Postgraduate research seminar series

11 December 2017: Stephanie Obermeier (PhD Student In Comparative Literature), ”Wo steckt Felicitas?’ Felicitas Hoppe’s Hoppe (2012) as a Critique of the Contemporary Autofictional Novel’

In Felicitas Hoppe’s novel Hoppe, the fictional biographer ‘fh’, combines biographical research with literary criticism in an account of the fictional Felicitas Hoppe’s life and literary works. The text makes reference to both clearly fictional and clearly non-fictional, or factual elements, and has therefore been critically received as ‘autofiction’. At first glance, the text does appear to correspond to the characteristics of autofiction as outlined by Jacques Lecarme, these being, firstly, the nominal identity of author, narrator, and protagonist, and secondly, the text’s self-identification as a novel, or a work of fiction. However, there is a third criterion of the autofiction genre that is specified by Serge Doubrovsky which Hoppe does not meet: namely, that an autofictional text should demonstrate the ‘impulse to reveal oneself in one’s truth’. I argue that the focus in Hoppe is less on self-discovery or even self-invention than it is on the text’s construction and its constant deferral of the moment of self-reflexion and self-constitution. Moreover, the text stages an opposition between the kind of novel the character Felicitas would most like to write, and the text which ‘fh’ (or, by extension, Hoppe herself) constructs. Rather than being a prime example of the contemporary autofictional novel, then, I argue that Hoppe can, in fact, be read as a novel that wants to champion the autofiction genre, but shies away from actually committing to autofiction’s generic conventions.

12 February 2018: Professor Peter Consenstein (City University of New York), ‘Literary Constraints and Their Results’

1 March 2018: Clemence Ardin and Axel Batt

Clémence Ardin (University of Kent), ‘ “[…] the sons of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful”: Fallen Angels and Women in William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Enoch and Alfred de Vigny’s Eloa ou la soeur des anges’

Abstract: In biblical myths, women are often associated with seduction, and therefore, evil. They can be seductresses or seducted, and, at first glance, always have a lesser part compared to men. However, when one observes thoroughly the myths in which they are involved, it appears that they actually are central figures, although often negative ones. The myth of the fallen angel, retelling the origin of evil through figures such as Satan or the Watchers, is not always involving clearly women. However, Romantic authors such as William Blake in his illustrations of the Book of Enoch (c.1824), and Alfred de Vigny in “Eloa ou la soeur des anges” (1824), have decided to include women in their visions of the myth. Indeed, Blake places women at the centre of the Watchers’ narrative and Vigny introduces, in his poem, the first female angel of literature. This paper aims to demonstrate that through their representations of women, Blake and Vigny try to convey their considerations on God. According to the two poets, God is not a benevolent and merciful father figure, but rather an indifferent tyrant.

Axel Batt (Lille 3/University of Kent), ‘Redefining the Genre of the Novel in Early Twentieth-Century French Literature: Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes’Abstract: When Alain-Fournier publishes his only book in 1913, the novel faces a generic crisis that scholar Michel Raimond describes as “un affaissement de la capacité d’invention” (a decrease of the capacity to invent). Naturalism, which had been given prominence during the 19th century, comes to a dead end as naturalists themselves denounce the excess of the movement and its tendency to be too scientific. In response to that crisis, French men of letters decide to found La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary magazine which aims at redefining the genre of the novel. It is in this review that the first chapter of Le Grand Meaulnes is published, and as such illustrates the new, and sometimes contradictory, définitions of the “Romanesque” proposed by the NRF. My contention is that, in the midst of the literary crisis, this novel serves as a fictional space where the writer finally manages to rethink the genre by conflating opposite forces: the legacy of Zola’s realism and naturalism with a renewed interest for the fictional and unlikely qualities of events; and Thibaudet’s definition of the novel made of love stories with Jacques Rivière’s definition of the novel made of adventures.

12 March 2018: James Hoctor and Helder Mendes Baiao

James Hoctor (University of Kent), ‘The Prejudices of the Phenomenology of Doubles’

Helder Mendes Baiao (University of Porto), ‘How the French Travelers Discovered the Portuguese Inquisition at the End of the Seventeenth Century’

26 March 2018: Beatrice Fagan and Katharina Kalinowski

Beatrice Fagan (University of Kent), ‘Medical and Literary Perspectives on the Changing Discourses of Maternity in Late Nineteenth-Century France’

The depopulation crisis in late-nineteenth century France prompted politicians, moralists and medical professionals to attempt to influence practices and discourses concerning maternity with a view to increasing the birth rate and reducing the exceptionally-high infant mortality rate. Increased emphasis on the role of the mother and a re-assessment of maternal care are reflected in the proliferation of medical documents on that topic released in the late nineteenth century, particularly those aimed directly at mothers.

This paper will examine two particular aspects of maternity that were targeted: the practice of breast-feeding and the use of wet-nurses. The use of a wet-nurse often required the travel or displacement of an individual. The wealthier classes would pay for a nurse ‘sur lieu’, requiring the nurse to leave her own baby behind. Conversely, the poorer classes would send their child to a wet-nurse in the countryside, where it would often be breast-fed alongside its ‘frère du lait’. A large quantity of previously unexplored medical texts engage with these practices and highlight the dangers and health risks involved for the mother, her baby and the wet-nurse, whilst encouraging mothers to breast-feed their own offspring instead.

In particular, this paper will discuss the displacement of babies and women involved in the wet-nursing industry, the reciprocal movement between countryside and city that entailed and the social implications of providing a substitute mother. This theme will be explored through literary representations of the wet-nursing industry, in particular Émile Zola’s Fécondité (1899), alongside contemporary medical documents. The paper will also question whether there is a discursive displacement taking place in Zola’s novel and literary texts, whereby traditional maternal discourses are replaced by a new discourse on motherhood, advocated by populationists.

Katharina Kalinowski (University of Kent), ‘Trans-lating Nature: The Art of Ecopoetry’.

Against the backdrop of a global ecological crisis, the attempt to poetically immerse in the beauty of nature must be decelerated by the plastic carpet covering it: pure nature, in its Romantic idea, does no longer exist. The contemporary literary movement dubbed ecopoetry is therefore opening up critical conversations with a sphere that has been irrevocably transformed by humans. At the edge of mankind and nonhuman nature, ecopoetry seeks to weave tensions between anthropocentrism/biocentrism, nature/culture, or self/other into its textures. By doing so, it clashes not only against borders of the human language, but also against borders of the human skin: We don’t speak tree, shell, or whale, and whilst trying to give a voice to the unknown, the ecopoetic act is shaped by multiple power dynamics. In order to gain deeper insights into the underlying intra- and extratextual conflicts, I propose to frame ecopoetry as a form of translation. Equally rooted in the desire to “carry over” and accommodate the foreign, translation inherently implies a violating, yet simultaneously invaluable communicative capacity. The concept of an “ecotranslation” will thus help to underpin ecopoetry as a transformative instrument with the potential to reimagine the exploitative relationship between human and nature, eventually contributing to a heightened environmental awareness.

3 April 2018: Dominique Carlini Versini and Mykyta Steshenko

Dominique Carlini Versini (University of Kent) will give a paper entitled ‘The Gendered Body Out-of-Bound in Virginie Despentes’s Les jolies choses(1998).’

Les jolies choses, Virginie Despentes’s third novel, is the story of twin sisters, Pauline and Claudine, involved in an identity swap. Claudine, an incarnation of hyper-femininity, asks her sister to pretend to be her and to sing at a concert where she is supposed to perform. After Claudine commits suicide, Pauline decides to adopt her sister’s identity in order to sign a deal with her music production company and pocket the contract advances. I argue that this bizarre plot allows an interrogation of the performance of gender and its inscription on the female body in the narrative.

Indeed, to become Claudine, Pauline must learn to perform her gender according to the codes of hyper-femininity. In this paper, I will demonstrate that this performance is defined by excess throughout its parodic and metamorphic dimensions. It involves transforming the female body to correspond to unreachable norms and expectations. It also means symbolically crossing the subject’s boundaries to reduce the body to an object of gaze, touch, and ultimately consumption. In that perspective, this paper will particularly look at the representation of street harassment and the mechanisms of objectification and dehumanisation it implies. At the same time, the excess displayed by the text allows to deconstruct gender politics and questions “the politically empowering potential of performance and spectacle” (Damlé 2013: 23). Ultimately, this paper will argue that the text offers a reflexion on gender performance and the gendered body as a produced and unstable process (Butler 1990, 2004, 2015), and a masquerade (Despentes 2006). It also resonates with current debates around the female body in the public space, sparked by the #MeToo or Time’s Up movements, constituting this way an important – albeit ambiguous – piece in recent French feminist writing.

Mykyta Steshenko (Paris IV Sorbonne) will give a paper entitled ‘Aesthetic Values of the Epistolary Correspondence in the Twentieth Century: On the Example of François Mauriac’s Epistolary Heritage.’

Often considered to be a “writer of the Catholic Church” or a “bourgeois writer”, François Mauriac’s personality is more complex and requires a more profound analysis due to his various engagements during the First World War, the Second World War as well as during various events in French and world history. Not only did his long literary career allow him to express his opinion in a sharp, rather conservative way, but he also drew his readers’ attention to some important aspects of human life, including the sense of brotherhood, camaraderie, unity, and respect. Mauriac believed that by fostering these positive values, humanity could rid itself of its destructive defects. My research attempts to draw a more realistic portrait of this important member of the French Academy, while countering inaccurate and superficial stereotypes which often harm literary research.

Correspondence is often neglected by some critics who believe it has less literary value than poetry or the novel. Nevertheless, this literary genre is a direct heir to the ancient rhetoric tradition which seems to be absent in modern literary discourse. The epistolary relationship contains an important treasure of eloquent expressions which are part and parcel of any writer’s style. Studying Mauriac’s letters will enable a more accurate definition of the writer’s aesthetics and his contribution to Modern Literature.