Welcome and Acknowledgements

 

On behalf of the Society for French Studies, it is my pleasure to welcome delegates to our 50th annual conference, which will be held, very fittingly, at St Anne's College, Oxford, where the first conference of the Society took place half a century ago. This year's programme offers plenary lectures from Jacques Dubois, Anne Green, Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer and Patrick O'Donovan and the fields covered by their lectures range chronologically from nineteenth-century attitudes to technological change through to contemporary women's writing and contemporary philosophy. The presentation of Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer, general editor of the Cahiers Marcel Proust de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (Brepols Publishers-BnF), will focus on this major collaborative development in the publication of Proust's manuscripts. In addition, we have a full range of parallel sessions on medieval, pre-modern and modern literary and cultural topics, aimed at reflecting the spread of specialist research interests of our members and of the discipline.

 

It will also be a pleasure in this anniversary year to welcome the French Ambassador M. Maurice Gourdault-Montagne on Tuesday evening, both to the reception before dinner (generously hosted as ever by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy) and to our conference dinner.

 

Mindful of the future needs of the profession in this 50th anniversary year of the annual conference, the Society very much hopes that we will have the pleasure of welcoming many graduate student delegates to St Anne's, where the postgraduate poster session will again be a feature.

 

A special attraction this year will be the exciting range of exhibitions generously provided from within the University of Oxford and catering for a wide range of interests. These include displays at the Bodleian Library, the Voltaire Foundation and the Taylor Institution, as well as a tour of the Codrington Library in All Souls College.

 

The Society wishes to acknowledge the continuing generous support, material and otherwise, provided to the conference by the R.H. Gapper Charitable Trust and the Cultural Department of the French Embassy. We are also grateful to St. Anne's College and All Souls College for their generous support.

 

Edward Hughes

Monday 29th June

 

 

12.00   Registration

            Marquee

 

12.00   Session for Postgraduate Students, including lunch

            Seminar Room 1

 

12:30   Buffet lunch for all delegates

            Marquee

 

1.30          Welcome by the President of the Society for French Studies, Edward Hughes (Queen Mary, University of London)

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

1:35     Plenary Lecture 1

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair: Edward Hughes (Queen Mary, University of London)

 

Patrick O’Donovan (University College Cork)

            Title: Enlightened Moderns: Thinking and Doing        

 

2.45     Afternoon Tea and Postgraduate Poster Session

            Marquee

 

3.15     PANEL SESSIONS 1

 

 

After Aimé Césaire

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair: tbc

 

Jane Hiddleston (University of Oxford)

‘Aimé Césaire and Postcolonial Humanism’

 

Martin Munro (Florida State University)

‘Listening to Aimé Césaire’

 

Kristen Stromberg Childers (University of Pennsylvania)

‘After Aimé Césaire: Historical Reflections on Post-colonial Martinique’

 

 

Proust and the Transformation of the Epic

Seminar Room 1

 

Chair: tbc

 

Catherine Burke (University College Cork; IRCHSS-funded)

‘Proust’s Homer: An Epic Transformation’       

 

Fiona Cox (University College Cork)

‘haec olim meminisse iuvabit – Proust’s Ghostly Cities’

 

Kathleen Hamel (University College Cork)

‘Art, Survival and the Myth of Pygmalion’

 

 

La Pensée du théâtre

Seminar Room 2

 

Chair : Tim Mathews (University College, London)

 

Nicolas Doutey (Université de Paris IV)

‘Le concept de scène à l’épreuve de l’expérience beckettienne’

 

Thomas Newman (Université de Rouen)

‘Le sort d'autrui chez Genet et Hegel’

 

Nicolas Ferrier (Université de Paris IV)

‘L’influence du théâtre dans la pensée de Guy Debord’

 

The Figure of the Artisan in Early Modern French Culture

Seminar Room 3

 

Chair: Kate Tunstall (Worcester College, University of Oxford)

 

Alexander Marr (University of St Andrews)

‘Copying, Commonplaces, and Technical Knowledge in Early Modern France’

 

Rowan Tomlinson (St John’s College, University of Oxford)

‘Savoir-faire, savoir-lire: Artisans, Autopsy, and Apprenticeship in Du Bellay, Ronsard, and Montaigne’

 

Wes Williams (St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford)

‘ « L’artisan par ce monstre a laissé sa boutique »: Paré, Ronsard, and Montaigne’

 

4.45          Afternoon Tea and Postgraduate Poster Session

            Marquee

 

5.15          Plenary Lecture 2

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair: tbc

 

Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer (École Normale Supérieure)

Title : Pour une bibliothèque génétique : l’édition des cahiers manuscrits de Marcel Proust

 

7.15     Wine Reception

 

8.00     Dinner

            Dining Hall

 

9.00     Presentation on the E-Enlightenment project

Dr Neven Leddy (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver)

 

 

 

Tuesday 30th June

 

 

7.45     Breakfast

            Dining Hall

 

9.00     Annual General Meeting of the Society for French Studies

            Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

9.00     Postgraduate Poster Session

            Marquee

 

10.00   Coffee & Postgraduate Poster Session

            Marquee

 

10.30   PANEL SESSIONS 2

 

 

Nostalgia I: Rethinking Nostalgia

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair tbc

 

James Helgeson (University of Nottingham)

‘Nostalgia and Hermeneutics: Erasmus, Du Bellay, Montaigne’

 

Henriette Korthals Altes (New College, University of Oxford)

‘Nostalgia, Photography and Affective Criticism in Barthes’s La Chambre Claire’

 

Mairéad Seery (Athlone Institute of Technology)

‘Nostalgia and lieux de mémoire: from Postmodern Playfulness to Hypermodern Fair Play’

 

Brian Sudlow (University of Reading)

‘Nostalgia as Flight or Fight: Rereading the French Catholic Literary Revival’

 

 

In and around the Encyclopédie (roundtable)

Seminar Room 3

 

Chair: Dr Wes Williams (St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford)

 

Marian Hobson (Queen Mary, University of London)

‘Measurement in the Encyclopédie’

 

Isabelle Moreau (University College, London)

‘L’araignée dans sa toile’

 

Sanja Perovic (King’s College, London)

‘From Diderot to Panckoucke:  the Time of Critique in the Encyclopédie’

 

Kate Tunstall (Worcester College, University of Oxford)

‘Blindness in the Encyclopédie’

 

Caroline Warman (Jesus College, University of Oxford)

‘ « L’arbre des connoissances »: the Abstract and the Particular Tree in Materialist Thought’

 

 

The Ethnographic Text

Seminar Room 2

 

Chair: tbc

 

Michel Julien (Université du Québec à Montréal)

‘Vers une approche poétique de texte ethnographique: « L’excès-l’usine » de Leslie Kaplan’

 

Cristina Kullberg (Dalarna and Uppsala Universities)

‘Writing at the Crossroads: Ethnography and Literature in the French Caribbean’

 

Anna-Louise Milne (University of London Institute, Paris)

‘Telling Tales, or Performing Ethnographic Understanding: Jean Paulhan on Madagascar’

 

Lucy O’Meara (University of Nottingham)

‘Roubaud, Japan and Urban Aesthetics’

 

 

Female Avant-Gardists

Seminar Room 1

 

Chair: tbc

 

Fanny Daubigny (California State University, Fullerton)

‘Marte Bibesco, lectrice de Proust ou les « Conjonctions » de l’Ecriture : Les femmes et l’avant-garde au début du XXiècle,  une conjonction inclusive ou dislocative?’

 

Ruth Hemus (Royal Holloway, University of London)

‘Dada’s Bride – Suzanne Duchamp’

 

Raluca Lupu-Onet (Université de Montréal)

‘Irène Hamoir ou le cas d’une double marginalité surréaliste’

 

Rachel Wimpee (New York University)

‘A Catholic Avant-Garde ? Rethinking Representations and Roles of Catholic Women in fin-de-siècle France’

 

 

12.30      Lunch

Marquee

 

1.30          PANEL SESSIONS 3

 

 

Voices in Medieval French Narrative

Seminar Room 3

 

Chair: Sophie Marnette (Balliol College, University of Oxford)

 

Chimène Bateman (Wadham College, University of Oxford)

‘Narrative Voice and the Female Dedicatees of Verse Romance’

 

Emma Cayley (University of Exeter)

‘ « La puce en l’oreille »: Erotic Friendship in Alain Chartier’s Debat Reveille Matin and Guillaume Alexis’ Le Debat de l’omme mondain et du religieulx’

 

Helen Swift (St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford)

‘« Je l’ay faict ensuivant ma puissance et scavoir »: Narrative Structures of Power in Jehan Dupré’s Le Palais des nobles dames (1534)’

 

 

Cinemas of Amnesia

Seminar Room 2

 

Chair: tbc

 

Guy Austin (University of Sheffield)

‘Against Amnesia: Remembering in Recent Algerian Cinema’

 

Julia Dobson (University of Sheffield)

‘Amnesia and the Nostalgic Construction of the Romantic Uncanny in Laetitia

Masson’s Love me (2000)’

 

Martin O’Shaughnessy (Nottingham Trent University)

‘Amnesia, Labour and Class in Recent French Cinema’

 

 

New Directions in French and Francophone Philosophy

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair: tbc

 

Henry Dicks (Wadham College, University of Oxford)

‘Home and Chez-Soi: A Linguistic Obstruction to the Development of Philosophical Ecology in France’

 

Nick Hewlett (University of Warwick)

‘Political Violence in the Work of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière’

 

Laura McMahon (Girton College, University of Cambridge)

‘Derrida Touching Nancy’

 

 

Literature and Social Class: 1640-1789

Seminar Room 1

 

Chair: tbc

 

Ann Lewis (Birkbeck College, University of London)

‘Classifying the Prostitute in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction’

 

Marine Roussillon (Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle)

‘La littérature chevaleresque : une littérature noble ?’

 

Geraldine Sheridan (University of Limerick)

‘Visual Approaches to Representing the Working Woman in the Encyclopédie and the Description des arts’

 

3.00     Afternoon Tea and Postgraduate Poster Session

Marquee

 

3.30     Plenary Lecture 3

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair: tbc

 

Anne Green (King’s College, London)

Title: Writing about Trains in Second Empire France

 

4.45     Free time to visit exhibitions at the Taylor Institution, the Voltaire Foundation or the Bodleian Library, concluding with a:

 

6.00     Tour of the Codrington Library, All Souls College

Wine reception

 

8.00     Conference Dinner

Dining Hall (St Anne’s College)

 

9.30     R H Gapper Charitable Trust Awards

 

Book prize: Mark Greengrass (University of Sheffield) for Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576-1585 (OUP, 2007)

and Christopher Prendergast (University of Cambridge) for The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (OUP, 2007)

 

Graduate Essay Prize: Kathrin Yacavone (University of Edinburgh)

 

Undergraduate Essay Prize: Clodagh Kinsella (University College, London)

 

Malcolm Bowie Prize

tba

 

 

Wednesday 1st July

 

           

7.45     Breakfast

            Dining Hall

 

9.15     Plenary Lecture 4

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair: tbc

 

Jacques Dubois (Université de Liège)

 

Title:   La stratégie du tout dire chez les romancières d'aujourd'hui : 

            Christine Angot et Catherine Millet

 

10.30  Coffee and Postgraduate Poster Session

 

11.00   PANEL SESSIONS 4

 

 

Science, Technology, Culture

Seminar Room 1

 

Chair: Marian Hobson (Queen Mary, University of London))

 

John Marks (University of Nottingham)

‘François Jacob and the Concept of bricolage’

 

Ian James (Downing College, University of Cambridge)

‘Bernard Stiegler and the Time of Technics’

 

Christopher Johnson (University of Nottingham)

‘André Leroi-Gourhan: Language, Technology, Cybernetics’

 

Yves Gilonne (University of Nottingham)

‘Maurice Blanchot et la rhétorique de la pensée atomique’

 

 

 

Nostalgia II: Nostalgia, Place and Displacement 

Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre

 

Chair: tbc

 

Anna M. Elsner (University of Cambridge)

‘ « Désir de Venise, désir de me mettre au travail » : Hybrid Nostalgia in Proust’s depiction of Venice’

 

David Evans (University of St Andrews)

‘The Distorting Mirror of Memory and the Island Imaginary: French-language Corsican Poetry 1880-1960’

 

Ashwiny Kistnareddy (University of Nottingham)

‘Diasporic Nostalgia: Reading India in Amanda Devi’s L’Arbre fouet (1997) and Indian Tango (2007)’

 

Nataliya Lenina (Université de Toronto)

‘L’espace « nostalgie » dans l’oeuvre de Georges Rodenbach et de Suzanne Lilar ou « le chant de sa terre »’

 

 

Imagining History

Seminar Room 3

 

Chair: Neil Kenny (University of Cambridge)

 

Bill Burgwinkle (King’s College, University of Cambridge)

‘The Fictional Crusades: Saladin and Homonymous Christian Knighthood’

 

Jane Gilbert (University College, London)

‘Extreme Fiction: The Roman de la Rose’

 

Finn Sinclair (Girton College, University of Cambridge)

‘Textual truths: Jean Froissart and the Writing of History’

 

Katherine MacDonald (University College, London)

‘The Hazards of History: Narrating Marie Petit’s Persian adventure (1705)’

 

 

Jews and Jewishness

Seminar Room 2

 

Chair: tbc

 

Helena Duffy (University of New England, Australia)

‘Could the Jew be the German’s Twin Brother: Abjection as the Source of Anti-Semitism in Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes’

 

Sima Godfrey (University of British Columbia)

‘“Shmatas R Us”: From Jewish Rags to French Riches’

 

Aimée Israel-Pelletier (University of Texas at Arlington)

‘Jews of Arab Lands Writing in French: Melancholy and Dhimmitude in Albert Memmi, Edmond Jabès and Paula Jacques’

 

David Ravet (Université de Paris III)

‘Le mythe du Juif errant: de sa légende chrétienne à sa réinterpretation dans l’art juif du XIXème et du XXème siècles’

 

 

1.00     Lunch and close

            Dining Hall

           

 

End of Conference