Society for French Studies

48th Annual Conference
University of Birmingham
2-4 July 2007

Monday 2nd July

12.00 Registration

1:00 Lunch for Postgraduate Students

2.00 Welcome by the President of the Society for French Studies, Simon Gaunt (King’s College London)

2:05 Plenary Lecture 1

Chair: Simon Gaunt (King’s College London)

Judith Still (University of Nottingham)

‘“Eating People is Wrong”: Enlightenment, Hospitality, and the New World’

3.30 Afternoon Tea

4.00 – 5.30 PANEL SESSIONS 1

Postcolonial Memories 1    (Abstracts)

Chair: Nicholas Harrison (King’s College London)

Fiona Barclay (University of Glasgow)

‘Imaginative Rememberings: Writing Algeria in Hélène Cixous’s Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage’

Veronika Thiel (University of Vienna)

‘La réécriture de l’histoire et ses stratégies narratives dans les romans d’Assia Djebar’

Jennifer Lauren Williams (New York University)

‘Towards a poetics of post/colonial reconciliation: languages in twos or languages for twos in Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison’

Vichy and its legacies     (Abstracts)

Chair: Martyn Cornick (University of Birmingham)

Kay Chadwick (University of Liverpool)

‘Vichy, public opinion and memory: the case of Philippe Henriot’

Paul Cooke (University of Exeter)

‘Mauriac and the memory of Vichy’ 

Christopher Lloyd (Durham University)

‘The Defeat and Occupation of France: Representing the Crisis of Rights and Identity in Post-War French Fiction’

Exhibitions, installations and museum space   (Abstracts)

Chair: Kate Ince (University of Birmingham)

Jenny Chamarette (King’s College, Cambridge)

‘Varda’s Trinket Box: Nostalgia, Temporalised Space and the Cinematic Installation in L’Île et Elle’

Greg Kerr (Irish Research Council for the Humanities & Social Sciences/Trinity College, Dublin)

‘Some aesthetic discourses surrounding the Expositions Universelles in the writings of Théophile Gautier and Michel Chevalier’

Emma Wagstaff (University of Birmingham)

‘Exhibiting the livre d’artiste: Museums, the internet and touch’ 

Medical Culture in the medieval and early modern periods   (Abstracts)

Chair: Stephen Bamforth (University of Nottingham)

Pierre Levron

‘Du médecin à l’écrivain : transfert et diffusion des savoirs sur la mélancolie dans la littérature des douzième et treizième siècles’.

Hugh Roberts (University of Exeter)

‘Medicine and Nonsense in French Renaissance Mock-Prescriptions’ 

Alison Williams (Swansea University)

‘Rabelais’s Pharmacopoeia’ 

5.45 Plenary Lecture 2

Chair: Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool)

Chris Bongie (Queen’s University, Canada),

‘Haiti, France, and the (Same Old) “New Humanism”’

7:15 Reception (ERI Atrium) hosted by the Department of French Studies, CELC, University of Birmingham

8.00 Dinner

9.15 Informal Meeting for Postgraduate Students

Tuesday 3rd July

7.45 – 8.45 Breakfast

9.00 – 10.00 Annual General Meeting of the Society for French Studies

10.00 – 11.00 Coffee & Postgraduate Poster Session

11.00 - 1.00 PANEL SESSIONS 2

What is Theory   (Abstracts)

Chair: Michael Moriarty (Queen Mary University of London)

Sarah Kay (Princeton University)

‘Truth in Poetry and the Subject Supposed to Know’

Patrick ffrench (King’s College London)

‘Theory/Practice/Symptomatology’

Suzanne Dow (University of Nottingham)

‘Hard Times: Theory, Difficulty and Perversity’ 

Shakespeare and France    (Abstracts)

Chair: Henry Phillips (University of Manchester)

Nicole Fayard (University of Leicester)

‘France’s ‘other’ national playwright? The Performance of Shakespeare in France and the Shakespeare myth’

Elina Absalyamova (Paris 4/ Moscow State University)

‘“Le vol entrelacé d’archanges”: Shakespeare et Racine vus par Verlaine’

Claire Le Guillou

‘George Sand Shakespearienne’

Matthias Zach (Paris 3; Tübingen)

‘Shakespeare translation in post-war France: a matter of language crises?’

Monsters and Monstrosity    (Abstracts)

Chair: Jennifer Birkett (University of Birmingham)

Peter Cooke (University of Manchester)

‘Gustave Moreau’s Monsters: allegory and the sins of the flesh in Œdipe et le sphinx, Les Chimères  and Les Épreuves’

Michael Harrigan (University College, Dublin)

‘Bestes fort aprochantes de la raison: The Transformation of Monstruosité in the 17th-Century Voyage to the East’

Michael Seabrook (University of Southampton)

‘The Devil in the Detail:  Monstrosity and the Satanic in Flaubert’s Smarh’

Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, Finland)

 ‘Monstrosity and Otherness in Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes’

The 19th-c. novel: pretexts, intertexts, contexts     (Abstracts)

Chair: Alison Finch (Churchill College, Cambridge)

Tim Farrant (Pembroke College, Oxford) ‘Balzac, Champfleury, Flaubert: pretexts, contexts, intertexts’

Nigel Harkness (Queen’s University Belfast)

‘“Rêves de Pierre”: Materiality and Representation in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel’

Kate Griffiths (University of Wales, Bangor)

‘Nana: Copies and Originals’

Andrew Watts (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne)

‘A matter of (bad) taste?: Honoré de Balzac’s Contes drolatiques in England and America’

1.00 – 2.00 Lunch

2.00 – 3.30 PARALLEL SESSIONS 3

Postcolonial memories 2     (Abstracts)

Chair: Patrick Corcoran (Roehampton University)

Helen Vassallo (University of Exeter)

‘La mémoire dans la peau: Memory, identity and trauma in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué’

Alison Murray Levine (University of Virginia)

‘Ethnography and Colonial Memory: Marcel Griaule and Jean Rouch’

Bronwen Martin (Birkbeck, London)

‘Post/colonial memory in Le Clézio’s Révolutions’  

History and the Everyday    (Abstracts)

Chair: Michael Sheringham (All Souls College, Oxford)

Margaret Atack (University of Leeds)

‘Secrets and Lies:  Representing Everyday Life under the Occupation’ 

Sarah Tribout-Joseph (University of Edinburgh)

‘Houellebecq’s Configuration of the Everyday’ 

Síofra Pierse (University College Dublin)

‘Voltaire Historian and the dual anxieties of appeal and omission’ 

Queer theory     (Abstracts)

Chair: James Williams (Royal Holloway London)

Lisa Downing (University of Exeter)

‘Michel Foucault and the Queer Self/Other’

Hector Kollias (King’s College London)

‘Making the Gay Self: Constructionism and the Resistance to Theory in Didier Eribon’s work’

Jason Hartford (University of Sheffield)

‘Interaction and Transfer: On Queer Theory Finding Itself’

Les poètes maudits    (Abstracts)

Chair: Patrick McGuinness (St. Anne’s College, Oxford)

Pascal Brissette (Université McGill, Montréal)

‘La malédiction littéraire: Notes sur la constitution du mythe’ 

Patricia Marcoz

 ‘Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen ou les multiples revanches d’un poète-Caïn au début du XXe siècle’

Emilie Sitzia (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)

‘Mallarmé, Manet, poète maudit / peintre damné: Un dialogue interdisciplinaire’

3.30 Tea

4.00 – 5.30 Plenary 3 (Plenary panel)

Chair: Sarah Cooper (King’s College London)

Judith Mayne (Ohio State University)

Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College London)

Emma Wilson (Corpus Christi, Cambridge)

‘French, Film, and French Film: Teaching French Cinema Across Disciplines’

7:00 Reception sponsored by the Service Culturel of the French Embassy

8.00 Conference Dinner

Wednesday 4th July

7.45 – 8.45 Breakfast

9.00 – 11.00 PANEL SESSIONS 4

Remembering and forgetting in pre-modern literature    (Abstracts)

Chair: Bill Burgwinkle (King’s College, Cambridge)

Finn E. Sinclair (Girton College, Cambridge)

‘Froissart and the Re-remembering of Memory’

Luke Sunderland (King’s College London)

‘The Future Perfect Memory of Medieval Cycles: the case of the Cycle de Guillaume d'Orange’

Helen J. Swift (St Hilda’s College, Oxford)

‘Aussy poeut memoire choisir’: Recollecting and Re-Membering in late-medieval dits’

Jane Gilbert (University College London)

Roland and Memory

Diderot     (Abstracts)

Chair: Nicholas Cronk (Voltaire Institute, Oxford)

Natasha Lee (Princeton University)

‘Nature talks back, or Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets’

John Phillips (London Metropolitan University)

‘Women are from Venus : Fear of the Other in Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets’

Mariana Saad (University of Sussex)

‘Diderot et le cerveau - Structure de l'esprit, structure du cerveau dans le Rêve de d'Alembert’

Kate E. Tunstall (Worcester College, Oxford)

‘Reading Experience: Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles’

War and poetry    (Abstracts)

Chair: Eric Robertson (Royal Holloway London)

Luc Bonenfant (Université du Québec à Montréal)

« La poésie comme outil guerrier:

représentations et fonctions de la guerre chez Rimbaud »

Stephen Forcer (University of Birmingham)

'Mental Cases: Dada' 

Louise Frappier (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver)

‘Fureur guerrière et fureur poétique dans les Tragiques d’Aubigné’

Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe (Hertford College, Oxford)

‘War and Progress: Victor Hugo’s L’Année Terrible’ 

Parental paradigms in French literature and film    (Abstracts)

Chair: Diana Holmes (University of Leeds)

Gill Rye (Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London)

‘Lesbian mothering and the family in France’

Andrew Counter (Christ’s College, Cambridge)

‘Fallait pas me faire comme ça!’: ‘Malfunctions’ of Inheritance in Zola’s La Terre

Louise Hardwick (Trinity College, Oxford)

‘Absent fathers and estranged mothers in the work of Maryse Condé’ 

Joseph Mai (Clemson University)

‘“I don’t know”: Paternity in the Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’

11.00 Coffee

11.30 – 12.45 Plenary Lecture 4

Chair : Lucille Cairns (Durham University)

Didier Eribon

‘De la décolonisation de l'esprit : Sartre, Fanon, Foucault’

1.00 Lunch

End of Conference