antoinette’s correspondence with Antoine Barnave’ 

From July 1791 up to January 1792, Marie-Antoinette corresponded with a politician named Antoine Barnave; this period is sometimes referred to as their ‘government by letter’ (Hardman, 2019: 242). While Marie-Antoinette and her family lived heavily guarded in the Tuileries, Barnave attempted to shape the new Constitution favourably towards the monarchy, and direct the king and queen’s behaviour in such a way as to improve public opinion towards them. Since the two correspondents could not speak in person, mistrust could easily develop: as Barnave put it, ‘il est trop facile de s’entendre mal lorsqu’on ne peut jamais se parler’ (ed. Lever, 2005: 589). In the letters, Barnave repeatedly pleads for Marie-Antoinette’s trust, and accuses her of losing faith in him because of a letter of 25 July: was he correct in this accusation? Meanwhile, Marie-Antoinette admonishes Barnave for not keeping her informed, and – while employing various methods to depict herself as trustworthy – is occasionally duplicitous.

Tuesday 1 November, 5:15–6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College 

Hestia Zhang (St. Peter’s) — ‘Display in Parisian Parks: Assertion of Bourgeois Identity, 1848-1914’  

Throughout the nineteenth century, French regimes kept renovating the newly democratised royal gardens in Paris to tackle the growing concerns of public health, urban scenery and political tensions. Particularly, the Second Empire and the Third Republic created new parks and squares, redesigned the suburban woodlands, and installed various outdoor entertainment in the rapidly urbanizing metropolis, marking the second half of the century as the prime era of public gardens and outdoor leisure. This public space frequently featured in literary and visual works of the period as a perfect setting for Parisian drama, staging all the “corruption, glamour, political manoeuvring, and false pretence”. In this presentation, I will examine the representation of green space in nineteenth-century French novels and paintings, especially Zola’s La Curée (1871), which opens with a carriage congestion in the Bois de Boulogne, and contemporaneous paintings of modern life by Manet, Degas, et cetera. Analysing the importance of displaying fashion, wealth, and social connections in the social game of looking and being seen, I argue that the public parks and gardens catered to the emerging middle class’s need to affirm their bourgeois rites and identity. 

Becky Short (St. Hilda’s) — ‘Just a Spoonful of Sugar? Horatian Satire in Le Livre de quatre couleurs (1760)’    

In 1759 and 1760, Catholic moralist Louis-Antoine Caraccioli published a visually-striking series of chromatic texts. The first was printed in green ink, the second in pink, and the third – Le Livre de quatre couleurs – in red, yellow, green, and brown. The works’ ludic form complements their content, which gives a whimsical depiction of French society and its frivolous concern with outward appearances. Many scholars have interpreted the function of colour in the texts as strategic, arguing that it serves to seduce a worldly readership before exposing them to the ‘true’ moralising message of the texts. Such a view places Caraccioli’s work in the Lucretian didactic tradition; the colour, it is suggested, is a honeyed veneer concealing the text’s bitter medicine. This interpretation has been supported by scholars’ engagement with the epigraph to Le Livre de quatre couleurs – a quotation from Horace’s Sermones in which he alludes to Lucretius: Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat? ‘What prevents a person from speaking the truth while smiling?’ Caraccioli, however, changes the first word of the question to Ridendo, rendering its translation ‘What prevents a person from speaking the truth by means of smiling?’ This alteration, which has been overlooked until now, demands a new reading. The author is not subscribing to Lucretian didacticism here, but rather is challenging it. This paper will argue that colour does not function as an accidental disguise, but rather is itself a vector of meaning. In interrogating how this interpretation changes our understanding of the texts, I will in turn assess Caraccioli’s contribution to the broader reception of Epicurean moral philosophy and Horatian satire in the long eighteenth century, along with thinkers such as Shaftesbury and La Rochefoucauld.  

Tuesday 18th October 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Tuesday 18th October 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Nora Baker — 'Revisiting Early Drafts for the Thesis Write-Up'

As she is preparing to submit her thesis, which investigates Huguenot refugee memoirs written after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Nora will discuss the final stages of a multi-year research project, focusing on strategies for dealing with large bodies of material and restructuring drafts in the process of ‘writing up’. 

Roundtable Discussion

Nora's presentation was followed by a discussion in which students introduced themselves, reflected on the year ahead, and discussed current research projects.  

 

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.