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| A |
Abramson, |
Julia, University of
Oklahoma: “Contre Stendhal: Mérimée’s
Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul (1825).” (25.1)
Prosper Mérimée’s Le Théâtre
de Clara Gazul (1825) has long been described as an attempt
to realize theories articulated in Stendhal’s Racine
et Shakespeare (1823-25) for a new Romantic drama. Yet this
interpretation of Gazul is unsatisfactory on several counts.
For example, ironic aspects of the plays subvert (rather than
illustrate) the Stendhalian notion of political and moral engagement
for theater. Reading selected plays, I shall argue that Mérimée’s
drama invokes Stendhal’s theory, but to critical purpose.
For Mérimée, a politically and historically conscious
theater was unattainable except in the rarefied world of art.
Gazul thus pointed the way not only for the mystification in
La Guzla (1827) and the later contes fantastiques, but also
for Stendhal’s own swerve away from the theater—he
never wrote a single play—in favor of writing novels
destined for “the happy few.”
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Algazi, |
Lisa, Hood College: ‘Sucer un sein
amer’: Unhappy
Romantic Motherhood.” (17.1) “Quel poète
nous dira les douleurs de l’enfant dont les lèvres
sucent un sein amer?”
The words of Félix in Le Lys dans la Vallée stand
in sharp contrast to representations of happy breastfeeding
mothers and their children in late eighteenth-century France.
Following the publication of Rousseau’s Julie, literary
representations of happy nursing mothers abounded as well.
With the cultural changes following the Revolution, however,
the happy breast-feeding mother all but disappears from French
iconography and narrative. Allan Pasco has theorized that the
virtual absence of the mother from the tale of the Romantic
hero can be traced to the custom of placing babies with a wet-nurse
from birth, as in the case of Félix (and Balzac himself).
In this paper I will explore the relationship between Pasco’s
theory of the maternally deprived Romantic hero and the paucity
of representations of happy nursing mothers in French Romanticism.
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Apter, |
Emily, New York University: “Global
Banking Interests and Economic Xenophobia as a World System
in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” (21. 3)
This paper interprets Rachilde’s 1887 novel La Marquise
de Sade, classified as one of Rachilde’s serial renderings
of feminine erotic decadence, as a war novel, alongside classic
works about the defeat of 1870 by Zola, Maupassant, and Abel
Hermant. By “weaponizing” the fashion worn by the
femme fatale, Rachilde not only literalizes the well-worn cliche
that women “arm” themselves as seductresses with
the help of an “arsenal” of beauty secrets, she
also reads the femme fatale as a figure of war, whose fashion
and self-fashioning derive directly from the historical conditions
of the Franco-Prussian war. While the most famous antiwar novel
of the period - Emile Zola’s 1892 La Débâcle - locates the root cause of decadence in the corruption and
complacency of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, La Marquise
de Sade adduces devirilization to be the primary reason for
national decline.
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Augustyn, |
Joanna, Columbia University: “A Capricious
Itinerary through the Past: Victor Hugo’s Le Rhin.” (5.3)
In 1845, seeking election to the Chambre des Pairs, Victor
Hugo became involved in France and Germany’s debate over
the Rhine by writing Le Rhin, lettres à un ami. In this
account of his travels through France, Belgium, Switzerland,
and Germany, he collects and records the evolution of European
history from the Roman Empire to the present. Ruin landscapes,
restored or unfinished cathedrals, and neglected tombs inform
the representation of the detail in Le Rhin. Personal anecdotes,
as well as citations of scientific encyclopedias and tourist
guides reproduce some of the rhetorical strategies of the ruin
landscape in order to present a culture in progress. Théophile
Gautier’s Caprices et zigzags, and Gérard de Nerval’s
Lorely and Voyage en Orient, which retrace Hugo’s “capricious” itinerary,
will provide additional perspectives on Hugo’s project.
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| B |
Bailar, |
Melissa, Rice University: “Stages
of Change: The Comédienne, the Theater, and
19th-century Paris.” (25.3)
The comédienne of nineteenth-century Paris was both greatly admired
and outcast from society, a contradictory position due to her participation in
the increasingly influential yet also suspicious pastime of the theater. Both
outside society in a position to parody it and also a powerful force within it,
the actress was a subject of increasing fear. In applying the lacanian mirror
stage to literary works of the time, such as Zola’s Nana, Nerval’s Aurélia,
and Balzac’s Illusions perdues, we can see that not only is the
actress’ realm of the backstage located between the Real and the Symbolic,
but that the actress herself shifts between the two. It is this shifting, unstable
position that evokes an obsessive fear in those around her, because it allows
the actress to transform and fragment both individuals and society.
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Beizer, |
Janet Harvard University: “ ‘Je
ne suis pas sandiste’: Reflections on Sand and her Critics.” (49.2)
This paper is and is not about George Sand. That is to say, I
want to use Sand to think with, taking as jumping-off point the
tendency of critics to deny their expertise, their experience,
and their authority in the area of Sand studies. I want to think
about George Sand (about why she, perhaps more than some other
writers, elicits a denegation
response from so many scholars who choose to write about her)--but
also about criticism and its discomforts, and about more dispersed
marketplace pressures that might well play a role in inducing
scholars to disclaim incipient "sandiste" or "sandien" tendencies.
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Belenky,
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Masha, George Washington
University: “Letters,
Lies, and Legible Urban Space in Balzac’s Ferragus.” (18.2)
Balzac’s Paris is a city on the threshold of modernity,
a space characterized by fragmentation and multiplicity of
experiences. In his “Parisian” novels,” mobility
and flux, both physical and symbolic, dominate the city, a
place of swift construction and increased traffic, but also
a site of rapidly shifting social class structures, and of
increased circulation of money and women. Traffic is a central
metaphor in Balzac’s 1833 Ferragus, one that poses a
key problem of legibility. Literal traffic of carriages and
cabriolets clogs Parisian streets. A steady circulation of
women of different social classes from one quartier to another
signals transgressive crossing among social spheres. Finally,
a frenzied circulation of letters punctuates and orients the
novel’s plot. Indeed, the novel is saturated with letters
that arrive at crucial points in the narrative and reverse
the course of novelistic events. Curiously, instead of providing
knowledge, the letters blur and displace the truth. This paper
explores the mapping of the letter plot onto the modern urban
space in flux. Mis-delivered and misread letters function as
a sign of modernity’s epistemological crisis. |
Bell, |
David F., Duke University: “Insuffisances
technologiques: Gustave Le Rouge et la surenchère des
machines.” (35.2)
Américains et Français se confrontent dans une lutte commerciale à surenchère
technologique dans La Conspiration des milliardaires de Gustave Le Rouge.
A coup de millions, le nouveau monde tente de subjuguer le vieux continent (la
France fait partie, après tout, de la vieille Europe...). Utopie des machines
et des inventeurs ou dystopie de la technologie? Un des premiers auteurs de la
science fiction se débat avec le dilemme créé par la promesse
technologique. Je tenterai dans mon exposé de mettre au clair les éléments
de ce dilemme. |
Bell, |
Dorian, University of Pennsylvania: “Textual
Surrogates: Discovery of the European Other in Early Arabic
Translations of the French Novel” (50.1)
Among the French authors whose late 19th and early 20th-century
translation into Arabic sparked a demand for the first Arabic-language
novels, novelists like Pierre Loti and Jules Verne figure prominently.
These authors' Arab popularity has traditionally only been
situated in the novels’ escapist appeal, or in the novels’ kinship
with classical Arabic literary tropes of adventure and romance.
To the contrary, I argue that Arab enthusiasm for French novels
was quite topical, and queries how early Arabic translations
of French novels might have constituted a surrogate means of
engaging the European other. If the exoticizing French novels
of the era reflected a French cultural center constructing
itself in terms of a colonial periphery, what does it mean
for Arab translators, novelists, and their reading public to
have been influenced by works in which the Orient was at once
other and essential to the colonizer’s construction of
himself? In other words, what can the literary economy of translation
tell us about the relationship of the periphery to a center
de-centered by its own ambivalent relation to that periphery?
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Berg, |
Keri A., DePauw University: “Characters
of Change A Change of Character: Balzac’s Criminal and
his Double, the Caricaturist.” (9.2)
Crime and caricature stand as primary elements of nineteenth-century
change. As the figurehead of les classes dangereuses, the criminal
exemplified the instability of the modern city. Caricature,
on the other hand, participated in the codification of society,
attempting to contain the evolving social landscape through
visual representation and parody. The two tendencies play out
in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine in the form of
the recurring characters Vautrin and Bixiou, the respective
criminal and caricaturist. In the author’s fictional
world, the men are enemies, for Bixiou capitalizes on the exposure
of the likes of Vautrin, selling illustrations from criminal
trials. Yet while they initially appear as opposites, in fact,
Vautrin and Bixiou are parallel figures. Both are model observers,
who expertly navigate the social order. As such, they function
as metonymies for modernity, emblematizing divergent, but nevertheless
complementary, strategies of adaptation and negotiation in
the new Paris.
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Best, |
Janice, Acadia University: “Les dangers
d’un amour trop exalté : l’adaptation dramatique
du Lys dans la vallée (11.1)
Le Lys dans la vallée de Balzac a été critiqué pour
la scène où, au moment de sa mort, Henriette
de Mortsauf avoue l’étendue de son amour pour
Félix de Vandenesse, et regrette sa vie de vertu. Barrière
et Beauplan ont adapté ce roman pour la scène
en 1853. Les censeurs sont intervenus à plusieurs reprises,
remplaçant certaines ambiguïtés du langage,
jugées scandaleuses, par des euphémismes moins
osés. Ils ont prêté une attention particulière à la
mort d’Henriette, insistant qu’il n’y ait
pas de lit sur la scène. Il était à craindre
que le réalisme du décor rende trop explicite
la nature du bonheur qu'Henriette regrette. Mon but est de
faire ressortir le fonctionnement dialogique de ce processus
de censure, qui restaure aux mots censurés leur sens
premier. L’association créée par Balzac
entre la passion adultère et les transports de la religion était
problématique, non pas les termes eux-mêmes.
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Blix, |
Göran, Princeton University: "Undermining
Progress: The Conjunction of Past and Future in French Romantic
Historicism." (32.3)
“
Progress” may define the 19th-century outlook on the
long-term world process; but, as the siècle de l’histoire,
this period was as much given to retrospection as to forecasting,
to reconstructing a brutal past as to forging a brighter future.
This is no contradiction: these contrary trends are the dialectical
faces of a unified modern experience of time. This paper explores
the tensions within this split temporal horizon by looking
at a key romantic figuration of the historical process: the
mine. The image of the subterranean work-site appears in Hugo,
Michelet, Gautier, and elsewhere, where it serves as a polyvalent
figure for both the labyrinthine past and the invisible factory
that produces the future. It embodies the symbiosis of retrospection
and progress in a unique experiential nexus. But, as the hinge
between past and future, as the site of a poorly compensated
labor, it also harbors a revolutionary potential.
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Brady, |
Heather R., Monmouth College: “Rewriting
Female Heroism: Dumas Père and the Comtesse Dash’s
Le Journal de Voyage d’une Parisienne (1855).” (6.2)
Scholars have accorded little attention to Le Journal de
Voyage d’une Parisienne (1855), the collaborative work of Alexandre
Dumas Père and Gabrielle Anne Cisterne de Courtiras,
who wrote under the penname of the “Comtesse Dash.” This
parody of a lady’s travel journal, nicknamed “the
Giovanni Journal” for the protagonist Marie Giovanni,
ridicules the genre’s romantic ideals of female heroism,
purposefully exaggerating contemporary gender conventions to
make an important point about the masquerade performed by such
travel writers to win and keep public acceptance. I will read
the text’s super-heroism in dialogue with earlier Romantic
travel writers such as Flora Tristan and the Comtesse Merlin,
whose texts are packed with heroic individualism and Romantic
epiphany, arguing that the Giovanni Journal’s ironic
and comedic distance throws contemporary conceptions of female
heroism into a chaotic and unscripted confusion.
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Brookes, |
Christine N., Pennsylvania State University: “Prosper
Mérimée, Ivan Turgenev, and the Cultural Translation
of Russia?” (50.2)
Though the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev translated Russian
literature into French with several translators, his most esteemed
co-translator was Prosper Mérimée. To understand
this relationship, I examine the writers’ published correspondence,
their exchanges with the houses that published their translations,
and the sociopolitical environment in which the works were
translated. It will be clear that Mérimée’s
knowledge of the Russian language and interest in Russian culture
were important qualities not only for the linguistic translations,
but also for the cultural translation of a foreign Russia.
I will demonstrate that Mérimée was Turgenev’s
preferred translator because he, along with the culturally
chameleonic Turgenev, was better able to act as cultural intermediary,
the two acting together as human filters through which various
notions of a certain culture were (re)presented to another.
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Canovas, |
Frédéric, Arizona State University: “Le
grand contempteur : Rémy de Gourmont vu par Paul Léautaud.” (8.3)
Si Gourmont fut le grand contempteur de sa génération, il faut
bien reconnaître que l’œuvre de ce dernier n’a pas bien
résisté au temps. Il convient de se demander pourquoi. Pour Léautaud,
la réponse est simple : « Gourmont est peut-être un peu trop
uniquement cérébral, idéologique. Le cerveau a tué chez
lui la sensibilité. Il lui manque un peu de vraie passion. Si c’est
cela qui fait durer les œuvres, ses livres à lui courent peut-être
un grand risque ». Il nous semble que Léautaud pose le doigt sur
un aspect important de la fortune littéraire et critique de l’œuvre
de Gourmont, fortune ou infortune que nous proposons d’analyser. |
Carpenter,
|
Scott, Carleton College: “Mérimée
and the Ravages of Time.” (22.1)
As one might expect of an inspecteur des monuments historiques who was both a devotee of archeology and an accomplished philologist,
history plays a complex role in Mérimée’s
works. In this paper I propose to investigate the role of the
past in Mérimée’s work, focusing on three
short stories. Unlike other writers of his time, for whom “history” seemed
to mean the Revolution (e.g., Balzac) or a personal golden
age (e.g., Nerval), Mérimée presents the past
as a brutal force which has been tamed and “euphemized” in
contemporary society, but not necessarily neutralized. Traces
of the past remain available to he who knows how to read them.
Hidden like an ancient statue in the silt, or like the long
occulted sanskrit root of a contemporary word, this brutal
past emerges from latency in the most startling of ways. The
convergence of violence and surprise manifests itself in diverse
forms: it is named, variously, the hoax, the ambush, the fantastic.
Paradoxically, in Mérimée, the past is always
lying in wait; far from suffering from the ravages of time,
it returns to ravage the present.
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Chambers, |
Ross, University of Michigan (emeritus): “George
Sand’s Decanonization Revisited.” (49.3)
The late Naomi Schor argued in 1993 that George Sand had dropped out of the literary
canon because her idealism was displaced, historically, by the triumphant orthodoxy
of nineteenth-century realism. As a memorial homage to her work, I propose an
amendment. The form of realism that displaced Sand as an idealist was primarily,
I believe, the realism of modernism as developed by Baudelaire in repsonse to
the events of 1848-51. A bit like Marx’s inversion of Hegel, Baudelairean
modernism inverts the social harmonianism, the aesthetic idealism and the cult
of the Artist that characterized the 1840s. Baudelaire’s aggressively misogynistic
attacks on Sand are a sign of his personal repudiation of what he regarded as
the culpable illusions that were dispelled by the June Days–illusions in
which he had abundantly shared. He went on to develop an unsystematic theory
of the alienated artist and of the artistic enactment of failure as the only
legitimate practice of art, theories that devalue “successful” writing
like Sand’s as conventional, facile and, of course, feminine. I will argue
that it is the historical success of ideas like Baudelaire’s that made
Sand for so long suspect and relegated her to the literary margins (of regional
writing, children’s literature, etc.). Thus the history of her decanonization
is the same history that led to Baudelaire’s canonization. And conversely
her contemporary recanonization corresponds to a victory of Sand’s politics
of “idealization” over what I call “Baudelaire’s desperate
theology for the modern age.” |
Chatterji,
|
Promita, University of California, Berkeley: “Words
on Display: Space and Representation in Champfleury’s
La Masquarade de la vie parisienne.” (18.3)
This paper looks at the construction of a musée des
affiches in Champfleury’s novel, La Masquerade
de la vie parisienne. Set among a community of ragpickers, the novel
uses the concepts of circulation and recycling to question
the boundaries between public and private space. Pulled off
of the streets and then pasted onto apartment walls, the posters
in the musée are both “on display” as they
would be in a museum and are functional: they divide the apartment
into private living quarters. A mixed-media artifact containing
both the visual and verbal, the affiches also conflate public
and private space by bringing the city into the apartment,
and the apartment into the city. This paper examines how the
musée maps the novel’s tension between public
and private space onto the relationship between word and image.
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Cnockaert, |
Véronique,Université du Québec à Montréal: “Parchemins
naturalistes” (26.2)
La multiplication des textes d'hygiène durant tout le
XIXe siècle, l'apparition des commissions de salubrité,
l'enfouissement des systèmes de canalisation, l'installation
croissante du bain à domicile, etc. créent et
imposent de nouveaux codes de vie. Ces réaménagements
privés et publics qui valorisent la propreté dictent
un nouvel ordre moral et bourgeois qui associe la propreté au
bien. Cette grammaire d'hygiène morale et physiologique
a pour effet d'instaurer de nouvelles attitudes culturelles
envers la peau — premier habit de l'homme — et
le toucher, son corollaire. La peau est tout à la fois
précieuse et suspecte : précieuse, car saine
elle est un gage de moralité; suspecte, car elle devient, à mesure
que le siècle avance, le terrain privilégié de
la contagion. L'œuvre de Zola ne rend pas simplement compte
de ces transformations hygiéniques, sociales et morales,
elle les repense (voire les transgresse) dans un travail constant
de réappropriation poétique. Nous voudrions,
dans un premier temps, montrer, à partir d'exemples
pris dans différents romans du cycle des Rougon-Macquart,
que l'écriture zolienne partage avec la dermatologie,
science née au XIXe siècle, un imaginaire végétal
de la peau et, dans un deuxième temps, que la peau possède
une fonction symbolique puissante. En effet, vecteur tout autant
du physiologique que du psychologique, elle est un véritable étendard
social du personnage, ainsi que le parchemin de son intimité.
|
Cohen, |
Margaret, Stanford University: “The Waterways
of Modernity.” (21.2)
In recent years critics have increasingly turned their attention
to how the Hexagon was shaped during the 19th century by its
relation to overseas colonies as well as by the flow of goods
and peoples around the globe. Despite this focus, the processes
essential to modernization occurring in the zones of maritime
transit remain relatively neglected. In this paper, I will
open up the problematic of how we would think 19th century
French modernity from the vantage point of waterways by examining
how these waterways were represented in sea fiction, aka le
roman maritime. Examples of questions raised as I read maritime
fiction include how to understand the specificity of "Frenchness" on
international waters, the international fraternity of labor
charcterizing life at the sea, and the power of notions of
flow, transit, and circulation to offer alternatives to urban
based landlocked models of modernity epitomized by Haussmannization.
|
Cook-Gailloud, |
Kristin Johns Hopkins University: “Variations
on Manet in Zola’s L’Oeuvre:
The Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Plein air” (4.3)
Seeing Manet’s works refused for the fourth time at the
Parisian salon de peinture, a defiant Emile Zola took his pen
on May 7th 1866 to proclaim him the herald of a new era for
art. Some twenty years later, however, the author of the Rougon-Macquart
seemed to degrade Manet in his novel L’Oeuvre by relating
the failure of a painting entitled Plein Air, which, in spite
of continual transformations, unquestionably resembles the
Déjeuner sur l’herbe. This study will examine
to what effect Zola set up an extensive modulation of the Déjeuner
in relation to his uncertainty vis-à-vis naturalism. |
Cordova, |
Sarah Davies, Marquette University: “From
Race to Business at the Théâtre de l’Académie
royale de musique: the Birth of the Ballet Blanc.” (25.2)
Two factors played importantly in determining the course that
the Paris Opéra would follow during its ‘Romantic’ apogee.
The first attended to the choice of its director. In 1776,
the best appointee was Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George.
However the period’s divas and ballerinas opposed his
appointment out of regard for their “honneur et la
délicatesse
de leur conscience.” The second concerned new revenue
sources. As the directors turned their attention to programmation,
they looked to ballet as a spectacle independent of opera productions,
with a potential for its own spectatorship. This paper looks
at the ramifications of the opposition to Saint George with
regard to the genesis of the ballet blanc and the Opéra’s success during the first half of the nineteenth century.
|
Cowles, |
Mary Jane, Kenyon College: “Telle qu’en
elle-même enfin…: Changing Mother(s) in Balzac’s
Le Lys dans la vallée.” (17.3)
In Le Lys dans la vallée, Henriette de Mortsauf’s
denial of the flesh functions like a delirium of negation,
particularly in the hours before her death. As the narrator
Félix de Vandenesse writes, “Ce n’était
plus ma délicieuse Henriette (…), mais le quelque
chose sans nom de Bossuet qui se débattait contre le
néant (…).” Physically, she has wasted away
through inanition; psychologically, she seems mad in her passion.
Above all, she is changed while denying change. Henriette’s
transformation in the face of death depends on two other changes
that precede it. First, Félix changes mothers, turning
from his own castrating mother to the “maternité spirituelle” of
Henriette. Second, Henriette transforms the awkward Félix
into a capable young man at the center of power. But when Félix
takes a mistress, Henriette’s secret jealousy eats away
at her, provoking a metamorphosis that mirrors the transformation
of passion. Yet that passion ensures Henriette’s immortality
in Félix’s heart. “[P]ar la douce loi d’une
métempsychose propre à l’amour” she
becomes the figure of desire that brooks no rival.
|
Cropper, |
Corry, Brigham Young University: “Ludus
Interruptus: Prosper Mérimée, Games, Ritual and
Violence.” (1.3)
When we think of Don José, the ill-fated lover in Mérimée's
Carmen, we generally link his downfall to his obsessive
attachment with the novella's heroine. But according to Don
José,
the tragedy started even before meeting Carmen. He admits to
his French interlocutor that what "lost" him was
not Carmen's beauty, but a game: "J'aimais trop
jouer à la
paume, c'est ce qui m'a perdu." For the historian and
archeologist Mérimée, games and sport operate
as a sort of conduit to the past--their ritualistic performance
eventually leads to violence and, in some cases, to a resurrection
of the past. And when the game is interrupted, the results
are deadly.
|
Day,
|
James, University of South Carolina: “Change
for the Worse? On Time and the Critique of Utilitarian Aesthetics
in Stendhal’s D’un nouveau complot contre les industriels and Other Writings” (19.1)
Near the end of 1825, Stendhal, already known for his temporally
relativistic definition of “le romanticisme” in
Racine et Shakespeare, authored his provocative pamphlet titled
D’un nouveau complot contre les industriels. In this
curious work he takes successful industrialists to task in
such a way as to suggest that personal well-being is incompatible
with collective welfare. In this work and others, Stendhal
displays suspicion toward the motivation of many who would
pursue progress. His protagonists are often like-minded: they
earnestly desire what we could call regime change, but they
find that the personal pursuit of such change is not fulfilling.
This study addresses the tension between Stendhal’s desire
for positive change and his intuition of the workings of time.
|
Desormeaux,
|
Daniel, University of Kentucky: “Oublier
la Révolution haïtienne: Toussaint Louverture et
Alexandre Dumas.” (47.3)
Panégyriste de son père, général
mulâtre né à Saint Domingue, qui a combattu
héroïquement les coalisés aux côtés
de Bonaparte, Alexandre Dumas est l'auteur de Mes Mémoires,
(1851-1853, en quatorze volumes). Ce déterreur des mythes
de 93, insurgé et chroniqueur de 1830 et 1848, ne dissimule
pas son attirance pour la Révolution haïtienne.
D’autant qu’il présente la victoire de l’armée
indigène comme le prix et la mémoire du sang
versé par le général Dumas qui aurait
refusé d’aller mater l’insurrection de Toussaint.
Coïncidence curieuse, un éditeur parisien publie
aussi en 1853 Mémoires du général Toussaint
Louverture avec des annotations et une préface de Joseph
Saint-Rémy. Quelles ressemblances ou différences
entre ces deux "Mémoires" qui sortent en librairie
presque immédiatement après la publication posthume
et en feuilleton, entre 1848-1850, des Mémoires d'outre-tombe de Chateaubriand et le Toussaint Louverture de Lamartine, en
1850?
|
Dhommée,
|
Emeline, Université de Montréal: “La
dynamique du monde de l'argent dans La Comédie humaine de Balzac.” (13.2)
Selon Jean-Joseph Goux, les pratiques de l'économie
monétaire produisent un mode de représentation
qui ne peut être que de type réaliste dans les
romans balzaciens. L'analyse qu'il fait de Gobseck est convaincante,
mais c'est oublier que les pratiques économiques évoluent à l'intérieur
de La Comédie humaine. Pourrait-on par exemple en dire
autant à la lumière d'un roman tel que La
Maison Nucingen, où on assiste à la crise généralisée
des valeurs et au dévoilement des mécanismes
du système boursier ? Notre lecture de ce récit
tentera donc de montrer que les principes de la représentation
réaliste y sont malmenés : effacement du narrateur
omniscient stable, fiable, qui contrôle, dévoile
et explique son univers, représentation abstraite du
personnage central, éclatement de la narration…
|
Dobelbower,
|
Nicholas, Macalester College: “Criminal
Habitus: Portraiture in French Legal Medicine.”
In response to Cesare Lombroso’s colorful portrait of
criminal man in Uomo delinquente (1876), French médicins-légistes argued that no single trait typified the criminal. Many physicians
however believed that a convergence of elements (the defendant’s “facies” or “habitus”)
could be indicative of criminality. Using tools appropriated
from multiple disciplines—literary portraiture, artistic
sketching, anthropometrics, handwriting analysis, and photography—early
criminology interpreted this corporeal text as a form of prima
facie evidence to distinguish the “accidental” offender
from the inveterate who required more aggressive disciplinary
intervention. I explore a number of such clinical descriptions
presented by collaborators of the Archives d’anthropologie
criminelle (1884-1915). Drawing on Foucault’s analysis
of the “clinical gaze,” I suggest that what theoretical
strictures prescribed for the deviant body, the criminologist
observed. I analyze the strategic use of rhetorical figures
that lent narrative coherence to the story of crime conveyed
in the very details of the criminal’s body.
|
Dolan,
|
Thérèse, Temple University: “Baudelaire,
Manet, and Wagner: Whose Music in the Tuileries?” (29.1)
Edouard Manet’s 1862 painting Music in the Tuileries has traditionally been read against the poet and art critic
Charles Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern
Life.” I propose a new reading of this painting, often
considered a watershed painting in the artist’s career,
against another Baudelairean text, the 1861 essay “Richard
Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris.” A majority of the portraits
included on the left-hand side of the painting are of Manet’s
friends who not only supported his art, but also served as
the first advocates for the radical music of the German composer
who proclaimed his work was “the music of the future.” Using
the musical history of the period and studying the literary
works incorporating analyses of the transposition of the arts,
I intend to situate Manet's work in the contextual history
of debates on musical aesthetics which I believe subtended
the artist's conceptualization of modernism and modernity.
|
Dubois,
|
Philippe C., Bucknell University: “Baudelaire
ou les Curiosités Culinaires d’un Dandy au Paradis.” (7.4)
“
Ah! chers amis, ne lisez pas Brillat-Savarin!” En s’exclamant
ainsi dans son introduction aux Paradis artificiels de 1851,
Baudelaire résiste de toutes ses forces à l’influence
récente de la chimie et la physiologie sur un nouveau
discours gastronomique qui émerge lentement depuis le
début du siècle. Afin de faire du gourmet le
frère du dandy, Baudelaire s’oppose à l’innovation
culturelle proposée par Brillat-Savarin et entreprend
au contraire de poétiser la ‘conception esthétisante
du culinaire’ mise en place par Grimod de la Reynière.
Ensemble, nous verrons donc comment la réaction de Baudelaire
au texte de Brillat-Savarin cristallise une vision de la gastronomie
qui s’impose comme l’art spectaculaire de l’imitation,
où les effets changeants de l’illusion redéfinissent
le factice et l’artifice de la table.
|
Duclert, |
Vincent, Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris: “Dreyfus diariste. L’Ecriture
comme résistance.” (10.1)
Le 22 décembre 1894, le capitaine Alfred Dreyfus est
condamné à la déportation à vie
pour un crime de haute trahison qu’il n’a pas commis.
Détenu sur l’île du Diable en Guyane française
dans des conditions extrêmes, il commence alors la rédaction
d’un journal. La pratique de l’écriture
revêt une triple importance. Elle expose la réalité d’un
système d’écrasement des déportés
conduits à la perte de leur identité et de leur
rapport au monde. Elle permet de maintenir vivante la conscience
de soi et de conserver une relation avec la société humaine.
Elle souligne enfin le pouvoir des mots, dernier rempart devant
l’extrémité de la violence et du désespoir.
L’écriture constitue ainsi une expérience
de résistance fondée sur la décision d’écrire,
mais aussi sur la conviction que le langage est un recours
devant les entreprises barbares ou totalitaires. Figure d’un
citoyen moderne pour une République démocratique,
Dreyfus se révélait aussi en avance sur son temps
pour la valeur qu’il accorda à l’acte littéraire.
|
Duffy,
|
John J. Jr., University of South Carolina, Columbia: “Changing
Sides: Carmen at the limits of nation, gender, genre.” (1.4)
Mérimée’s Carmen represents the
convergence of a series of modern discourses which were crucial
in the
mid-nineteenth century and which continue to dictate our own
modes of analyzing culture and literature. Drawing upon a tradition
of association of the oriental with the feminine and with the
imaginative, this short novel carries dichotomies between east
and west
and between female and male within its thematic structure,
while the dichotomy between the imaginative and the scientific-philosophical
determines its formal structure. Carmen reflects upon
the possibilities and dangers of a coexistence of these two
discourses, a coexistence
which for many is the very condition of possibility of the
majority of novels of this period. This reading demonstrates
that the crossing of geographical, economic, racial, and gender
boundaries is not just one theme among many in this novella,
nor indeed in the early nineteenth-century novel in general.
|
| |
| E |
Edelstein, |
Dan, University of Pennsylvania: “Balzac
and the Invention of Mythical Modernism.” (9.3)
Balzac, like his contemporaries, enthusiastically embraced the post-revolutionary
craze for mythology. He initially approached myths from the then dominant supernatural
perspective, but soon undertook a process of demystification: instead of interpreting
myths to discover primitive metaphysical truths, he began recuperating them to
express modern political and social ideas. This process reached its fulfillment
in Le père Goriot, where the myth of Faust (whose fantastic dimensions
had already been exploited in a series of texts, notably La Peau de chagrin)
is employed to present an alternative social model to the legalistic society
of the day. Breaking with the Romantic pursuit of origins, Balzac's novel use
of mythology to create order within the chaos of modernity foreshadows the Modernist
project of such writers as Eliot and Joyce, and underscores the necessity of
abandoning archetypal approaches to literary uses of myth, still common in academic
scholarship today.
|
Edwards,
|
Wade, Longwood University: “Prefacing
Change: The Preface as Instrument of Masculine Authentication.” (2.2).
Elisabeth Badinter argues in her discussion of the essential
qualities of Western masculine identity that we can account
for the emergence of homophobia as an effective weapon of masculine
authentication in the nineteenth century once we recognize
that “l’un des caractères les plus évidents
de la masculinité est l’hétérosexualité” (XY,
147). This paper studies the short, polemical prefaces of four
nineteenth-century novels for the way they espouse homophobia
(or its precursors) in order to confront perceived cultural
challenges to traditional masculine identity. The prefaces
under consideration include Zola’s introductions to Belot’s
Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme and Laupts’s Le
Roman d’un
inverti, Constant’s prefaces to Adolphe, and Pierre de
Coubertin’s introduction to his novelized autobiography,
Le Roman d’un rallié. By no means contemporaneous,
these extremely dissimilar prefaces, I argue, nonetheless all
exhibit a rhetoric of self-censure, victimization, and misogyny
that is typical not only of a defensive homophobia, but also,
as it turns out, of a normalized masculinity.
|
Emery,
|
Elizabeth, Montclair State University: “Contaminating
Displays: Huysmans, Art, and the Fin-de-siècle Consumer.” (20.3)
Condemning plans to build a Musée des arts décoratifs,
J.-K. Huysmans accused state-sponsored exhibits of "contaminating" art
by presenting it to the public. Instead of "conserving" originals,
as a nation should, Huysmans felt that France was "spoiling" them
by encouraging their imitation by designers of industrial art.
The resulting "fakes" thus tended to supercede the
originals. Focusing on Huysmans’s correspondence, art
criticism, and novels, this paper traces the double-bind inherent
in his writings about the accumulation and presentation of
works of art: although he wished to preserve France’s
artistic heritage, he did not know how to do so without bringing
undesired attention to it. Could literature serve as a compromise?
|
Ender, |
Evelyne, Harvard University, “Nerval et
la science du souvenir.” (31.1)
Walter Benjamin a montré, à travers Baudelaire et Proust, que la
modernité est marquée par la recherche de signifiants de l’expérience
et donc par la remémoration. Nerval préfigure ce changement en
révolutionnant la conception de la mémoire subjective. Mais l’apport
nervalien n’est pas que culturel, il est également scientifique.
La lecture de Sylvie montre ainsi comment l’écriture de
Nerval préfigure les découvertes récentes sur la mémoire
affective en psychologie et neurologie. L’oeuvre nous montre comment la
construction de scènes mnésiques permet le déploiement d’une
mémoire devenue le fondement même d’une ressaisie de la subjectivité.
L’on comprend mieux alors pourquoi la "recomposition du souvenir" propre à Sylvie acquiert
une fonction thérapeutique. Mais il faut voir ici que Nerval ne fait pas
que soigner sa folie, il offre les premières esquisses d’une psychologie
de l’imagination annonçant les découvertes de chercheurs
tels qu’Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio ou Jean-Pierre Changeux. |
Enz,
|
Molly K. University of Wisconsin: “Tropical
Tension: The Figures of the Island and the Mulatto in Dumas’s
Georges.” (47.4)
In his book Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of
Post/Colonial Literature, Chris Bongie states that the figure of the island
can be viewed in two opposing lights: “As a negative
figure, the island becomes the site of a debilitating or dangerous
isolation…However, the figure of the island also beckons
in another more positive direction, offering the prospect of
defined boundaries and a desirable self-sufficiency” (18,
20). The islands are places of mixings of many sorts: linguistic,
cultural, and racial. The result of this hybridity is a multi-faceted
identity which is often represented in literature through the
figure of the mulatto. In my paper, I examine the tension between
the different races in Alexandre Dumas’s novel Georges and explore how the protagonist, a mulatto from the Île
de France, struggles with racial prejudices and his individual
identity.
|
| |
Falconer, |
Graham Université de Toronto (emeritus): “L’évolution
du roman sous la Monarchie de Juillet, selon les catalogues
des cabinets de lecture (fonds Q28 de la Bibliothéque
nationale de France). (38.2)
En 1838, lors d’une réédition de la
Peau de chagrin, Balzac s’est plaint à Mme Hanska: “Il
y a encore des gens qui s’obstinent à y voir un
roman; mais chaque jour les vrais appréciateurs du genre
gagnent du terrain.” Sous la Monarchie de Juillet, sans être
nouveau, le débat sur le statut du roman devient particuliérement
vif; d’un côté, une littérature d’évasion,
dite “industrielle”, créée pour satisfaire “la
masse lisante;” de l’autre, un genre sérieux,
le genre de demain, par lequel le jeune Flaubert, comme ses
contemporains anglais et russes, pense naturellement entrer
en littérature (plutôt que par le théâtre
ou la poésie, comme leurs prédécesseurs
romantiques). L’évolution des pratiques de catalogage
des propriétaires de cabinets de lecture de l’époque
jettent sur ce débat une lumière inattendue et
peu connue. |
Fay, |
Carolyn, Franklin & Marshall College: “Ceci
tuera cela”: Scandals in the Priesthood in Hugo, Gautier
and Zola.” (11.2)
With one gesture Claude Frollo boils down the enormous revolution
of the printing press to a simple formula for change: "Ceci
tuera cela." This paper will read Frollo's formula as
one which informs the narrative dynamic of three texts: Hugo's
Notre-Dame de Paris, Gautier's "La Morte amoureuse" and
Zola's La Faute de l'abbé Mouret. While each text dramatizes
the scandal of priestly desire, I will show that the real scandal
lies in the margins of Zola's novel where we find an alternate
model for the forces of change which drive narrative, one which
dislocates the ceci/cela binary, thereby unsettling the very
categories upon which institutions such as the priesthood depend.
|
Ferguson, |
Priscilla Parkhurst, Columbia University: “Les Bourdieu
d’en France.” (33.3)
Pierre Bourdieu’s death in 2002 has prompted assessments
of a different order than those, often partisan, that appeared
during his lifetime and to which he often responded in kind.
The special issue of the Revue des sciences humaines that appeared
earlier this year is notable for the range of commentary, from
disciples such as Patrick Champagne, to longtime critics such
as Alain Touraine, and scholars in other disciplines such as
Roger Chartier. These articles offer a good starting point
to consider the “Frenchness” of a body of work
that aimed, and reached readers well beyond France.
|
Finn, |
Michael R., Ryerson University: “From Possession to
Self-Possession : Spiritualism, the Paranormal, Dreams and Écriture in Rachilde.” (2.4)
In France in the 1870s, changing medical theory concerning
hysteria collided with a traditional spiritualist movement
that was itself shifting toward a more modern parapsychology.
Those most affected by this evolving quarrel were often women,
who were more frequently the subject of the hypnotist, made
up the great majority of the diagnosed hysterics, and tended
to be involved in spiritualist practices. This paper will explore
the impact of three discourses of “possession” on
one young female, the writer Rachilde: the discourse of the
medium, of the hypnotist, and of the nerve doctor. It will
track her ambivalent relationship with a noted “scientific” spiritualist
and query her representation of hysteria theory following her “hysterical
attack” and leg paralysis of the early 1880s. The paper
will then explore the construction of Rachilde’s writing
persona, tracing the connections between possession, hallucination,
a sense of dual personality, and the “possessed” mental
state that is the writing stance of certain Rachildian protagonist/writers,
e.g. those of Le mordu (1889) and La sanglante ironie (1891).
|
Fisher, |
Dominique, University of North Carolina: “Les Hors-Nature
ou les mises en scène de l’Autre.” (37.3)
Dans Les Hors-nature (1897), la tentation du lesbianisme et
de l’homosexualité masculine, présente
des prises de positions contradictoires, fascination et rejet,
propres à l’imaginaire rachildien et à l’esthétique
décadente de l’époque. L’homosexuel/le
apparaît ici dans un contexte théâtralisé,
exotique et caricatural et où l'élément
féminin est rapidement évacué. Paul-Eric,
travesti et homosexuel efféminé, combine tous
les clichés de l'éphèbe et du rasta. Il
vit par ailleurs une relation incestueuse avec son frère
Reutler qui finit par l’assassiner après avoir
en vain tenté de le masculiniser en le jetant de force
dans les bras des femmes. Margueritte Florane est présentée
sous les masques de l’actrice et du travesti. Je montrerai
comment la représentation de l’homosexuel/le en
tant qu’Autre, s’imbrique dans ce texte dans une
logique nationaliste et raciste, reflet d’un certain
universalisme français.
|
Gaillard, |
Françoise, Université de Paris
7-Denis Diderot: “Le siècle du mouvement: imaginaire
de la mobilité sociale et spatiale” (51.3) |
Gantz, |
Katie,Valparaiso University: “Une langue étrangère:
Translating Sex and Race in Rachilde’s La Jongleuse.” (37.2)
In Rachilde’s La Jongleuse, the young Léon finds
that, regardless of his own language of seduction, he remains
unable to translate protagonist Eliante’s discours on
exotic sexual pleasures into the acte of heterosex. Such eccentricity
on her part is repeatedly linked to the revelation that she
is a Creole, a liminal fin-de-siècle identity that hovers
visually and culturally between "European whiteness" and "island
blackness." Her long-absent servant, the négresse Mada, functions in absentia as the sexual "voice" of
Eliante. Otherwise unable to express erotic sentiment, Eliante
ventriloquizes Mada’s uncivilized "native" passions.
However, she must simultaneously revise and re-voice them in
a language more comprehensible to her white French suitors.
This act of translation ultimately serves as the explanation
for Eliante’s double perversion: her "whiteness" makes
her frigid, unattainable by men; her "blackness" makes
her depraved, full of fetishistic desires incompatible with
heteronormative bourgeois society.
|
Garval, |
Michael, North Carolina State University: “Hungry Eyes.” (14.3)
Focusing on an emblematic fin-de-siècle illustrated
menu,“LES CINQ SENS,” this paper probes a paradox:
how and why, in gastronomic images from the late nineteenth
century, vision seems to surpass taste, with the eyes taking
precedence over the mouth. Three specific contexts serve as
a backdrop: 1) the iconographical topos of the five senses;
2) early nineteenth century gastronomic discourse on the senses;
3) illustrations from early- and mid-nineteenth century gastronomic
works. This emergent conception of gastronomy as more visual
than gustatory – to be enjoyed with mouth shut and eyes
wide open – was driven by democratization of gastronomic
refinement, and by rapid development of powerful visual means
for reaching the public. “LES CINQ SENS” thus offers
more than a trenchant image of gastronomy as a feast for the
eyes. It anticipates the later evolution of gastronomy as a
favorite spectator sport for the indolent television viewer.
|
Genova, |
Pamela A., University of Oklahoma: “La
Dernière
Mode: Mallarmé and the Modalities of the Popular Press.” (44.1)
In 1874, Stéphane Mallarmé founded his own journal, La
Dernière Mode. In this odd magazine, he wrote articles
addressing a vast array of cultural phenomena grouped around
the notion of la mode: dresses, jewelry, food, and the most
fashionable soirées. La Dernière Mode, characterized
by Jean-Pierre Richard as “cette extraordinaire encyclopédie
de la frivolité,” may seem an unlikely enterprise
for le poète de l’absolu, yet the project holds
great interest from a critical perspective and can be understood
as a logical reaction to the crisis that Mallarmé had
suffered in the 1860s, a fearful experience of near madness.
To find his way back from ethereal abstraction to the concreteness
of daily life, Mallarmé plunges into the banalities
of hemlines and petits-fours, images that can be read as an
illustration of the aboli bibelot of his verse, as protection
from the haunting image of Icarus and the temptation of transcendence.
|
Gindhart, |
Maria P., Georgia State University: "A
'Secular Genesis’:
Fernand Cormon’s Painting Cycle for the Amphitheater
of the New Galleries at the National Museum of Natural History
in Paris.” (36.3).
Fernand Cormon’s paintings for the amphitheater of the
New Galleries of Comparative Anatomy, Paleontology, and Anthropology
(1898) at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris can
be viewed as a “secular Genesis,” as they present
a scientifically informed account of the development of humanity
from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. While the amphitheater’s
location in a scientific institution influenced Cormon’s
choice of subject matter, the secularization of the Third Republic
was impacting government-funded public art more generally.
In the aim of separating church and state, profane subject
matter increasingly replaced religious scenes in works commissioned
by the French Fine Arts Administration, and the history of
France became the new “laic Bible” and served as
a source of artistic inspiration. Cormon’s canvases thus
fulfilled the changing iconographic and ideological needs of
both the Museum and the French State.
|
Ginsburg, |
Michal P., Northwestern University: “Narratology and
Amatology in Stendhal.” (19.3)
|
Girard, |
Marie-Hélène, Yale University/Université de
Picardie: “Courbet et le motif du casseur de cailloux." (39.2)
Le tableau Les Casseurs de cailloux fut peint par Courbet en
1849 et exposé au Salon de 1850-1851, aux côtés
de l’Enterrement à Ornans dont il partagea le
scandale. Il fut l’objet de nombreuses réactions,
où l’appréciation esthétique de
l’oeuvre se mêle aux préoccupations sociales,
voire socialistes et qui font du tableau une pierre de touche
des changements en cours dans la vie artistique et dans la
vie sociale française, autour du milieu du siècle.
La bataille réaliste fait alors émerger non seulement
une volonté de renouvellement esthétique mais
aussi des préoccupations nouvelles autour de la notion
de progrès et de la représentation du travail.
Le sujet du casseur de cailloux, dont Courbet n’a pas
l’exclusivité, va ainsi devenir un motif de la
peinture réaliste que l’on se propose d’interroger
dans la communication, d’un point de vue thématique
et à la lumière de l’histoire des idées,
en le confrontant à la thématique plus large
du rapport de l’homme à la pierre – du tailleur
de pierre au casseur de cailloux, l’éventail est
large – et à la réflexion contemporaine
de la Seconde République puis de l’Empire, sur
le rôle du travail manuel au regard du progrès.
Ce sera par là même l’occasion de mesurer
l’engagement social des tenants du Réalisme.
|
Glinoer, |
Anthony, Université de Liège,: “Les
cénacles
romantiques et la révolution de la sociabilité littéraire
(1820-1835).” (32.1)
La Restauration et la monarchie de Juillet marquent une intensification
et une transformation profonde de la sociabilité intellectuelle à Paris
: résurrection des sociétés savantes,
création de cercles en tous genres, naissance de groupes
saint-simoniens, etc. Le cénacle appartient à ces
modes nouveaux de sociabilité : face à la forme
traditionnelle du salon, poètes, plasticiens et musiciens
devenus camarades se rencontrent là pour former une « communauté émotionnelle » et
participer au triomphe de l’esthétique romantique,
considérée comme l’incarnation du renouveau
en art. La communication portera sur la polémique engagée
vers 1830 autour de la notion de camaraderie en littérature,
et analysera les caractéristiques fondatrices du modèle
cénaculaire, qui deviendra dominant dans les avant-gardes
des XIXe et XXe siècles.
|
Goffette, |
Jean-Dominique, Lycée Jules Ferry: “Les Grands
Boulevards, espace de référence et lieu d’exception:
Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire.” (22.2)
Après 1830, les Grands Boulevards occupent une place
singulière et emblématique dans la constitution
et la diffusion des représentations littéraires
de Paris et de l’espace public moderne. Lieu original
et d’exception, ils deviennent à travers un foisonnement
de discours et de récits hétérogènes,
l’espace de référence de l’identité de
la ville moderne et d’une société entrée
dans l’âge de la modernité politique. L’exposé se
propose de montrer comment Balzac s’approprie les schèmes
représentatifs déjà modélisés
et modalisés de ces Boulevards pour les transformer
en un lieu où la ville se représente et se joue,
puis la manière dont Flaubert reprend à son compte
le topos inventé par Balzac et le remanie pour le métamorphoser
en un lieu emblématique d’une ville-spectacle
réduisant l’individu à n’être
qu’un simple spectateur. Appréhendé sous
cet angle, l’univers de la ville flaubertienne apparaît
très proche de celui évoqué par Baudelaire
qui sera abordé dans la conclusion de l’exposé.
|
Gordon, |
Rae Beth, University of Connecticut: "Darwin in Show
Business" (46.4)
Exhibits of "Phenomena" took place throughout the
19th century in France, but from the 1870's on, the ways in
which they were presented and the reactions of spectators and
journalists were inflected by popular conceptions of Darwinism
in France. This paper looks at Phenomena in several Parisian
sites: the fairground, the Jardin d'Acclimatation, the caf'conc'
and music-hall. Performances of minstrels, of African dancers,
of chimpanzees, and of cafe-concert stars such as Polaire were
assimilated in varying ways with Phenomena on exhibit or in
music-hall acts. An increasing anxiety about regression becomes
part of the journalistic discourse surrounding not only performing
chimps at the Olympia, but also singers and dancers at the
Moulin-Rouge.
|
Gould, |
Evlyn, University of Oregon, “The Trials of Public
Education in Zola and Barrès.” (10.3)
During the Third Republic in France, public education became
a privileged forum for crucial national debates about the formation
of French citizens. In response to the dramatic effects of
the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) on these debates, two of the
most prominent spokesmen of the period, Emile Zola and Maurice
Barrès, wrote novels examining the institution of secular
curricular reform from diametrically opposed ideological perspectives.
Zola's last novel, Vérité, published posthumously
in 1903, and Barrès's Les Déracinés of
1897, both sought to put public education on trial. In this
paper, I propose a comparative exploration of the two novels
with special attention to the figure of the liberal educators
they stage: Marc Froment in Vérité and Bouteiller
in Les Déracinés. Ultimately, despite their reputations
as the quintessential Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard, respectively,
the ever-popular Zola and the largely forgotten Barrès
both represent the figure of the teacher as the very symbol
of the secular French Republic and the classroom as the place
where French universalism is both put into practice and contested.
|
Goulet, |
Andrea, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: "Wallpaper
in the Eye: Villiers, Leroux, and the Optical Chambers." (14.2)
This paper analyzes two fictions featuring bedrooms whose descriptions
echo and exteriorize the anatomy of the human eyeball: Villiers
de l'Isle-Adam's fantastic tale Claire Lenoir (1867/1887) and
Gaston Leroux's detective story Le Mystère de la Chambre
Jaune (1907). Through a figural link between domestic "chambre" and
optical chamber, both fin-de-siècle texts explore the
troubled sites of human comprehension. As with Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1899), these stories
present enclosed women suffering from "visions" whose
reality status is disputed by their male observers/investigators.
Moreover, in an age of interest in optical distortion and hysterical
sight, the French authors extend the question of visual pathology
to the men in their fictions, by implicating Bonhomet, Rouletabille
and Larsan in the confused relations between human perception
and external reality. The paper calls on the science of optics
to propose that rather than represent the "chambres noires" of
a photographic machine, the bedrooms in question tap into the
epistemological ambiguities of the living, tinted, and imperfect
chambers of the eye.
|
Grossman, |
Kathryn M., Pennsylvania State University: “Class Mobility
and “Regime Change” in Hugo’s L’Homme
qui rit.” (5.4)
The notion of changing classes pervades Hugo’s L’Homme
qui rit (1869), set in Restoration England. The hero, Gwynplaine,
is removed through kidnapping and mutilation as a child from
his rightful place as an heir to the peerage, then suddenly
elevated in adulthood from performing on street corners to
taking his seat in the House of Lords. Like his republican
father, he finds himself despised and rejected, but not before
he can plead the case of the nation’s poor to an aristocracy
determined to preserve the status quo. Gwynplaine’s extreme
mobility is thus a metaphor for all who aspire to a different
world — from utopian dreamers to self-absorbed social
climbers. While Hugo’s meek hardly end up inheriting
the earth, their ups and downs imply that such shifts in fortune
can also appy to their oppressors, as well as to imperial rule
in nineteenth-century France. To borrow a current expression: “Regime
change begins at home.”
|
Guentner, |
Wendelin, University of Iowa: “Changements de vitesse:
Aspects of Acceleration in 19th- Century France.” (16.1)
In 19th-century France technological changes associated with
the industrial revolution gave rise to a collective impression
that the pace of life was dramatically speeding up. I examine
this perception, in particular with respect to early accounts
of railroad and steamship travel, photography and, later in
the century, travel by automobile. I then explore the extent
to which this sense of life’s ever increasing velocity
may have influenced the evolution of aesthetic judgments concerning
the elements that make a work of art or literature a completed
oeuvre, rather than just a preliminary sketch.
|
Guerlac, |
Suzanne, University of California, Berkeley, "Ernest
Renan and the politics of Race, Nation and Civilization." (23.4)
It is a commonplace that the concept of race has relatively
little weight in the French context which privileges notions
of nation and civilisation. This view is most famously expressed
by Ernest Renan in his short essay "Qu’est-ce qu’une
Nation?" In fact, Renan's articulation of the concepts
of race, nation and civilization (or “science")
is much more complex. My talk will explore the importance of
race in the thinking of Renan , how questions of race were
built into his notion of "civilization," and political
pressures that influenced his apparent subordination of the
concept of race.
|
Guieu, |
Jean-Max, Georgetown University: “Ethique sociale et
chorégraphie: le ballet de Messidor d’’Emile
Zola.” (4.4)
Fidèle à la plus pure tradition de l’opéra
français, un ballet est placé au milieu du drame
lyrique Messidor, que Zola écrivit pour son ami le compositeur
Alfred Bruneau (Palais Garnier 1897). Pourtant jamais auparavant à l'Opera
un ballet n’a été chargé de sens
comme celui-ci. Au delà de sa fonction narrative, il
transpose l'univers personnel de Zola, avec ses fantasmes affectifs
ou ses obsessions cataclysmiques. Surtout, la chorégraphie
est ici porteuse d’un message politique, qui reprend
celui du drame lyrique: l’Or, c’est-à dire
le Capital, maléfique lorsqu’il est employé pour
le profit de certains, peut et doit devenir bénéfique
en servant la collectivité. A la fois délire
mystique, discours socialo-paternaliste ou forme de propagande à la
manière des opéras maoistes, le ballet de Messidor
illustre en la justifiant une économie politique et
sociale très fin-de-siècle.
|
Hadlock, |
Philip G., Texas Christian University, "Driving Concerns
in Maupassant's 'Le Gueux'" (39.2)
In his short story, “Le Gueux” (1884), Guy de Maupassant
reflects on the connotations of the mechanical for the body’s
coherence as a site of epistemic or esthetic curiosity. The tale
focuses at a constative level on the aftermath of an automobile
accident; yet the narrative’s most intriguing questions
may relate to the functions that the mechanical body performs
in establishing the human body’s identity within the cultural
order. In Maupassant’s scenario, recourse to the mechanical
might be said to supplement the always tenuous relationship between
the human body and its own selfdom: it animates the unfulfillable
promise of mastery over the object world; and thus, it sustains
the radicalized desire to uncover the self’s relation to
its material existence. Perhaps, then, the tale’s ultimate
meaning has to do with the unmanageable consequences of the drive
to master relation to one’s own body, and to the systems
of identity that the cultural order prescribes for it.
|
Hamrick, |
L. Cassandra, Saint Louis University: “When ‘les
Civilisés’ become ‘les Barbares’ and ‘les
Barbares’ become ‘les Civilisés’.” (23.1)
Dramatic transformations in the area of transportation in 19th-century
had an “exotic” effect on artistic and literary
production in France. Yet the effect was not uniquely a phenomenon
of cultural hegemony. By expanding the possibilities of physical
déplacement, railways and steamboats were also broadening
the possibilities of psychological and aesthetic transfer to
the “other” culture. When this mechanism occurred
through “European eyes,” les civilisés (the
Europeans) remained civilized as the dominant culture. L’Autre (the object of European regard) remained on the fringes as
le barbare. With writers such as Gautier and Baudelaire, however,
there are signs of a reversal of this mechanism when encountering
the “Other.” In becoming the “Other,” the
critic becomes le barbare. Subject and object are (momentarily)
fused and le barbare is accorded the status of civilisé,
while le civilisé (the Western European) is displaced
to the status of barbare. This paper will explore the notion
of barbare/civilisé transfer in Gautier’s critical
writings as a sign of an emerging ethnological consciousness
in a century of profound change in nearly all areas of human
endeavor.
|
Hannoosh, |
Michele, University of Michigan: “Michelet and the
Visual Arts.” (40.1)
In both his private journal and his published histories, Jules
Michelet was a committed and assiduous interpreter of the visual
arts. While historians of architecture and literary scholars
of Romanticism have recognised the importance of his remarks
on the gothic, the rest of his art criticism — particularly
his extensive discussions of painting from the past and the
present — has been virtually ignored. Yet Michelet’s
highly individual insights are not only fascinating in themselves;
they also relate in complex and illuminating ways to his historical œuvre.
Through examination of specific examples, this paper will discuss
some of the ways in which his reflexions on the development
of the arts relate, in this student of Vico, to the historical
development of cultures, including that of nineteenth-century
France.
|
Harkness, |
Nigel, Queens University Belfast: “‘Le Roman-bâtard’:
Women’s Writing and Illegitimacy during the July Monarchy”(6.1)
The July Monarchy marked an important period of transition in French literary
history, during which Realism supplanted Sentimentalism, and the novel form was
colonised by men. How did women writers experience and react to this progressive
masculinisation of a genre which had long been their preserve? This paper will
highlight an unease about writing which emerges from the work of women writers
such as Ulliac-Trémadeure, Touchard-Lafosse, Marbouty and Carlowitz, and
manifests itself in corporeal and sexual, rather than literary and intellectual
terms. Writing becomes akin to adultery for these writers. , and the woman writer
is seen, and more significantly represents herself, as transgressive. Not only
is the act of writing presented as incompatible with marriage, but the product
of this act, the novel, is compared to the illegitimate offspring of the adulterous
liaison, and is seen as requiring the name of a man/father if it is to succeed
in the literary world/marketplace.
|
Hart, |
Kathleen, Vassar College: “The New Darwinian Paradigm:
Reflections on its Relevance to French Studies.” (52.1)
The relatively new field of evolutionary psychology seeks to
explain human behavior, thought, and emotions in terms of Darwinian
evolution. Theories from this field are rapidly gaining ascendancy,
yet literary and cultural theorists have shown surprisingly
little interest in them. Can we afford to ignore a field that
backs up theories about human motives and behavior with scientific
evidence? Theories, moreover, with which our students are likely
to be familiar? What are the implications of such theories
for French studies? My paper addresses these questions in two
parts. First, I show how evolutionary psychology (often wrongly
confused with social Darwinism or biological determinism) supports
or challenges various critical theories. I then discuss ways
in which I have begun to use theories of evolutionary psychology
in my teaching and scholarship, focusing on Darwinian explanations
of concepts including moral emotions, status, story-telling,
and binary thinking.
|
Harter, |
Deborah, Rice University: “Psychic Spaces in Rachilde’s
La Tour d’amour.”
Rachilde’s La Tour d’amour (1899) dramatizes the
hazards not just of the body’s excesses (those of the
sea that lies at the base of the lighthouse lifting up her
skirts “jusqu’aux entrailles” and moaning “comme
une épouse trahie”) but also of the body in
excess (those that Barnabus retrieves as they wash up on the shore
and whose hair he drapes from his cap). The body in excess
that interests me most in this novel, moreover, is the one
that emerges from the spaces of the mind: the “psychic” body
that is more fluid space than body and whose “portrait” is
sketched in Jean Malheux’ journal. Psychic excess emerges
here from the very boundaries of language to take on its own
articulate shape. As it records Malheux’ loss of lucidity
Malheux’ journal folds into and exceeds the madness it
would describe, and its contours are as seductive as any the
novel offers.
|
Hartmann, |
Esa Christine, University of North Carolina: “‘Le
dix-neuvième siècle à l’extrême’:
Désirs décadents et vicissitudes de la modernité dans
A rebours de J.K Huysmans.” (4.3)
Si Huysmans évoque, dans son œuvre Là-bas,"
l’ignominieux
spectacle de cette fin de siècle", des Esseintes,
héros du "roman-fantaisie" A Rebours (1884),
représente bien le dandy exquis et raffiné de
la décadence, de cette époque située au
point extrême du XIXe siècle qui ressemble à une
"exaspération
nerveuse". Comment analyser et comprendre ce sentiment
de "fin de siècle" qui affecte l’esprit
et l’âme des héros décadents sous
la forme de la "Grande Névrose", comme
le fit jadis l’ennui chez leurs prédécesseurs
romantiques? Phénomène métaphysique autant
que physiologique, la névrose décadente incarnée
dans le personnage unique de des Esseintes entraîne la
métamorphose du désir érotique, le goût
des paradis artificiels et des plaisirs pervers. Mélange
des sexes, stérilité, sadisme, perversion et
cruauté sont les nouveaux modèles érotiques
de la littérature fin de siècle, pulsions libidineuses
morbides produisant aussi une nouvelle perception du langage.
La rhétorique fin de siècle se définit
moins comme un style homogène qu’un mélange
de styles et de discours: le genre littéraire préféré de
des Esseintes est le poème en prose, “le suc concret,
osmazme de la littérature, l’huile essentielle
de l’art.”
|
Hawthorne, |
Mélanie, Texas A & M University: “Riding
in Car(riage)s With Boys (and Girls).” (37.1)
The automobile has long been understood--particularly in American,
but also in European, culture--as a place that offered both
a sense of freedom and an alternative private space. This presentation
examines the predecessor of the car, the carriage, as place
of sexual exploration in several nineteenth-century French
novels, from Madame Bovary to René Maizeroy's Les
deux amies (1885) and in particular the two very different versions
of Rachilde's Monsieur Vénus of 1884 and 1889. These
decadent novels rewrite the narrative, moving from "riding
in carriages with boys" to a narrative of "riding
in carriages with girls." This analysis of the topos of
the carriage suggests that long before riding in cars (with
either boys or girls) was possible, women used the carriage
as a place to explore alternative forms of sexual expression.
|
Hayes, |
Jarrod, University of Michigan: “Que(e)r(y)ing the
Quadroon Ball in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: Towards an
American Studies in French.” (52.2)
Sidonie De La Houssaye’s 1894 Louisiana novel Octavia
la quarteronne stages the conflict between Franco- and Anglo-American
regimes of racial difference. Set in the 1830s, this novel
offers insights into the institution of plaçage or contractual
relationships between white men and mix-raced women. Octavia
avenges being dumped for a “legitimate” wife by
kidnapping her lover’s daughter and raising her as a
quadroon. Years later, Octavia arranges for him to discover
his son and this daughter in bed together, after which he shoots
his daughter then himself. Contrasting starkly with the tragic
mulatta of Anglo-American fiction and its narratives of passing,
Octavia would be unthinkable under Anglo-American definitions
of race. This text and others like it thus constitute important
sites for an American Studies in French, sites at which American
notions of racial difference can be challenged and the sexual
transgression of racial boundaries can lead to interdisciplinary
crossings as well.
|
Healey, |
Kimberley, University of Rochester: “France’s
Inscrutable Utopia: China in the Nineteenth Century.”(27.1)
French missions to China in the nineteenth century were religious
and commercial, colonialist and anti-colonialist, covert and
public, led by individuals and group interests, and, motivated
by looking both to the past and the future. As these interactions
with China had widely disparate political or economic aims,
reactions to France’s involvement with China also varied.
Writers reacted to news from China by either viewing this farthest
Orient as a dystopia or as a utopia for nineteenth-century
France. This paper will present individual reactions to the
interactions of these two countries plotting their place in
an increasingly international world. The French involvement
with China raised issues about human rights, imperial dynasties,
free trade, Anglo-French political relations and aesthetic
value. These questions, rather than reinforcing French national
identity, ultimately destabilize both the French colonial project
and cultural communities in France.
|
Henry, |
Freeman G., University of South Carolina: “From ‘langue
fixe’ to ‘fixisme’: Turning Back the Clock
in Restoration France.” (51.1)
Restoration policies sought to heal national wounds and promote
national cohesion and stability by revalorizing key pre-Revolutionary
ideals and by institutionalizing resistance to change. This
paper demonstrates the extent to which fixity in language and "fixisme" in
science contributed to the hegemonic and intellectual centripalism
of the period. Indeed, Cuvier (as scientist) and Lhomond, Chapsal,
and Girault-Duvivier (as grammarians) may be seen as unwitting
cohorts in the promulgation of a basic attitude of resistance
common to the entire nineteenth century.
|
Hiner, |
Susan, Vassar College: “Mode, Monde et Demi Monde:
Fashioning Social Flux.” (18.1)
This paper explores the relationship between the demi-monde
and the world it shadows. Despite the apparent opposition of
these social worlds, within the demi-monde there existed a
clear hierarchy among women replicating that of the grand monde.
The courtesan doubles the proper lady through the mirror of
fashion. Balzac’s 1838 “La Femme comme il faut” reveals
the structured social world of mid-nineteenth-century Paris
and illustrates the staging of social belonging. Dumas père’s
1843 “Filles, lorettes et courtisanes” sets forth
the rigid hierarchy of the demi-monde. Yet these texts also
signal the growing fluidity of the social structure and voice
the alarm produced by such mobility. These physiologies, read
alongside two novels, illuminate the connection between and
potential reversibility of the apparent adversaries of courtesan
and proper lady and point to the medium of their interchange – fashion.
This link expresses social reinvention and the transgressive
blurring of monde and demi-monde.
|
Iandoli, |
Louis J., Bentley College: “The Palace
of the Tuileries and its Demolition: An analysis of the years
1870-1883.” (36.2)
The Palais des Tuileries has long been cast into oblivion and
denial in the French psyche. It paradoxically has reappeared
in controversy over the last 130 years. The loss of the Tuileries
has not been analyzed or debated enough in intellectual circles.
For scholars of French society and history, the destruction
of the great monument is often a mystery to which they give
little consideration. The vast majority of people do not know
about the manner of the palace's destruction. When one considers
the events that took place at the palace from 1789 to 1871,
it is baffling that the residence is so dimly recollected.
The following questions will be considered: "What happened
to the Tuileries Palace in the period of 1870-1883," and "What
happened subsequently to the palace in the minds of the French
people?"
|
Ifri, |
Pascal,Washington University: “La naissance de l’esthétique
proustienne dans Contre Sainte-Beuve. (40.3)
Si A la recherche du temps perdu marque une coupure radicale
avec l’esthétique du XIXème siècle
et fait entrer la littérature dans une ère nouvelle,
la plupart des théories et idées qui y sont présentées
figurent déjà dans les textes plus tard rassemblés
sous le titre Contre Sainte-Beuve. Dans cette communication,
nous limitant à une seule mais importante dimension
de l’esthétique de Proust, nous nous proposons
de nous arrêter brièvement sur les passages de
Contre Sainte-Beuve où naît la théorie
proustienne de la lecture. Nous verrons alors que c’est
en dénonçant la méthode critique de Sainte-Beuve
et en proposant une meilleure méthode pour lire des
auteurs tels que Nerval, Baudelaire, Balzac et Flaubert, que
Proust échafaude ses théories sur la lecture,
des théories qui se retrouveront presque intactes dans
le roman.
|
Ippolito, |
Christophe, University of the Pacific: “Stratégies
créatrices et analyse critique de la modernité:
Flaubert et la littérature populaire.” (41.2)
Cette communication se propose d’examiner les modalités
de résistance à la modernité en analysant
chez Flaubert les nombreuses critiques des productions en séries
de physiologies, keepsakes, feuilletons, et autres avatars
de la modernité naissante, alors même qu’il
en fait un usage extrêmement productif dans ses romans,
y développant sinon une relation d’‘hybridité’ du
moins un jeu complexe de repoussoir entre ces productions et
son écriture. Au-delà du principe affirmé de ‘l’art
pour l’art’, on distinguera la réaction
de Flaubert, qui dépasse une simple opposition binaire
entre tradition et modernité, de celles de ses prédécesseurs.
Ses oeuvres, attentives à la diversité de ces
publications, semblent assigner à chaque genre ‘populaire’ une
place particulière dans la société comme
dans l’économie du récit, et l’on étudiera
les stratégies d’insertion de ces productions ‘modernes,’ leurs
justifications possibles et leur rôle d’indices
de (résistance à) la modernité dans les
romans.
|
Jenson, |
Deborah C., University of Wisconsin: "Chateaubriand’s
Black and White Napoleons" (47.2)
Mimesis, particularly in the guise of mimicry,
emerged in the colonial era as the privileged trope of likeness
to which colonial slaves and masters were in thrall. This
mimetic likeness was a sort of funny mirror version of
the universal likeness celebrated in article One of the
Rights of Man. To consider mimesis and universalism in
tandem in a postcolonial context is provocative because
where universalism posits that we are all fundamentally
alike, a mimetic epistemology yields the observation that
we are nothing—neither alike nor different—until
we begin internalizing and modeling the likeness that organizes
the world into which we have been integrated. A mimetic
predisposition to the world essentially discounts universals
while performing imitation and resemblance as the paradoxically
global substance and action of inhabiting the world. Napoleon
allegedly was disturbed by the mimetic transference others
perceived between him and the “black Napoleon,” the
Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture. The
resemblance was sufficiently clear for Chateaubriand, in
his Mémoires d’outre-tombe, to taunt Napoleon
as the “Napoléon blanc.” This presentation
traces the construction of the black and white Napoleon
tropes in the context of Chateaubriand’s larger critique
of Napoleonic “univeralism” as imperialist
worldmaking: a literal reconstruction of the geopolitical
boundaries of our world(s).
|
Johnson, |
Donald, Independent Scholar: “Hugo’s
Poetic Change.” (5.2)
In his preface to Les Voix intérieures, Victor Hugo writes that the poet’s
most serious function is to effect a change in the interpretation of political
events whereby certain of these events are elevated “à la dignité d’événements
historiques.” Such an assertion of poetry’s power to act upon the
political scene is an inverted version of Hugo’s more familiarly historicist
claim in Préface de Cromwell that a given poetic form or practice is the
reflection of the political system of the society in which it is produced. Both
claims presume the possibility of an exchange between poetry, politics and history
that it will be the task of this paper to interrogate. Specifically, I will be
asking how, according to Hugo, do these exchanges and changes take place, how
do poetic events happen, and how does it happen that they can be translated into
political or historical events, events that change politics or history.
|
Johnson, |
Sharon P.,Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University: "Cleansing Les Halles:Discourses
of Health and Disease in Zola's Le Ventre
de Paris"( 42.1)
Emile Zola situates Le Ventre de Paris (1873) in the newly
renovated Haussmannian Halles de Paris. The author's metaphorical
representations of either a healthy or ailing urban center,
depending on the virtues or degeneracy of its populace, have
a long historical precedent. During the second half of the
eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century,
especially the period from 1830-50, abundant medical, architectural,
and municipal reports diagnosed the ills of the city of Paris
and proposed solutions to ameliorate them. A juxtaposition
of Zola's novel with reports from especially the July Monarchy
and the Second Republic provides a new frame of reference in
which to analyze the politics and ideological import of the
Le Ventre de Paris. The force of the novel's irony and the
implication of the text's discursive battle between les
Gras and les Maigres are intensified metaphorically and ideologically
when Le Ventre de Paris is recontextualized in the larger medical,
social, and political discourses that constructed and conflated
disease, immorality and impropriety to Paris' urban problems,
its working class, and political unrest.
|
Johnson, |
Warren, Arkansas State University: “Tracking Shots:
The Analytic of Motion in La bête humaine.” (16.3)
Zola’s La bête humaine (1890) describes the destructive
effects of replacing the circulatory motion valorized in such
earlier texts as Au Bonheur des Dames by a one-way or at best
shuttling movement. The repeated motifs of speed and of the
fleeting glance try to make visible what motion conceals from
the eye, that the terminus of linear movement, like the daily
run between Paris and Le Havre, is necessarily paralysis and
death. Because it is susceptible to being frozen in the photographic
image, linear movement or impulses (which includes the hereditary
flaws that drive Jacques Lantier) is antithetical to the complex
circulatory mechanisms that are the only sustainable outlets
for human energy. My paper will examine how photography at
this historical juncture, despite its promise for representing
the real, can be seen as arresting the vital flow of economic
and social relations in the latter nineteenth century.
|
Jovicic, |
Jelena, University of Western Ontario, “Voyager en
bon touriste: Les cartes postales et les guides touristiques
du XIXe siècle.” (27.4)
Le XIX siècle voit apparaître une nouvelle figure,
celle du touriste. Le terme 'touriste' date de 1816, mais c'est
Stendhal qui l'impose réellement en 1838 avec les
Mémoires
d'un touriste. A partir de 1840, le tourisme se transforme
en phénomène culturel: les grandes collections
de guides touristiques et de cartes postales figurent déjà sur
le marché français. Dans ma communication, j’explorerai
cette expansion du tourisme au XIX siècle en me limitant à un
corpus de lettres d’Orient écrites par quatre écrivains-voyageurs
(Flaubert, Maupassant, Loti et Isabelle Eberhardt). L'objectif
de mon analyse sera double. D'abord, je montrerai comment ces
lettres fonctionnent comme le 'montage' de deux discours touristiques,
celui du guide de voyage et celui de la carte postale. Ensuite,
j’examinerai comment la pratique du tourisme, malgré son
aspect trivial, élabore un nouveau concept d’espace.
|
Kadish, |
Doris, University of Georgia: “Tamango:
Texts/Contexts/Intertexts.” (47.1)
A mordant irony sets Prosper Mérimée's short
story Tamango (1829) apart from the scores of other stories
about blacks and slavery published in the 1820s. To fully understand
Mérimée's ironic strategy, one must read this
narration of a slave revolt on board ship both contextually
(in relation to abolitionist activities in the 1820s) and intertextually
(in relation to the other "negrophile" works of the
time). Further light can be shed on Mérimée's
story by contrasting it with the far less ironic movie version,
also entitled Tamango, directed in 1957 by John Berry. Berry,
a communist who was blacklisted in the United States, spent
most of the rest of his career in France, where this film was
banned because of its depiction of an interracial relationship.
Produced under far different conditions and received by far
different audiences, these two texts– one narrative and
the other cinematic--nonetheless mine the same quarry of negrophile
tales of the 1820s; and, as I shall argue in this paper, they
do so for similar engagé purposes.
|
Kamm, |
Lewis, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth: “Fission
and Fusion: Escaping the Traps of Naturalism (and Other Literary
Movements).” (34.1)
This paper raises questions about our tendency to focus on
isms as definable movements by linking interpretations of Naturalism
and Emile Zola to a central theme in early nineteenth-century
French literature and by utilizing ambiguities of Zola's work
as a means for understanding historical traps of interpretive
notions of literary movements. “Naturalism,” like
so many other "movements," is
a moving target, both the continuation and the dissolution
of what we refer to as “Romanticism.” Additionally,
even the purpose of the work of art constantly wavers between
two larger factors: a function determined specifically by
social and historical context and, paradoxically, an immanence
which points to universal questions of humankind and considers
literature without reference to any specific contextual reality
or ism. Literary movements are seen as sand paintings, and
we, as literary critics, are advised to change our notions
of categorization
in the face of these changes.
|
Katsaros, |
Laure, Amherst College: "From 1789 to 1848: Change
and Continuity in Revolutionary France" (38.2)
This paper analyzes the connection between the publication
of three important books on the French Revolution in early
1847 and the Revolution of 1848 which was to follow. These
works, as well as the men who wrote them (Jules Michelet, Alphonse
de Lamartine, and Louis Blanc), played a determining role in
the short-lived Second Republic. I will discuss how the model
and example of 1789 both paved the way for 1848, and stood
in the way of 1848. Retrospectively, the Revolution of 1848
was widely perceived as a failed repetition of 1789, as if
the example of the past had prevented the new Revolution from
looking ahead to the future. More generally, I will examine
how the notion of political change in nineteenth-century France
was modeled on the French Revolution, and how its overwhelming
presence paradoxically represented the greatest obstacle to
change.
|
Kelly, |
Dorothy, Boston University: “Noisy Change in Balzac’s
La peau de chagrin.” (48.1)
Coins are constantly jingling in Balzac’s La Peau
de chagrin. This insistent noise echoes the “noise” of
a profound conflict in the way the text represents signification
itself. I will investigate the two contradictory sides of this
coin of meaning, a contradiction which I view as a symptom
of change in the nineteenth-century view of language, and the
way in which this change is aptly signified by those jingling
sounds of spare change.
|
Kessler, |
Marni, University of Kansas: “An Eye for an Eye: Edgar
Degas’ Woman with a Bandage.” (14.1)
I will analyze Degas’ Woman with a Bandage of 1872-73
as it relates to the artist’s failing eyesight and ophthalmologic
practices during the second half of the nineteenth century.
By the mid 1860s, Degas vision became blurred. Told he would
eventually go blind, he became depressed. I want to argue that
in this image of a woman with a white bandage over her eye,
Degas visualizes his anxiety. Even Degas’ formal choices
capitulate to questions of vision and visibility. The close-up
format produces a tension between clarity and obscurity, focus
and blur. Indeed, Degas varies focus in order to address, through
subterfuge, a weakened vision that corresponds to his way of
seeing. He scumbles paint across the surface, creates a distorted
view. By continually calling into question legibility and privileging
muddled forms, Degas configures vision as a site of privilege
and anxiety.
|
Kiebuzinski, |
Ksenya, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute: “On Nationalism
and Citizenship: Politics and Pedagogy in Magasin d’éducation
et de récréation (1864-1915).” (10.4)
In 1864 Pierre-Jules Hetzel, a Republican activist, publisher,
and writer of children’s stories under the name P.-J.
Stahl, established together with his childhood friend Jean
Macé, a teacher and founder of the Ligue de l’Enseignement,
the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation.
The publication of their children’s literary magazine
coincided with the stabilization in power of the bourgeoisie,
the library movement of the 1860s, and the expansion of education
under Jules Ferry that led to free, compulsory secular education
in 1882. Hetzel’s goal was for the magazine to serve
as a vehicle to bring about changes in the mores of future
generations of French citizens--to make them more patriotic
and more willing to lay down their lives for the good of France.
He and the editorial board turned to children’s literature
to inspire a rebirth of the pride and spirit which they felt
had been lost during the Second Empire and the events of 1870-1871.
Their magazine fit the political and pedagogical agenda of
the Third Republic by extolling the virtues of education, love
of country, and duty to one’s parents, teachers and state,
all factors that would help form an egalitarian, secular and
civic-minded society.
|
Kilbane, |
Aimée, University of California, Santa Barbara: “Community,
Wandering and the Bohemian Aesthetic in Gérard de Nerval.” (31.3)
Bohemian subculture in nineteenth-century Paris was characterized
by its resistance to the bourgeois world’s commitment
to conformity, industry, and capitalist exchange. Nerval’s
writings reflect both the community and the isolation that
resulted from the rejection of bourgeois values. Works such
as Petits châteaux de Bohême and La
Bohême
galante nostalgically describe the community of romantic artists
of Nerval’s youth, while Voyage en Orient, Promenades
et souvenirs, Les Nuits d’octobre point to Nerval’s
compulsion to wander, both within Paris and abroad. To travel
in this way is to make oneself foreign, which served to accentuate
Nerval’s dissociation from the dominant culture and enabled
him to inhabit the outsider’s position. I will examine
Nerval’s contribution to the image of the bohemian, the
paradox of this subculture typified by both a camaraderie of
outsiders and the need to escape, as well as the appeal of
travel linked to unsettling changes occurring at home.
|
Koos, |
Leonard R., Mary Washington College: “La Femme
au Temps des Colonies: The Example of Yasmina (Hélène
Roncin) in Colonial North Africa.” (10.4)
By the late nineteenth century, the residential colonial population
in French North Africa had begun to produce a literature that
not only attempted self-representation, but also self-consciously
sought to differentiate itself from metropolitan constructions
of the colonies. This paper proposes to examine the works of
Hélène Roncin, who published under the pseudonymYasmina
in Algiers in 1897 a volume of travel writing entitled Croquis
tunisiens and sixteen shorter autobiographical sketches, nature
studies, and stories based on local folklore in the late 1890s
in La Revue Algérienne Illustrée. While Hélène
Roncin’s works participate in the discursive ramifications
of the colonial enterprise, they also self-reflectively explore
the limits of colonial discourse in which representationally
displaced subjects are accorded a textuality verging on post-orientalist
representation.
|
Landenson, |
Elisabeth, University of Virginia: “Flaubert
and the Art of Masturbation.” (41.3)
Flaubert’s monumental correspondence, repository of the
personal observations he kept out of his famously “impersonal” published
works, contains a running commentary on the subject of masturbation.
Masturbation most often serves metaphoric and quasi-metaphoric
ends in the letters, as when he advises Ernest Feydeau to renounce
a budding sexual relationship, on the grounds that it will
prevent him from writing. Masturbation is better, he tells
his friend, specifying: il faut foutre l’encrier. This
paper will analyze the figure of masturbation in Flaubert’s
correspondence both in the context of contemporary attitudes
toward autoeroticism and in that of representations of alloeroticism
in his works written for publication. I wish ultimately to
show that Flaubert’s valorization of autoeroticism as
a model for literary creation, even if it does not explicitly
figure in his published writings, paves the way for the emphasis
on artistic self-fecundation in twentieth-century works, especially
Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.
|
Lathers, |
Marie, Case Western Reserve University: “La Fille
aux yeux d’or and the Absence of Color.” (48.2)
I refer to Linda Nochlin’s essay “Géricault:
The Absence of Women” to read for (the lack of) color
in Balzac’s text. Balzac highlights our misunderstanding
of color by giving Christemio alternately black and white eyes.
Whereas white represents the mixing of all colors, black represents
the absence of color. Nochlin’s reading of Le Radeau
de la Méduse (1819) points out that Géricault’s
painting eliminated women by replacing femininity with two
other marginalized categories, age and race. I argue that substitutions
are not made, rather categories—present or absent—work
to sustain one other. The position of Christemio is then compared
to that of the black male in Le Radeau, who waves a white cloth.
Finally, Joseph le Nègre’s status in the painting
is compared to that of Laure, who poses in Manet’s L’Olympia wearing a white headscarf. This brings us back to the white
scarf with which Christemio blindfolds Henri de Marsay.
|
Le Calvez, |
Eric, Georgia State University: “Génétique
transformationnelle du personnage flaubertien: le cas Pellerin.” (30.2)
On a souvent remarqué que les personnages flaubertiens
sont instables, variant selon la progression de l’intrigue
et surtout leur fonction dans chacun des contextes. C’est
particulièrement vrai des personnages de L’Éducation
sentimentale, où abondent les velléités
et les résolutions manquées. Pellerin, le peintre
du roman, appartient bien à cette catégorie de
personnages mouvants, jusqu’à devenir, comble
de la déchéance, photographe. Il est de plus
chargé d’ambiguïtés notables, puisqu’il
est à la fois le porte-parole de l’auteur en matière
d’art ainsi que la cible de l’ironie du narrateur.
Cette communication se propose non pas de voir comment Flaubert
conçoit le personnage de Pellerin mais d’étudier
la genèse de ses transformations dans les manuscrits
du roman, en particulier dans la perspective d’une génétique
scénarique, s’attachant à la mise en place
du personnage par rapport aux grandes articulations narratives
dans les scénarios.
|
Lee, |
Susanna, Georgetown University,: “Scientific Discourse
and the Move to Secularism.” (11.4)
This paper argues that nineteenth-century scientific discourse
revealed a profound ambivalence about the move from religious
to nonreligious modes of understanding. It also examines how
that discourse is evoked in nineteenth-century fiction to either
sustain or undermine narrative coherence. The discourse of
science functions as a site of transition from religious to
secular modes of consciousness: it removes the element of the
divine from natural processes but at the same time, through
its language, retains the shade of enigmatic mysticism that
was the divine’s principal contribution. Nineteenth-century
authors use scientific discourse in fiction to banish or to
recuperate the specters of divine force and transcendent order.
For Flaubert, scientific discourse functions in a resolutely
secular atmosphere as an ironic reminder of God’s absence.
For Zola, naturalist language, despite its secular moorings,
indicates a reluctance to abandon the sense of irrevocability
and moral resonance that accompanied religious modes of understanding.
|
Lerner, |
Bettina, Yale University: “The Peuple at Waterloo and
Modalities of Change.” (5.1)
The memory of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo on June 18,
1815, haunted France’s literary imagination for much
of the nineteenth century. In Victor Hugo’s famous depiction
of this event, the crushing loss is paradoxically reconfigured
as a narrative of rebirth from which the peuple emerges as
the embodiment of historical progress. Hugo absorbs other accounts
of the battle by lesser-known historians and novelists of his
time into his own suggestive reading, recasting it as a liminal
moment where the potential for social regeneration is locked
in combat with an endlessly regressive Revolutionary past.
|
Lintz, |
Bernadette, Colgate University: “Le Palimpseste du
fard impérial: l’inscription de ‘L’expiation’ dans
La Débacle.” (26.3)
L’on poursuivra ici une réflexion sur un détail
textuel de La Débacle dont la véracité historique
fit l’objet d’une vive controverse lors de la publication
du roman en 1892. Il s’agit du fard que Napoléon
III aurait porté lors de la bataille de Sedan alors
qu’il s’était exposé en vain au feu
des Prussiens. Présentée comme une pratique scripturale,
la pose du fard introduit dans le roman la problématique
de l’inscription et du déchiffrement. Remontant
les filières textuelles de la théâtralité,
du simulacre, de la virilité, de la pourriture et de
la contagion engendrées par ce détail cosmétique,
l’on débouche sur l’intertexte poétique
et historique hugolien consacré au Second Empire (Les
Châtiments, Napoléon le Petit, Histoire d’un
crime, L’Année terrible). La construction zolienne
du personnage de l’empereur déchu fait en effet
jouer un certain nombre de figures hugoliennes tirées,
entre autres, du texte central des Châtiments, “L’Expiation”.
L’on tentera d’esquisser une réflexion sur
les modalités et enjeux de l’inscription du monument
hugolien dans La Débâcle et de voir dans quelle
mesure la figuration zolienne de l’effondrement du Second
Empire s’inscrit dans le contexte discursif des textes
du poète
|
Llyod, |
Rosemary , Indiana University: “ Reinventing Pegasus:
Bicycles and the fin-de-siècle imagination.” (45.4)
In this paper I want to look at the ways in which the bicycle
entered the imaginaire of French fin-de-siècle writers
and artists. While sociological research indicates that the
bicycle did less to liberate women than one might imagine,
my interest is mainly in the realm of creative art, in the
transformation of the female figure in advertisements for cycles,
and in the ways in which writers from the Goncourts and Larbaud
to Alain-Fournier and Jules Romains seized on this recent invention
to make it part of their re-creation of modernity. In particular,
I shall be focusing on Maurice Leblanc’s seductive tale,
Voici des ailes, which sets out to forge a new aesthetics as
well a new erotics based on the bicycle.
|
Loth, |
Laura, University of Minnesota: “‘Nos regards
avides la contemplent avec curiosité’: Conflicts
of Vision, Gender and Genre in Women’s Travel Narrative
in Algeria, 1850-1900." (27.2)
While French women writers in the early period of colonial
expansion in Algeria were prolific, few studies have given
close critical attention to these texts. Drawing on examples
from the period of 1850-1900, this paper explores the subject
positions available to French women writers within the genre
of travel writing. I propose to examine the various ways that
these women, within a typically male genre and in a masculine
colonial space, establish an image of a female viewing subject
and traveling figure within a landscape. Informed by visual,
colonial, and gender studies, I argue that French women's
travel writing is a space in which the founding myths of 19th
century
French gender and national identity are brought to the fore.
|
Lukacher, |
Maryline, Northern Illinois University: “Lamiel, lectrice
de Stendhal.” (19.2)
Commencé en 1839, Lamiel est posthumement publié en
1889 et remet en question l’inachevé du dernier
roman de Stendhal. Lectrice avide, Lamiel lit tous les romans
du maître d’école dont l’histoire
du Grand Mandrin et Monsieur Cartouche sont ses préférés.
Mais au-delà des ressemblances et des hésitations
narratives, Stendhal avoue dans son essai “L’art
de composer les romans,” qu’il ne fait point de
plan précis afin que le travail de la mémoire
n’éteigne pas la liberté de l’imagination.
Lamiel devient le symptôme d’une liberté sans
limite; à la fois double intellectuel de Stendhal et “monstre” abandonné par
l’auteur au profit du jacobin Sansfin, Lamiel est la
dernière héroïne stendhalienne qui annonce,
bien que schématiquement, les écarts de l’héroïne
bataillienne à venir.
|
Lutz, |
Jay, Oglethorpe,University: “The Satirical Song
Collections of Anti-Boulangist Verse: Jules Jouy, Maurice
Millot and
Louis Marsolleau.” (10.2)
Jules Jouy wrote daily Anti-Boulangist lyrics evoking the
day’s
or week’s events throughout 1888 and 1889. He subsequently
published the songs in volumes entitled Chansons de l’Année (1888) and Chansons
de Bataille (1889). Many of the songs
were performed at the Chat Noir cabaret and parodied popular
Boulangist
songs often making use of the Boulangist original melodies.
Similar efforts by Maurice Millot and Louis Marsolleau are
also notable. The publication of these songs in monograph
form at the conclusion of a year or two is worthy of note.
Analysis
of selected texts from the four volumes will provide better
understanding of the strategy and nature of the satire. The
presentation will also provide excerpts of the satirized
Boulangist songs and consider the nature of performance as
perceived in
the texts. It will focus upon the targets of the satire and
the relationship to social groups, political movements and
biographies of the individuals under attack. The goal of
the study will be to understand how best to view these published
books of some length in terms of effects on readers and as
artistic statements by the song writers.
|
| |
| M |
Mahuzier, |
Brigitte, Bryn Mawr College: “Humiliation
and the Construction of Identity in the 19th century French
Novel.” (2.1)
Humiliation is generally considered an absolute negative, an
experience to be feared more than fear itself. A cliché exploited
to great effet by Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir sees humiliation
as the trigger of violent retaliation. If humiliation is primarily
seen as destructive, however, it is also formative. Hence the
importance of this experience in the early 19th century novels
of initiation such as those of Stendhal and Balzac which claim
to portray, as never before, the “âpre vérité” of
a historical coming of age. But the ethical relevance of this
emotion derives from the fact that it involves memory. As this
paper will demonstrate, what is at stake in these novels is
not simply a dialectic of humiliation (positive/negative) but
the relation between humiliation and memory.
|
Mammon, |
Sayeeda H., Edgewood College: “Window to Poseidon’s
World: Aquariums in fin-de-siècle Literature.” (45.2)
The first public aquarium opened in London in 1853. By the
1870s, several European cities followed suite. Privately owned
smaller aquariums also came into vogue during this period before
finding their way into the literary productions of the fin-de-siècle.
The aquarium was a unique invention in that it furthered scientific
investigation of oceanography
and marine
biology while fueling the nineteenth-century taste for exotica
and escapism. This paper sets out to assess in what ways the
aquarium represents progress and new discoveries in fin-de-siècle culture
while providing scope for fantasy and creative expression.
By looking at relevant samples from the works of Huysmans,
Laforgue, and Rodenbach, this study not only investigates the
aquarium as an invention advancing scientific inquiry into
ocean beds and marine life, but also explores the fin-de-siècle literary
reconfigurations of the glass fish-tank as an aesthetic construction
and a symbolic space.
|
Marin, |
Mihaela, Ohio State University: “Masques anciens, sens
nouveaux? Lecture des visages dans La Terre de Zola.” (4.1)
Le sujet de cette communication est inspiré de la préface
de Germinie Lacerteux où les Goncourt se demandaient
si la tragédie, "cette forme conventionnelle d'une
littérature oubliée et d'une société disparue," était
totalement inadéquate comme forme d'expression littéraire
dans une société moderne où le triomphe
du roman et du genre épique était définitivement
reconnu. Je me propose de reformuler quelques questions sur
le tragique et la tragédie dans La Terre de Zola. D’abord,
dans quelle mesure pourrait-on parler de spectacle tragique
dans la vision du monde de l'écrivain naturaliste? Peut-on
attribuer une fonction tragique au milieu sans trop créer
de dissonances conceptuelles entre les références
contemporaines de l'œuvre et les anciennes exigences formelles
du genre? Serait-il possible d'envisager la survivance du sentiment
tragique dans le contexte historique de la deuxième
moitié du dix-neuvième siècle; ou de trouver
des réminiscences de performance théâtrale
de l'Antiquité gréco-latine dans les formes modernes
du roman naturaliste?
|
Marmarelli, |
Trina, Stanford University: “Surviving Hugo: Liberation,
Anxiety, and Self-control in French Verse Around 1886." (12.4)
Victor Hugo’s death in 1885 is generally presented as
an unambiguous liberation for French verse, but even Stéphane
Mallarmé, who is invariably cited in support of this
view, ultimately seems to find Hugo’s disappearance disconcerting
rather than invigorating. I argue that the anxiety surrounding
Hugo’s death gave a new urgency to the ongoing reflection
of poets and theorists about the nature of verse. This reflection,
which culminated in the official début of vers
libre,
was informed by the prosodic innovations of previous decades
as well as the growing influence of psychophysics, with its
emphasis on the subjective, individual character of perception.
The way in which the verslibristes redefined verse as an endlessly
malleable substance entirely under the control of the writing
subject marks a fundamental shift in the nature of the French
lyric, permanently detaching the lyric from its original context
of collective performance.
|
McCall, |
Anne, Tulane University: “Still Life and Foreign
Exchange in Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations
d’une paria (1833-1834).” (43.1)
According to Flora Tristan’s famous 1838 account of personal
suffering and collective oppression in both the Old and New
World, a living room in the capital of Cape Verde shows easily
recognizable signs of French habitation. Between a series of
reminders of national heroics and a list of scattered anonymous
objects that Tristan recognizes as "coming from France," two
globes and a jar containing two fetuses preserved in alcohol
celebrate geographically expansive and focused scientific inquiry.
They also invite viewers to participate in the same project
as those who assembled the objects for viewing. The globes
and the fetuses, serve, in conjunction with references to a
global slave trade and dead slave babies featured the book’s
second-to-last chapter, as a critique of Western epistemology.
Tristan’s contradiction-riddled travel narrative represents
an important if incomplete attempt to undertake international,
multi-racial study without succumbing to the temptation of
culturally valorized acts of pickling.
|
McCready, |
Susan, University of South Alabama: “Revising the Canon:
New Perceptions of Mérimée’s Le Carrosse
du Saint-Sacrement and Romantic Theater.” (32.2)
Published in 1829, Prosper Mérimée’s Carrosse
du Saint-Sacrement debuted in 1850 at the Comédie-Française,
but met with disapproval from audiences and critics for its
anticlerical attitude. The play closed almost immediately,
and Mérimée never saw it performed again. Not
until 1919, when avant-garde director Jacques Copeau produced
it, did the play enjoy success in theatrical performance. Emile
Fabre later revived it three times during the 1930s at the
Comédie-Française to good reviews and respectable
receipts and Mérimée’s play eventually
reached an even wider audience as the source of Jean Renoir’s
1952 film Le Carrosse d’or. The tardy theatrical success
of Mérimée’s play is just one example of
the way in which the hierarchy of romantic playwrights was
revised during the period between the wars. Using this play
as a case in point, I will show how the political and social
context of the entre-deux-guerres shaped the choices of the
theater directors of the time, and how in turn their choices
shaped not only the developing theatrical aesthetic but also
the literary canon and Mérimée’s enduring
legacy in the repertoire.
|
Metzidakis, |
Stamos, Washington University: “Poétique de
la ligne: Autour des colonnes sculptées.” (12.1)
Au dire du critique d’art américain Rudolf Arnheim,
la ligne est l’élément de base de tous
les arts plastiques. Agissant comme un index peircien, la ligne
serait le sine qua non qui donne à l’artiste et à son
public la possibilité de percevoir une direction ou
un mouvement dans une création quelconque. Le présent
essai vise à considérer le moment où la
ligne sculpturale la plus statique, la colonne antique, se
transforme en autre chose et permet à la matière
brute de passer à l’état d’une sculpture
plus mouvementée ou active. A l’aide de plusieurs
exemples tirés des oeuvres d’artistes et d’écrivains
qui ont travaillé entre 1789-1857, nous allons démontrer
que ce moment, crucial au niveau esthétique général,
arrive lorsque la ligne s’écarte de la simplicité géométrique
d’une pure verticalité droite.
|
Meyer, |
E. Nicole, University of Wisconsin--Green Bay: “Flaubert's
Bastard Son." (41.1)
In Bouvard et Pecuchet, Bouvard's questionable filiation signals
Flaubert's fundamental challenge of the origin and authority
of all language. The entire work demonstrates the reduction
of all discourses to a single level of indifference, and consequently
the loss of faith in the existence of an irrefutable knowledge
and in the power of the Word. Through his interrogation of
origins, filiation, paternity and authority, Flaubert recognizes
language as an autonomous symbolic system in which no reference
to origin of discourse can be valid. Indeed, Flaubert seems
to challenge the paternity of his own text. In proving that
there is no origin as everything has already been said, Flaubert
produces an original: he reaches beyond the stagnancy of his
contemporaries' language in order to create something quite
new.
|
Michaud, |
Stéphane, Université de Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle: “Nouvelles
recherches sur Flora Tristan :premier bilan du bicentenaire.” (43.4)
L’année 2003, qui marque le bicentenaire de la
naissance de Flora Tristan, aura permis des avancées
significatives : la session que le présent colloque
organise sur la Paria offre une nouvelle illustration de cette
dynamique. On tentera ici un premier bilan. On s’arrêtera
d’abord au roman de Mario Vargas Llosa, El paraíso
en la proxima esquina (Madrid, Alfaguara, 2003, publié simultanément à Madrid,
en langue originale, et à Paris, en traduction française)
: Le Paradis — un peu plus loin choisit Flora Tristan
et son petit-fils Paul Gauguin pour héros. La deuxième
volet de l’analyse portera sur le troisième colloque
international Flora Tristan qui s’est tenu les 13 et
14 juin à Paris, à la Maison de l’Amérique
latine, avec la participation effective de Mario Vargas Llosa.
Il avait pour titre : « de Flora Tristan à Mario
Vargas Llosa, deux siècles de relations Europe latine – Amérique
latine ». Plusieurs chercheuses, spécialistes
de la littérature féminine et des gender studies
y participaient, Catherine Nesci et Christine Planté par
exemple. Une nouvelle période s’ouvre dans la
recherche. On en dessinera les enjeux. |
Miller, |
Andrew J., University of South Carolina Spartanburg, “Mérimée’s
Carmen and Echoes of Manon Lescaut in Andalusia.” (1.2)
Sainte-Beuve described Mérimée’s Carmen as “une Manon Lescaut plus poivrée et à l’espagnole,” upon
its publication in October, 1845. Certainly as mirrors to Renoncour,
Des Grieux, and Manon, Mérimée introduces: a
bourgeois French archaeologist, Don José, a Spanish
nobleman turned criminal, and a beautiful gypsy girl named
Carmen. The clever twist that Mérimée adds to
Manon Lescaut consists of the novella’s setting in Andalusia,
the exotic southernmost region of the Iberian Peninsula. Andalusia
empowers Carmen, and it bewitches men who seek to appropriate
her. Through Andalusia Mérimée ultimately enables
Carmen to emerge as a haunting figure of racial difference,
the likes of which Prévost could not have imagined.
|
Minahen,
|
Charles D., Ohio State University: “Gender Ambiguities,
Conflicts, and Shifts in Rimbaud.” (4.4)
Although numerous works of Rimbaud are susceptible to erotic readings, the
(en)gendering of desire is not always clear, even though the poetic voice
is generally presumed to be masculine. One notable exception is in "Délires
I," where the poet, in a game of gender reversal, enacts both parts
of a dialogue between a masculine "époux infernal" and feminine "Vierge
folle." Such gender slippage is nonetheless rare. Ambiguity rests more
in the object of desire and in the attitude toward that object. In the early
Poésies, the perspective is that of an iconoclastic adolescent male
making crude, scatological references to sexual activities and mocking “revered” adult
authority figures, like priests. In the Derniers vers, a more ambiguous interplay
between masculine and feminine figures is deployed, sometimes represented
only by the capitalized pronouns "Elle" or "Lui." These
same pronouns recur in Illuminations often in complex conjunction with other
quasi-allegorical figures. While the feminine figures are prevalent through
all stages of the oeuvre, the attitude toward them, and toward the masculine
figures, is apt to be ironic and their status as objects of desire, difficult
to determine.
|
Miner, |
Margaret, University of Illinois at Chicago: “Au Bureau
de change: Mallarmé Banks on Music.” (44.3)
Mallarmé’s writing emphasizes music’s partnership
with gold in the circulatory system of value that sustained fin-de-siècle France: Mallarmean music shares the wealth
of solar myths and alchemical mysteries, but also assumes the
debts of the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus affair, and the reputedly
tarnished coin of Jewish influence. This suggests a possible
link between Mallarmé and Moses, a Jewish figure traditionally
associated with French debates about social degeneration and
regeneration. As both bearer and breaker of sacred inscriptions,
Moses offers a provocative model for Mallarmé’s
struggle with the hazards of writing, particularly in his Livre project. Moses also hovers behind Lesseps’s desert-crossing
triumph at Suez and his exclusion from the promised glory of
Panama, events that emblematized the fluctuating values of
positivist enterprise and orientalist imagination. Further,
this Mosaic subtext provides an occasion for reexamining the
foundational transaction Mallarmé envisions between
music and letters. Like the Golden Calf story in Exodus, where
shattered inscriptions coincide with rising song and circulating
gold, the Mallarmean scenario would seem to involve a lucrative
recycling process that music and letters each operate within
the ongoing fall of the other.
|
Moisan, |
Philippe, Grinnell College: “Archéologie de
la Béance.” (39.3)
Le point de départ de cette étude est le tableau
de Gustave Courbet, "Enterrement à Ornans." Cette
toile, qui bien sûr inaugure l'avènement du réalisme
en peinture, est aussi la mise en scène de nombreux
thèmes centraux de la littérature du XIXe siècle:
déchristianisation de l'espace symbolique, anonymat
des personnages représentés, intérêt
pour la laideur et la banalité, et ainsi de suite. Il
en est un cependant qui paraît plus important, parce
qu'il est au centre de la toile, il s'agit du thème
de la béance, de cette tombe ouverte autour de laquelle
se réunissent tous les personnages peints par Courbet.
Ce vide, ce trou noir en quelque sorte dans l'espace représenté est
un motif qui revient dans plusieurs textes de la deuxième
moitié du XIXe siècle, comme par exemple L'Education
sentimentale ou Les Misérables.
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Monicat, |
Bénédicte, Pennsylvania State University : « Les
vertus du savoir: Livres d’instruction et littérature
féminine au 19e siècle.» (6.4)
Le devoir d’instruction qui gouverne en partie la littérature
d’enfance et de jeunesse au 19e siècle est indissociable
du devoir d’éducation qui est alors de plus en
plus souvent à la charge des femmes. Il en résulte
une participation importante de ces dernières à l’oeuvre
formatrice que constituent les nombreux ouvrages dont les sujets
incluent bien entendu l’apprentissage de la langue, mais
aussi l’histoire, la mythologie, l’économie
domestique, la botanique, l’agronomie, la météorologie
ou encore l’astronomie parmi autres matières.
Si certains critiques ont analysé le principe et les
stratégies de mise en fiction qui servent d’armature
esthétique à la transmission du savoir, peu nombreuses
sont les études qui ont examiné l’importance
et les sens de ce mode d’écriture dans l’histoire
littéraire des femmes au 19e siècle. La présente
communication se propose d’en ébaucher les lignes
directrices en s’attachant aux écrits de quelques-unes
de celles qui ont contribué à faire de cette
pratique une activité majeure de l’histoire intellectuelle
des femmes, sinon de leur histoire littéraire. Oeuvre
formatrice, certes. Oeuvre transformatrice?
|
Mortimer, |
Armine Kotin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “Music,
Love, and Opium: Semiotics of Balzac’s Massimilla
Doni” (48.3)
The French doctor introduced among the Italian characters of Massimilla
Doni, true to the philosophical type he represents,
undertakes to cure three of the Italians of their passions:
Cataneo’s passion for music, Emilio’s for love,
and Vendramini’s for opium. Although the chief focus
of the story is on Emilio and his love for Massimilla Doni,
Balzac brings these three forms of desire together in a passage
of central significance. Together, identified as three expressions
of the same human capacity, they tie down what Balzac called
the “psychic subject” of his novella, which he
said was a “marvel” and a “mythical page” difficult
to write. Balzac anticipated that he would be misunderstood
and accused once again of obscenity: not unlike other stories
especially among the Études philosophiques, like Melmoth
réconcilié and L’elixir de longue vie,
high-minded subjects are obscured in a narrative containing
moments of crudity or buffoonery. Following the traces of these
three signs throughout the story, I will show how their concerted
action brings about the change in Emilio Memmi necessary for
the happy ending to occur.
|
Moscovici, |
Claudia ,University of Michigan:“The Life of Art:
Gautier, Zola and Changes in Romantic Aesthetics.” (40.2)
During the mid- to late nineteenth-century, two authors, who
came to be known as representatives of two seemingly opposed
literary movements, struggled with the assumptions of Romanticism:
Théophile Gautier and Emile Zola. For Gautier Romantic
aesthetics was not sufficiently detached from social life,
for Zola it was excessively so. This presentation will examine
these radical critiques and transformations of Romanticism,
present their key arguments, and, since the question of value
can never be completely divorced from the presentation of content,
look at the merits of the alternatives they offer.
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Naginski,
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Isabelle, Tufts University: “George Sand's
Prophetic Realism: The Ennobled Voice of Pierre Huguenin.” (49.1)
With Le Compagnon du Tour de France, Sand turned her attention
to the "lower" spheres of society where, as she noted, "de
plus grandes idées et de plus grands sentiments" circulated.
Its eloquent hero was "un type d'ouvrier avancé," capable
of expressing "des idées sur la société présente
et des aspirations vers la société future." The
novel was badly received: "on cria, dans certaines classes, à l'impossible, à l'exagération,
on m'accusa de flatter le peuple et de vouloir l'embellir." Sand
denounced the implicit literary double-standard of the day
which called for a distortion in the figuration of characters.
As she saw it, critics, editors and readers bestowed or withheld
approval depending on the way social classes were represented.
The nobility and the bourgeoisie must be idealized, while the
proletariat and the peasantry, in a kind of reverse idealization,
were to be depicted in as grim a light as possible. This paper
will show Sand ardently at work throughout the 1840s to turn
this literary model on its head.
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Nematollahy,
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Ali, CUNY, Baruch College: “Lucien Descaves et la Commune
de Paris.” (8.1)
Sous-offs, roman anti-militariste de Descaves, fait scandale
en 1889 et lui vaut un procès en correctionnelle. Descaves
semble mener une double vie. Il est à la fois proche
de Darien et des écrivains d’ « extrême-gauche »,
et de plus en plus lié à Huysmans, ses « autres » romans
ne déplaisant d’ailleurs pas à Goncourt.
Il sera, par ailleurs, un des dix premiers membres de l’Académie
Goncourt. Comment concilier les deux hommes, l’ami du
peuple et l’académicien, l’écrivain
libertaire et le proche de Goncourt? C’est ce que je
propose de faire, à travers deux romans sur la Commune
où se trouvent deux visions opposées de ces soixante
et onze jours qui ont marqué l’histoire.
|
Newmark,
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Kevin, Boston College: “Way Past Aging: Baudelaire's
Old Men and Benjamin's Passageways.” (22.3)
Walter Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire insist on the fragility,
the brittleness, and the permanent transience of the modern
experience of time. For Benjamin, and a host of readers after
him, there can be no better example of this allegorical dimension
of modernity than the sonnet, "A Une Passante." The
change the poem seems to introduce into literary history is
the way modernity is itself characterized by nothing but change,
in the ceaseless passage of time. But doesn't Baudelaire's
allegory go even further than this, threatening poetry itself
with a loss of control or knowledge over itself? This paper
attempts to delineate the "change" that occurs as
one passes from a conception of allegory as it can be read
in "A Une Passante" to its reinscription in "Les
Sept Vieillards." This passage from one text to the other
evokes Benjamin's description of the way the Passages were
themselves suddenly transformed into an age beyond time itself.
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Olds, |
Marshall C., University of Nebraska: “The How's and
Why's of Characterization in Flaubert.” (30.3)
Asked to speak about Flaubert's characters in terms of Forster's
types of "flat" and "round," I hope less
to show what is constant in these creations (already studied
brilliantly by Diana Knight and others) than to point to what
is continually evolving throughout the novelist's career as
his esthetic presuppositions change. This movement is away
from realism toward different forms of abstraction that sometimes
carry the illusion of realism.
|
Olmsted, |
William,Valparaiso University: “Money Talks: The Making
and Breaking of Social Ties in L’Education sentimentale.” (13.3)
Monetary transactions in L'Education sentimentale construct
a pattern in which relations of trust are established or destroyed
on the basis of money promised, loaned, invested or donated.
Beyond thematizing prostitution and fraud, monetary reductions
of love and friendship organize reading in terms of narrative
expectations and denials. Money thus functions as an operator
of social relations and narrative contracts. Readers learn
that "money talks" in ways that go beyond discursive
hegemony or social power as Flaubert leads us to a critical
understanding of money's effect on personal ties and its significance
as a master-trope for narrative indeterminacy.
|
Olson, |
Kory E., Pennsylvania State University: “The Language
of Maps: Paris 1870." (42.2)
The language of maps is central to any argument about the influence
of political forces in all types of cartography. The Paris
Illustré 1870
is an example of how the city of Paris, nearing the end of the
Second Empire and on the verge of entering a period of profound
change and instability, was not shown as unstable. In fact, when
looking at the guide published by Adolphe Joanne, we see the
city of Paris quite differently. The capital of the French Empire
is represented as calm, serene and welcoming to its visitors.
Which version is correct? The language of maps used was integral
in hiding the true condition of the city and, at the same time,
the society at large. |
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Pappas, |
Sara, Colgate University, “Resisting Change? On Zola’s
Abandonment of Impressionism.” (4.2)
Many studies of Émile Zola’s art criticism have
focused on exploring why, toward the close of his career as
an art critic, Zola rejected Impressionism. They usually conclude
that he was simply wrong, that Zola’s ultimate dismissal
of Impressionism represents an error in judgment. Instead of
considering Zola’s later support of Salon art as a mistake
in judgement, my paper will examine those images he did begin
to prefer. Instead of analyzing Zola’s aesthetic writings
for the purpose of supporting a broader narrative of the canon
of Western art, which focuses on what we today would call the
avant-garde, my paper will consider how Salon artists came
to represent change for Zola. Zola’s fondness for painters
like Henri Gervex and Jules Bastien-Lepage actually corresponds
more agreeably with his early praise of Manet and the Impressionists
than is first apparent and also relates to Zola’s theory
of how to make the crowd comprehend aesthetic change.
|
Pasco, |
Allan H., University of Kansas: “Disastrous Change
in Balzac’s France: From Paris to Berry and Back Again
in La Rabouilleuse.” (9.1)
Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse exploits a very innovative plot
structure to insist on the changes taking place in France,
changes that warn of a dangerous future. Plot centered novels
usually follow the actions of a central character or group.
In La Rabouilleuse everyone and every action follows the inheritance
from Paris to provincial Issoudun, and back to Paris. The narrator
describes a society where religion has lost its power, where
the local government is so inbred that change is impeded, where
traditional families in a patriarchal system have been replaced
by irregular couples, where, in short, mediocracy reigns. Through
it all, the unusual sequence based on inheritance changes and
reflects the changes Balzac saw in society. Unfortunately,
the bourgeois mediocracy most often succeeds in crushing the
outstanding young people that France so desperately needs.
|
Perciali, |
Irene, University of California, Berkeley: “Inscrutable
Strategists: Pre-thinking Economic Change in Balzac’s
France.” (13.1)
This paper turns to the formal question of how the idea of
change was constructed through literary representation. Focusing
especially on the question of economic modernization, I consider
the transition to capitalism as a rhetorical effect. How did
the now-familiar structure of this transition come into being?
Economic change was in part formulated through a new kind of
character: the economic mastermind able to perceive future
events and strategize accordingly. One such character is found
in Balzac’s La Maison Nucingen (1838), whose central
figure functions as the personification of change. Nucingen
embodies innovation: in thinking ahead, he makes present and
knowable the trajectory of the future. In contrast to his ability
to see and judge clearly, though, Nucingen is insistently represented
as inscrutable, opaque, and mysterious to others. In my reading
of Balzac, economic change is rendered as knowledge and point
of view, and resolved in narrative terms.
|
Pierssens, |
Michel, Université de Montréal: “La Science
et les Lettres: de l’enthousiasme au rejet.” (51.2)
Un courant de pensée assez peu étudié traverse
depuis le 19e siècle toute la culture française
: prétexte à condamnation pour les uns, mais
seule attitude de progrès pour d'autres, il s’agit
de ce que Jacques Bouveresse a stigmatisé sous le nom
de « scientisme des littéraires ». Sous
le Second Empire et surtout sous la Troisième République,
au moins jusqu’à la première Guerre mondiale,
la foi dans la science constitue une source d’inspiration
et d’enthousiasme pour beaucoup d’écrivains
comme pour la plupart des scientifiques (parmi ces derniers,
le chimiste Marcellin Berthelot se distingue comme le militant
le plus bruyant). Le scientisme figure pour d’autres
en revanche un facteur de perversion aussi bien dans les sciences
qu’en dehors, mais plus particulièrement quand
il touche les Lettres. Brunetière occupe successivement
les deux positions: d’abord l’un des critiques
scientistes les plus convaincus, il se métamorphose
de manière significative en dénonciateur véhément
de la “banqueroute de la science.” On sait par
ailleurs que tout un pan des violentes polémiques suscitées
par les théories de Zola au nom du Naturalisme s’inscrit
dans cette histoire du scientisme, qui est donc elle-même
plus longue, plus générale et plus complexe que
ce seul épisode de la « vie littéraire » fin
de siècle. Elle englobe également beaucoup d'autres
auteurs, favorables ou hostiles à la science, de Villiers
de l’Isle-Adam à Jarry, à Proust ou à Raymond
Roussel, sans oublier les romanciers populaires d’avant
la science-fiction, tels Gustave LeRouge ou Maurice Renard,
chez qui le scientisme ou la hantise de la science s’exprime
souvent de manière hyperbolique. L’histoire proprement
littéraire de ce mouvement est donc en partie faite,
mais de manière dispersée et sans référence
articulée à la question du scientisme en tant
que tel. Il reste donc à la réinscrire dans une
histoire culturelle globale du 19e siècle.
|
Porter, |
Laurence M., Michigan State University: “The Art of
Characterization in Flaubert’s Fiction. I: Denotation
and Appellation.” (30.1)
Authors sustain the identities of their characters—self-sameness
persisting over time—through anaphoric strings of namings,
characterizations, perceptions, memories, discourse, and functions
involving plot, themes, and implicatures. Today we shall discuss
styles of namings by the author/narrator (denotation), or by
other characters (appellation). Flaubert often makes the marked
choices of absent naming (free direct or free indirect discourse),
deferred naming (impressionistic narration), or invariable
naming (narrative tags like those used in texts of plays).
The expressive value of such choices will be examined, with
special emphasis on the uses of appellation in power struggles
among characters seeking to dominate or seduce others. The
discussion concludes with an analysis of a complex web of denotation,
focalization, free direct discourse, and summary narration
in a passage from L’Éducation sentimentale, and
of the rhetorical resolution of the ending, where denotation
and appellation merge two characters with the narrator and
with each other.
|
Powell, |
David A., Hofstra University: “Fauré and Debussy
Sing Verlaine:.” (29.2)
Verlaine’s poetry has been set to music more than that
of any other symbolist poet. Rather than examining the hackneyed
notion of “poetic musicality,” I will explore something
more musical strictu sensu: the musical interpretation of musical
images in poetry. One well-known poem suitably illustrates
my undertaking: “Clair de lune” (from Fêtes
galantes). Both Fauré and Debussy set the poem
to music (Debussy twice), with satisfying but different results.
I will
focus on the discrete musical elements in Verlaine’s
text and how the two composers “translate” them
into the musical code. My commentary will attempt to answer
a question that baffles musico-literary scholars: how do composers
understand poetic musical symbolism?
|
Przybos, |
Julia, Hunter College, CUNY: “La cuisine réaliste,
ou Monsieur de Boisdhyver de Champfleury.” (39.1)
Les travaux de Xavier Bichat marquent la fin de la biologie
mécaniste et le début du vitalisme qui triomphera
au dix-neuvième siècle. “La vie est l'ensemble
des fonctions qui résistent à la mort,” écrit-il
dans Les recherches sur la physiologie de la vie et de
la mort (1800). Embrassant cette formule, les écrivains réalistes
n’hésitent pas à parler de l'existence
physiologique des personnages. Champfleury s'attache même à étudier
ce qu'il advient de l'être humain lorsque l’équilibre
entre les fonctions physiologiques est perturbé. Dans
Monsieur de Boisdhyver, il met en scène une communauté religieuse
et examine des hommes voués au célibat. |
Putnam, |
Walter, University of New Mexico: “Captive Audiences:
A Concert for the Elephants In the Jardin des Plantes.” (46.1)
When two elephants, Hanz and Pariqui, were transported as spoils
of war from the Ménagerie of Loo (Holland) to the recently-established
Jardin des Plantes in the heart of revolutionary Paris, their
arrival created a public sensation as well as posing multiple
questions about captivity and freedom, nature and education,
intellect and feeling. On 10 Prarial An VI, a small musical
ensemble consisting of oboe, flutes and violins gave a concert
for the elephants in an attempt to observe their reactions
to various compositions and rhythms. I will examine the concert
for its ideological and scientific biases as well as its value
as a complex example of performance in which the elephants
form an audience but one that is itself being studied for its
ability to respond to the universal language of music.
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Rabine, |
Leslie, University of California, Davis: “Flora Tristan’s
Closet.” (43.2)
The affinity between marginalized sexualities and self-fashioning
through costume, dress and fashion expresses itself through
the word “closet.” A literal space for storing
clothing as signs of true, false, ambiguous, masqueraded and
mystified identities, the closet is also the metaphorical space
for prohibited sexualities. Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations
d’une pariah is a textual maze of such closets, offering
resources of disguise and theatricality to its outlaw heroine.
The memoir, in which Tristan commits herself to “dire
toute la vérité,”does not so much
follow the tradition of autobiographical confession as foreshadow
the structure of the coming-out story. In this, as in her political
writing and organizing, Tristan was an important precursor.
|
Richards, |
Marvin, John Carroll University: “Change in Nineteenth-Century
French Culture or Studies: Is Quebec In or Out?” (52.3)
"
Plus ça change...." This paper opens with a consideration
of what NCFS means--how is the field constituted and what does
it include—or exclude? More specifically, how do we situate
the 19th-century literature written in French in a colony subject
to British rule and apparently absent from the field of NCFS?
Is it possible for a Canadian writer to "pass" as
French in a kind of cultural transvestism? This paper briefly
examines Quebec’s colonial emplacement in the nineteenth
century between la loi du père—British Empire—and
la culture mère, a culture divided between old and new
regime values. Finally, I turn to Quebec’s fin de
siècle
poète maudit, Emile Nelligan, who has mythic status
in Quebec, appearing in opera and films, novels and poems,
yet is unknown in the field of "French studies" as
practiced today in the U.S. academy.
|
Richer, |
Jean-François, Université de Montréal
/Université de Paris 8: “Un changement de décor
sous la Monarchie de Juillet: la réinvention du boudoir
dans la Comédie Humaine d’Honoré de Balzac.” (46.2)
Lieu clé de l'imaginaire spatio-romanesque de Balzac,
le boudoir associe dans La Comédie humaine la culture
d'Ancien Régime à celle de la société bourgeoise.
Là deux siècles se rencontrent, se heurtent,
et cherchent une autre façon de dire le temps présent.
Nous nous attacherons à décrire les échos
visibles de ce changement de décor en étudiant
l'économie matérielle du boudoir que Balzac met
en scène autour de 1830. Soit l'exemple des glaces:
omniprésentes et célébrées dans
les boudoirs de la littérature galante des Lumières,
elles sont quasi absentes dans ceux de La Comédie humaine.
Les premiers multiplient les corps, les célèbrent,
tandis que les seconds les découpent, les fragmentent,
transformant une optique de la jouissance en une optique de
l'identité sociale. La réinvention du boudoir
dans La Comédie humaine révèle donc les
modes nouveaux de la sociabilité au XIXe siècle.
|
Rifelj, |
Carol, Middlebury College: “Hair and Death in the Nineteenth
Century.” (46.3)
The nineteenth century saw a change from memento mori to preserving
the memory of the dead person, including contact with the dead
body. The privileged vehicle of memory became the hair, which
was saved as locks or used to make commemorative jewelry and
pictures. First, I will trace the history and uses of these
objects. Then I will discuss how they function in the novel
of the time, including works by Maupassant, Sand, Flaubert,
and Rodenbach. Cut hair plays many roles: sacrifice, token
of the loved one, and relic of the dead. It has the power to
keep memory and grief alive and to generate narrative. Yet
these works also emphasize the intimate connections between
hair and death. In fact, the disappearance of nineteenth-century
funerary and commemorative customs shows that there are fashions
in death as there are in hair.
|
Roche, |
Isabel K., Bennington College: “The Inscription of
the Historical Figure In the Novels of Victor Hugo.” (36.1)
While all five of Victor Hugo’s major novels--Notre-Dame
de Paris (1831), Les Misérables (1862), Les
Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L'Homme qui rit (1869) and Quatrevingt-treize (1873) qualify as historical, the nature of these texts, which
often denounce existence that is based on historical imperatives
in favor of individual moral ascendancy, betrays a highly charged
and complicated attitude toward history that renders classification
difficult. This paper examines Hugo's predilection for the
historical, as figured specifically through the inscription
of historical characters, and his textual use of them in four
out of five of these novels. For if, on a first level, they
can be seen as serving a fictional need as they add to the
historicity of the periods portrayed in the texts, furnishing
an effet de réel, their presence is, on a second level,
at cross-purposes with this referential function as they take
on mythical and symbolic dimensions.
|
Rogers, |
Nathalie B., Wellesley College: “La Prostituée
sandienne donne le change ou ‘Oui, monsieur Reboul, j’ai
lu Isidora.’” (4.2)
Leslie Ann Minot a montré que les textes sandiens centrés
sur la prostitution, Lélia et surtout Isidora, s’inscrivent
mal dans les schémas du canon de la littérature
prostitutionnelle au dix-neuvième siècle. Minot
s’insurge contre le “silence critique” qui
a enveloppé l’œuvre de Sand dans ce contexte
et appelle à poursuivre plus avant la tâche comparatiste
avec le canon masculin. Dans cet esprit de changement de perspective
sur ce canon, je propose un nouvel examen d’Isidora,
seul roman sandien centré sur le personnage éponyme
d’une prostituée et texte, qui, bien plus que
Lélia, a été victime d’un “oubli” presque
total de la critique. Je propose de suivre une piste différente
de celle de Minot, celle de la forme textuelle, de l’expérimentation
esthétique qui caractérise l’écriture
des textes centrés sur la prostitution. Mon argument
est qu’Isidora est l’une des œuvres-clé qui
jalonnent les grandes étapes de l’expérimentation
esthétique chez Sand. Je propose d’examiner les
enjeux de ce texte en comparant les paramètres choisis
par Sand à ceux qui caractérisent le roman de
prostitution masculin de cette époque.
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Sachs, |
Leon, Davidson College: “Pandora’s Books: the ‘Modern
Educated Woman’ in Eugène Brieux’s Blanchette (1892).” (25.4)
This paper will examine Eugène Brieux’s Blanchette (1892), one of the earliest and most successful of the many
plays treating the topic of female education at the end of
the nineteenth century. The eponymous heroine, educated in
Republican “normal schools,” can neither accede
to the bourgeoisie nor reassimilate into the popular milieu
from which she comes. She epitomizes the (then) familiar figure
of the young woman who, as a result of her learning, seems
unfit for a traditional marriage. In addition to questions
of class and “family values,” the play raised such
topical issues as the Paris-province relationship and the utility
of modern science. By situating the play within the context
of the critical debate that it sparked, I will analyze the
way in which the “educated woman” became a focal
point for a variety of controversial topics circulating in
late nineteenth-century French society.
|
Samuels, |
Maurice, University of Pennsylvania: “The Jewish Balzac.” (23.2)
Nineteenth-century French Jews experienced the conflict between
tradition and progress characteristic of modernity in a particularly
acute fashion. This dilemma is dramatized in the realist
fiction published by Ben Lévi during the 1840s. Ben
Lévi’s stories allow us to view modernity from
the margins, to understand how the battle with change was
fought by those on its front lines. They also allow us to
explore the ways in which Jews, who were often the objects
of “realist” representation, appropriated “realist” strategies
for their own ends. Ben Lévi’s forgotten fictions
thus not only provide access to a unique literary voice from
the archives of the nineteenth century, but also reveal how “realist” literary
codes proved more versatile than we might previously have
imagined.
|
Santos, |
José, Texas Tech University: “Au pays du mufle,
les borgnes sont rois: Laurent Tailhade, polémiste,
rhéteur et bretteur.” (8.2)
Laurent Tailhade n’a pas été de ces oubliés
de la fin du siècle qui furent exhumés à partir
des années 70. On peut regretter que son œuvre
demeure à ce jour introuvable. Nous nous intéresserons
au polémiste, à celui qui vérifie l’axiome
qu’esthétique et politique ne sont pas diamétralement
opposées. Car sans compter ses innombrables écrits
journalistiques, c’est jusqu’à sa poésie
qui est contaminée par ce besoin d’entrer en guerre
contre les bourgeois, les imbéciles, les antisémites,
et toute la comédie du pouvoir. L’analyse de la
rhétorique tailhadienne nous amènera à aborder
son humour décapant, la satire se faisant sœur
du comique.
|
Sanyal, |
Debarati, University of California, Berkeley: “Baudelaire
and the Violence of Modernity: Poetry, Irony and Critique.” (7.2)
Baudelaire is often invoked as the poet who gives voice to
the trauma of modernity. This paper reads Baudelaire not as
a witness to historical trauma, but rather, as a contestatory
voice intervening in the historical scene from the standpoint
of executioner (bourreau), as well as victim or witness to
its traumas. The representation of violence in Baudelaire’s
poetry functions as ‘counterviolences’ that expose
and critique the concealed, structural violences in postrevolutionary
urban modernity. The paper considers the relevance of such
a contestatory stance in a contemporary climate that privileges
trauma and victimization over historical analysis and ethico-political
agency.
|
Schehr, |
Lawrence R., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: “Declining
Flaubert.” (35.1)
Each of the four major canonic realist novelists – Stendhal,
Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola – has somewhat of a pessimistic
view of the possibility for human happiness. Even Balzac, the
rosiest, can be at times pessimistic, and certainly is so in
later life. Flaubert however stands out as the one who shows
no belief in a progress narrative. Rather, his characters fail
repeatedly and fall away. Each of his works is a construct
of insufficiencies on the level of the plot and in the formation
of character; the depicted world, while arguably realist, often
seems a slightly lesser version of the real world. His characters’ foibles
are seldom explored with sympathy: there will be no tragedy
here, just a kind of dedramatized apathy marking time. If plots
decline gradually in most of the works, decline repeatedly
and obsessively marks every aspect of the structures of Bouvard
et Pécuchet. In that novel, Flaubert moves beyond the
uncertainty (Culler) most visible in Madame Bovary and Salammbô.
He goes beyond the obstinate irony of “Un cœur simple” and
L’Éducation sentimentale and reaches a level of
decline and insufficiency theretofore unheard of. Language
and knowledge, while once in support of received ideas in the
earlier work, translated into nostalgia in L’Éducation
sentimentale, are, in Flaubert’s last work, marks of
a monstrous epistemology and a rhetoric of failure.
|
Schiau-Botea, |
Diana, Rutgers University: “L’Espace performatif
du poème et ses représentations dans La Plume
et Le Mur.” (12.3)
A partir de la réflexion de Foucault sur “les
espaces autres,” l’exposé explorera les
rapports du poème au lieu de spectacle et les rôles
de la récitation dans les espaces culturels alternatifs
du café et du cabaret. Notre attention se portera sur “Salut” de
Stéphane Mallarmé et “L’Hiver” de
Jehan Rictus, poèmes destinés à être
d’abord dits à un auditoire particulier, dans
un espace investi de fonctions symboliques. En étroite
relation avec ces poèmes, on examinera la conception
sacralisée de l'espace dans La Plume et l’agencement
du textuel et du spatial pratiqué aux Quat’z’Arts
dans Le Mur – création singulière
du texte dans l’espace, qui enrichit le spectacle d’une
dimension scripturale collective. Ainsi on s’interrogera
sur les rôles attribués par les artistes d’avant-garde à la
mise en scène de la parole poétique et/ou de
l’écriture dans la création de la communauté à la
fin du XIXe siècle.
|
Schlossman, |
Beryl, Carnegie Mellon University: “Suivant le voeu
fait, Carmen.” (1.1)
Carmen appears to the reader (and the opera spectator) as an
image of the Other and an image of desire for Mérimée’s
narrator and José, the man who loves her, kills her,
and dies for her (approximately according to Carmen’s
prediction). Mérimée portrays Carmen as an Andalusian
gypsy: his Carmen conjures up the narrator’s fantasies
of feminine impurity and José’s memories of Carmen
emphasize her own invocations of Catholicism and the occult.
This talk will explore the portrait of Carmen in aesthetic
as well as erotic terms, and its impact on Baudelaire. While
the discourse of love in Mérimée’s novella
breaks down, the bewitching image of Carmen lingers on through
early modernism and beyond.
|
Schuerewegen, |
Franc, Université d’Anvers: “La haine
du berger (Jules Verne).” (35.3)
L'homme prothétique nous fait peur. Cyborgs, clones
et autres Frankenstein commencent à envahir massivement
nos sociétés postmodernes. Et nous ne savons
trop comment réagir. Je propose ici d'envisager quelque
peu différemment la question du "protheticus".
En marchant à reculons en quelque sorte. Et dans la
conviction que c'est la fin du XIXe siècle qui nous
permet de mieux comprendre le début du XXIe. Je commence
mon enquête chez Jules Verne dans un roman qui est, du
point de vue que j'essaie d'adopter ici, d'une lucidité extrême:
Le Château des Carpathes (1892). Roman truqué,
piégé. Apparaissent côte à côté deux "civilisations" entièrement
différentes et, en principe, antihétiques. Le
monde d'avant la tekhnê. Les technologues, les manipulateurs,
les cloneurs. Mais voyez ce qui se passe: le clone est déjà là où il
ne pourrait en principe pas apparaître. Et l'idée
de Jules Verne est bien que l'être humain est "protethicus" à son
corps défendant. En fin de parcours, nous dialoguerons
avec un philosophe contemporain, Bernard Stiegler, auteur d'une
thèse sur "la faute d'Epiméthée." C'est
en effet une réflexion sur la "faute," sur "l'insuffisance" que
nous voulons développer ici. Et nous verrons que Verne
et Stiegler, cela va très bien ensemble.
|
Schulman, |
Peter, Old Dominion University: “A Change in France,
A Change in Verne: Thanatos and Dystopia in Les 500 millions
de la Bégum.” (28.1)
While most of Jules Verne’s early work has been considered
by many to be encomia to technology and progress, the later
500 millions de la Bégum can be seen as a “turning
point” in Verne’s career in terms of his own ideological
evolution from sunny optimist to guarded pessimist. Written
shortly after the Franco-Prussian war, Les 500 millions
de la Bégum paints a grim nationalistic picture of two
scientists, a benevolent Frenchman, and an evil, despotic German
who each inherit millions from a long-lost relative. Whereas
the Frenchman creates a utopia on the West Coast of the United-States,
the German builds a “City of Steel,” a dystopic
mining village/slave camp. While Les 500 millions is the first
of Verne’s novels to present both utopic and dystopic
visions of society, it is also the first to feature a truly
evil scientist bent on initiating a proto-nuclear war on France
in an attempt at German world domination. A product of a general
post-war, anti-German sentiment in France, Verne’s shift
in concerns towards the fin de siècle went hand in hand
with France’s as well.
|
Séginger, |
Gisèle, Université de Strasbourg II: “Salammbô et
la question des races.” (23.3)
Au XIXe siècle, la notion de race, chez des auteurs
aussi différents qu’Augustin Thierry, Michelet,
Taine ou Renan, contribue à l’élaboration
de modèles d’intelligibilité de l’histoire.
Il ne faut pas oublier que chez Augustin Thierry c’est
le conflit des races qui permet de penser une lutte des classes
(idée que lui empruntera Marx) et la dialectique de
l’histoire. La notion de race se trouve au centre de
projets différents : penser l’ascension de la
bourgeoisie française dans une longue durée depuis
les luttes raciales des temps mérovingiens chez A. Thierry,
penser la rationalité et le devenir éthique de
l’histoire dans le cas de l’Histoire romaine de
Michelet, qui fait de la lutte entre les sémites et
les Indo-européens une lutte entre la violence et le
Droit, penser l’histoire sociale de manière positiviste
dans le cas de Taine, penser la part des peuples sémites
dans l’évolution de l’Occident vers le monothéisme.
Dans ce contexte nouveau où la notion de race s’impose
dans les pensées de l’histoire, quel usage fictionnel
un roman comme Salammbô peut-il faire de ces représentations
dix-neuviémistes? Sur ce point précis, c’est
une sorte d’archéologie culturelle de la fiction
que je me propose de faire dans cette étude.
|
Silverman, |
Willa Z., Pennsylvania State University: “’Tout
aux modernes! ‘The New Bibliophilia of the fin-de-siècle. “ (38.3)
Breaking with the ‘retrospective bibliophilia’ of
the Société des bibliophiles françois, ‘new’ bibliophiles
of the fin de siècle (Octave Uzanne, Henri Béraldi,
Paul Gallimard, Robert de Montesquiou, the frères Goncourt)
promoted the collection, production and adornment of works
by contemporary authors. They championed a new esthetic of
the book, which relied on the same innovative technologies
used to mass produce the commercial books these bibliophiles
often disparaged. A network of publishing houses, reviews,
bookstores, binderies, and exhibits helped legitimize the new
livres de luxe. The genesis and dynamics during this period
of what Pierre Bourdieu terms a “sous-champ de production
restreinte,” in which producers (of books) produce solely
for other producers (and not for a mass public) is related
to several trends: political (the growing autonomy of the literary
field from the political one); social (the development of a
materialistic elite of haut bourgeois collectors); esthetic
(Symbolism, dandysm, Art Nouveau); technological.
|
Slater, |
Lee, Old Dominion University: “Exotica in Mobili:
Bourgeois Desire, Utopian Vision and the Vehicular Spaces
of Jules Verne.” (28.2)
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century writers
and visionaries fell victim to a pervasive mal-de-siècle,
lamenting the loss of the human element in an age of mass mechanical
production and actively seeking out Other worlds, other spaces,
other terrains of aesthetic appreciation. Many of Jules Verne’s
protagonists in his Voyages Extraordinaires embrace France’s
positivist agenda while simultaneously seeking escape from
a civilization overcome by progress. Nemo’s strategy
in Vingt-mille lieues sous les mers, along with later Vernian
heroes, is to retreat from this world by cultivating a utopian
culture within the protective shell of his technological wondership,
the Nautilus. This paper will explore the paradoxical immobility of the man/machine relationship in Verne’s narratives,
their predetermination and imprisonment by an imposing system
of bourgeois cultural values, their meticulous construction
of very private and individualized interiors which speak to
bourgeois desire.
|
Smart, |
Annie, Saint Louis University: “Le Lait de la liberté:
Louis Aimé Martin’s Great Maternal Revolution.” (17.2)
While the nursing mother may be absent from French Romantic
literature, she is certainly present in the didactic literature
of the time. Social theorists and political writers puzzled
over the “woman question,” creating a multiplicity
of theories of maternity. In this paper, I argue that as the
divisions within the bourgeois public sphere become more apparent,
motherhood comes to figure a counter-balance to bourgeois liberal
values – that is, to a private sphere grounded in commodity
exchange, and a public sphere dominated by individual interests. L’Education des mères de famille (1834), Louis-Aimé Martin’s
best-selling treatise on motherhood, furnishes an excellent
example of the mother as the locus of political and economic
discourses. Declaring that “Le lait maternel sera
le lait de la liberté,” Martin interpellates the
mother as social regeneratrix. As we shall see, “le
lait de la liberté” and “l’amour maternel” re-define
citizenship, value, and systems of exchange.
|
Smeets, |
Marc, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen: “Joris-Karl
Huysmans et le style gris.” (20.1) L’été 1892,
Huysmans se convertit au catholicisme. Moment important, à la
fois pour l’homme et l’œuvre. L’auteur
a changé de cap, il n’est plus le même.
Mais qu’écrire désormais? Et comment? Et
pourquoi? Pendant la rédaction de son « à rebours
de Là-Bas », J.-K. Huysmans est confronté à divers
problèmes, surtout liés à son statut d’artiste.
Puis-je, homme converti et écrivain, continuer comme
avant? Faut-il écrire dorénavant d’une
autre manière? Il l’essaie, mais le résultat
est fort médiocre. Une sorte d’angoisse s’empare
de l’écrivain. Il veut se conformer aux contraintes
de la littérature spirituelle, contraintes qui, en termes
d’Edmond de Goncourt, supposent un « style gris ».
Mais ce n’est pas là non plus la route à suivre.
Enfin, une sorte d’illumination se produit. Du moins,
c’est notre hypothèse ici. Joris-Karl Huysmans
a compris qu’il faut changer sans trop changer. Changer
un tout petit peu, juste ce qu’il faut. |
Starr, |
Juliana, Christian Brothers University: “Brave New
Woman or Stepford Wife? Villiers’ Robot in L’Eve
Future.” (45.3)
The postmodern concept of the cyborg as a highly creative and
transformative entity might apply to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s
novel L’Eve Future (1886), which breaks fresh ground
as an early experiment in science fiction, being the story
of the inventor Thomas Edison and his creation of the lovely
Hadaly, a mechanical woman indistinguishable from a real woman.
Taking inspiration from Donna Haraway’s notions of the
cyborg, I would like to demonstrate that while Hadaly could
potentially offer a visionary image of a new world order, she
unfortunately serves primarily as a rather conventional effort
to control woman by making her into a robot. By drawing comparisons
between Hadaly and various female androids of popular culture,
I hope to shed light on Villiers’ book as an innovative
one in concept and form, but as a work that ultimately ends
up conveying many of the fears inherent in the old system.
|
Starr, |
Peter, University of Southern California: “The Filmic
Commune.” (26.4)
Of all the works in the rich intertext of Grigory Kozintsev
and Leonid Trauberg’s 1929 film, New Babylon—essays
by Marx and Lenin, paintings by Degas and Manet, caricatures
by Daumier—none are arguably more significant than two
novels by Émile Zola, La Débâcle and Au
Bonheur des Dames. Indeed, by yoking the stories of those novels
together, Kozintsev and Trauberg effected a thorough-going
meditation on the commonalties of capitalist commerce and revolutionary
violence. The aim of this paper is to explore New Babylon’s
rewriting of Zola along an axis that runs from trauma, melancholic
confusion, and ambivalence on the one hand to an essential
futurity on the other.
|
Stephens, |
Sonya, University of London: “Photography & Finish:
Changing Value(s) and Representation in Mid Nineteenth-Century
Paris.” (16.2)
In this paper I will explore questions of change in relation
both to the Parisian cityscape and to the emerging photographic
techniques which formally capture and constitute that change – historically,
architecturally, psychologically, and representationally. Inherent
in the very notion of change, is the question of time and the
photograph is of particular significance in this respect, not
only because of its emergence at this point in history, but because
of the paradox of the medium itself (long exposure time versus
speed and motion; subjective vision versus the systematisation
of vision in the cultural context, etc.). This notion of time
and change is also present in Barthes’ conception of the
photograph, explored in Camera Lucida. Here he describes the
photograph as catastrophe, as expressing a temporal rupture,
a phenomenon that has also been described as the ‘this
will be’ and ‘this has been’ of every frame.
The paper will examine, then, images by Le Secq, Marville and
Houssin, comparing and contrasting their approaches to the changing
landscape and to photographic art, including the impact of the
photographic panorama (and related notions, such as ‘images
en série’). Most importantly, however, it will use
these photographs of Paris as a case-study in the formal implications
of photography, in the proliferation of photographic techniques,
technologies and practices in the period, in order to situate
it within this aesthetic and as a form significantly contributing
to the nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon of the unfinished. |
Stivale, |
Charles J., Wayne State University: “Tracking the Rogue
Translation: Guy de Maupassant in the Anglo Wilderness.” (50.3)
Imagine the following quandary: after working for several decades
on the works of an esteemed author in French studies, you succeed
in confirming that both the extant corpus of the author's works
in English translation as well as many of the extant translations
themselves are unfaithful to the corpus and texts established
definitively in the original French editions. The corpus in
question is Maupassant's, and in this talk, I will review anomalies
in the constitution of Maupassant’s corpus in English
translation and peculiarities in specific translations that
continue to circulate well into the cyberage.
|
Strauss, |
Jonathan, Miami University: “Writing into Silence.” (31.2)
This paper examines a paradox in the use of language, which structures the relation
between individuality and expression and is acute in Nerval, because of the
isolating effect of his madness. Few authors would seem as changeable, in their
style, existence or persona. Yet Nerval was deeply troubled by the impossibility
of change and by a totalizing, hyperbolic subjectivity reminiscent of the worst
criticisms directed at Hegel’s hegemonic and panlogistic world-historical
subject. This world without another rightly horrified Nerval, for inside it
new knowledge or genuine change was impossible. His response to Janin’s “epitaph” reveals
his fear that he would never again be able to “me faire écouter
sérieusement.” Is change possible if others will not listen? Nerval
brings us to this paradox: there are no others unless they answer us, but in
answering, they are no longer others. It is around this crux, I argue, that
Nerval’s madness turns. |
Sureau, |
Eloise, Washington
University, "Maldoror daguerréotypé :
une écriture photographique des Chants" (34.2)
1839 : au milieu d’une recrudescence d’inventions
mécaniques et d’innovations industrielles, la
photographie fait ses premiers pas et excite l’intérêt
de la population. Elle domine bientôt la propagation
des images et des idées. Les techniques photographiques
sont encore mal maîtrisées mais le but est clair:
lier le passé avec le futur, ici avec là-bas,
conserver et diffuser.
1868 : Isidore Ducasse Comte de Lautréamont aimerait
publier ses Chants de Maldoror qui ne sortiront des presses
que posthumes (1874). L’esprit de découverte,
les sciences naissantes attirent son attention : son texte
regorgeant de termes techniques et de nouvelles technologies.
L’apport de la photographie et surtout de l’aspect
instantané de sa prise n’ont-ils pas réussi à influencer
les mots et le sujet des Chants ? Le texte de Lautréamont
pourrait ainsi révéler une écriture
photographique.
|
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| T |
Thomson, |
Clive, University of Western Ontario: “Excessive Bodies
and the Body Politic: Rachilde and the Uses of Hyperbole.”
In their efforts to explore concretely the multiple meanings
of Rachilde’s androgenous characters, critics from Havercroft
to Lukacher to Cabanes have privileged such textual procedures
and rhetorical figures as “juxtaposition,” “paradox,” “antithesis,” and “le
sujet en chiasme.” Such studies (including my own) have
tended, however, to de-politicize Rachilde—to suggest
for example, as does Maryline Lukacher, that “ce que
Rachilde réclame finalement, c’est l’anonymat
sexuel.” I will propose in this paper that an exploration
of the figure and force of hyperbole redresses this difficulty.
In both La Marquise de Sade (where Mary Barbe is described
as having “l’indice absolu . . . de la monomanie
des cruautés”) and La Jongleuse (where Celestin
Barbe “avait su borner ses aventures galantes à de
simples relations hygiéniques”) we see exaggeration
not just in descriptions of the physical but also in the very
characterization of desire, discovering ultimately, in Rachilde’s
use of hyperbole, a means to understand the still controversial
question of her “politics.”
|
Tilby, |
Michael, Selwyn College, Cambridge: “Variations on
a bourgeois icon: some representations of the umbrella in nineteenth-century
French literature and painting.” (45.1)
Though, strictly speaking, the umbrella is not a nineteenth-century
invention, it acquires a new significance as cultural object
in nineteenth century France and consequently a privileged
status in a range of literary and artistic representations
of urban life. Indissociable from the self-image cultivated
by Louis-Philippe, the umbrella becomes in due course emblematic
of the ambiguous relationship between caricature and realism.
The history of its representation is likewise closely related
to the changing physical aspect of the French capital. But
if the umbrella is an emblem of the self-confidence of the
urban bourgeoisie, its potential absurdity and vulnerability
also enable it to function as the indicator of a failure to
achieve equanimity with this new environment, revealing in
the process an inadequacy that has both economic and sexual
connotations.
|
Toumayan, |
Alain, University of Notre Dame: “Baudelairean Intertextuality
and Transformation.” (7.1)
Baudelaire's tendency to write "through" various
models or figures that would include Delacroix, Poe, De Quincey,
Hugo, and many others is well attested in much scholarship
devoted to him. In his study French Romanticism, Frank Bowman
identifies and further specifies this practice in Les Fleurs
du Mal as the rewriting of a source text which, itself unambiguous,
is rewritten as ambiguous. Focusing primarily on religious
iconology, I will examine this tendency in Baudelaire as well
as other forms of Baudelairean intertextuality and I will seek
to observe to what extent consideration of these practices
can serve as an "aid to reading" Baudelaire, as Bowman
puts it.
|
Touya, |
Eric, Adelphi University: “The Culture of Performance
in 19th Century Paris: Assessing Changes in Literature and
Music.” (29.3)
During the nineteenth century, music brought language to an
impasse that reached its paroxysm when Mallarmé argued
that music had “put an end to the exclusive reign of
clarity in literature.” Focusing on the works of Beethoven,
Balzac, Baudelaire, Liszt, Mallarmé, Wagner and Debussy,
I will explore how the new dimension assumed by musical performance
changed the nature of the cultural life in Paris, transformed
the imaginative world of the novelist and poets, and gave a
new meaning to their work. How did the emergence of music in
France as a supreme art form raise new questions on the concepts
of language, self and representation? How did it change the
Parisian audience’s notions of performance, culture and
literature?
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| U |
Unwin, |
Timothy, University of Bristol: “Jules Verne’s
novel explorations.” (28.3)
Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires are one of the
finest documents we possess of a nineteenth-century world whose
technologies, lifestyles and structures are being transformed.
This paper will concentrate on two aspects of Jules Verne’s
vision of change. First, it will look at the political and
social world-view that emerges from his writings, stressing
that if he did ‘foresee’ anything, it was less
an era of futuristic technologies than one of globalisation
and the dangerous alienation that can result from it. Second,
it will analyse the impact of Jules Verne’s preoccupation
with change on the novelistic technique that he uses, arguing
that, far from being a conventional educational writer, Jules
Verne contributes very significantly to the evolution of the
novel-form itself. In Jules Verne’s hands, the novel
becomes an instrument with which to look at a new and slightly
strange world, and a means of coming to terms with change.
|
Urquhart, |
Steven, Queen’s University: “L’écriture
athée chez Mallarmé: signe de sa modernité.” (44.4)
La poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé, qui marque
l’histoire littéraire par son hermétisme,
relève d’une richesse profonde et témoigne
des différents moments dans la vie et la pensée
du poète. Influencé par l’instabilité sociale
et les idées autant philosophiques que politiques de
son époque, Mallarmé, comme tant d’autres
artistes de cette période, a renoncé à Dieu
assez tôt dans sa vie. Cependant, en examinant sa poésie,
il semble avoir été aux prises avec son éducation
catholique et l’importance de Dieu dans l’inspiration
poétique pendant toute sa vie. Étant donné ce
fait, j’examine la question de l’athéisme
dans la poésie de Mallarmé et explore, à l’aide
de sa correspondance et de sa prose, comment cette problématique
se manifeste dans ses poèmes. Sujet complexe, l’athéisme
du poète semble représenter non seulement une
des clés pour comprendre son œuvre, mais aussi
un signe de sa modernité.
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| V |
Vachon, |
Stéphane, Université de Montréal: “Le
tombeau d'Honoré de Balzac.” (9.4) |
Vallury, |
Rajeshwari, Kenyon College: “Une jouissance d’épiderme” or
an Aesthetics and Politics of the Surface: The Power and Value
of Metamorphosis in Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin.” (4.1)
The purpose of this paper is to study the politics of gender
and the body articulated by the figure of the androgyne in
Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. My paper argues that
Théodore/Mademoiselle de Maupin is an androgynous figure
that breaks apart the sexual categories that subtend D’Albert’s
(Platonic) conception of Beauty. Using the Deleuzian concepts
of sense and event, I show how Mademoiselle de Maupin moves
outside of the coordinates of height and depth that structure
the binaries of Platonic thought. Sexuality is a surface effect,
an incorporeal sense-event irreducible to the body that produces
and expresses it. Mademoiselle de Maupin’s androgyny
is an androgyny of the superficial, of the simulacrum as a
force of movement and becoming. S/he heralds a new power of
metamorphosis that affirms the productive power and multiplicity
of the False, or in other words, an aesthetics and politics
of sense.
|
Verona, |
Roxana, Dartmouth College: “Anna de Noailles dans son
atelier.” (6.3)
Anna de Noailles (1876 1933) appartient corps, âme, et
plume au passage d'un siècle à l'autre. Aujourd'hui,
le lecteur qui cherche en vain ses poèmes sur les rayons
des librairies s'interroge sur les motifs de l'oubli total
d'une oeuvre qui remporta, pendant la vie du poète,
un succès constant. L'enquête que je propose par
la suite examine les écrits de Noailles par rapport à l'institution
littéraire qui « a organisé » cet
oubli, en partant de l'hypothèse selon laquelle il est
impossible de séparer le tableau et son cadre. Dans
le cas de Noailles le contenu de l'oeuvre (poésie mais
aussi autobiographie et correspondance) renvoie non seulement
aux mises en scène de l'énonciation mais aussi à celles
qui reflètent son statut d'écrivain dans la société.
L'analyse de quelques concepts reparaissant tels "spectacle," "narcissisme," "exotisme," et "orientalisme" contribuent à expliquer
les rites d'écriture et les négociations intenables
d'un écrivain qui fut à la fois princesse française
et orientale, Dreyfusarde et femme poète.
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Waller, |
Margaret, Pomona College: “Think Globally, Act Locally?
Anti-Conquest during the Empire” (21.1)
Edward Said famously argued in 1993 that “the novel and
imperialism are unthinkable without each other” (Culture
and Imperialism, 70-71). In nineteenth-century French studies,
however, imperialism tends to mean French incursions into territories
overseas with a decided emphasis on the middle and end of the
century. Studying the Napoleonic era and broadening the field
of inquiry to cultural as well as literary history provide
a salutary counterbalance to this tendency to see a nation’s
expression of global ambitions as something that happens primarily
or even exclusively “over there,” and to the exotic
other. Indeed, I will argue, in the discourse about gender
during the Napoleonic period, the local and the global are
unthinkable without each other—as a necessary, albeit
illusory, foil. In this paper, I explore an apparent paradox:
at a time when military might and male rule enjoyed unprecedented
prestige and legitimacy, most men, writing from and about the
home front, promoted a form of male domination that explicitly
eschewed male violence, conquest, and tyranny as legitimate
forms of power.
|
Weil, |
Kari, California College of the Arts: "Creating a Thoroughbred
Human: Gustave Le Bon, Pierre de Courbertin and the Politics
of Sports at the Turn of the Century" (2.3)
In 1908, the founders
of “La
Culture Physique,” co-authored
a book entitled, L’Art de créer un pur-sang humain.
Despite the popular attraction of the thoroughbred human, its
meaning figured ambivalently at the core of debates concerning
the new and growing field of sport science. The thoroughbred
and, more generally, the horse figured in these debates due,
on the one hand, to the so-called progress made in horse breeding,
but also to the continuing, if changing, identification between “pure-bred” and
aristocracy in the French cultural imagination. In this paper
I want to examine the role of the horse in these debates and
in the related educational theories of Gustave Le Bon. The
relationship among man, woman and horse, figures either metaphorically
or literally as a response to fears over French “degeneration” and
as an educational model for healing the pathologies contacted
through impoverished heredity and/or modern life. |
Wettlaufer, |
Alexandra K., University of Texas at Austin: “Postcards
from the Edge: Flora Tristan, Paul Gauguin, and their Dystopic
Utopias.” (43.3)
In this paper I will examine Tristan’s trips to Peru,
England and France and Gauguin’s voyages to Brittany,
Tahiti and the Marquesas, comparing the visual and verbal portraits
each paints of identity, race, gender and alterity. Using Mary
Louise Pratt’s theories of the “contact zone” and
male vs. female travel narratives, I will document the ways
in which Tristan and her grand-son self-consciously positioned
themselves at the margins of culture—both their own and
that of the other countries—in order to claim a distance
from any center, while at the same time questioning the constructions
of race, gender and sex at home and abroad. In mapping the
gazes of Tristan and Gauguin on the exoticized female body
of the Other—clothed, veiled or nude—the double
bind of colonialism becomes apparent. For despite the avowed
goals of this pair of social idealists, their utopias inevitably
turned dystopic, as the differences they set out to celebrate
remain forever mired in hierarchical structures of disequilibrium.
Even as they reject the French culture they flee, both Tristan
and Gauguin were rapidly rejected by the cultures they sought
to embrace, leaving the author and the painter in a perpetual
Romantic isolation that reflects the larger crises of personal
and national identities in collision with the colonized during
the nineteenth-century.
|
Whidden, |
Seth, Villanova University,: “Changing Time and Space:
Rimbaud’s ‘dérèglement de tous les
sens’” (12.2)
This paper considers Rimbaud’s famous call for “le
dérèglement de tous les sens” in a new
light. Rather than accepting the obvious extension of Baudelairian
synesthesia in the attribution of color to letters in “Voyelles” – subsequently
and bitterly recalled in “Alchimie du verbe” from
Une saison en enfer (“J’inventai la couleur des
voyelles!”) – the current paper reads Rimbaud’s “dérèglement” in
the way that Rimbaud intended to be read, “littéralement
et dans tous les sens.” Instead of limiting the meaning
of the word “sens” to “senses,” as
almost all of Rimbaud criticism and all of the translations
into English have done, the present study interprets the word “sens” in
all its myriad possibilities: senses, meanings, and directions,
all definitions proposed by dictionaries of the period.
|
Wilkinson, |
Lynn R., University of Texas at Austin: “Culture and
Power in Balzac’s Rubempré Cycle:The View from
Bourdieu.” (33.2)
This presentation takes Bourdieu’s analysis of Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale as the point of departure
for a discussion of Balzac’s Illusions perdues and Splendeurs
et misères des courtisanes that focuses on the representation
of the possibility of literary and cultural autonomy. In Illusions
perdues, Daniel d’Arthez and his Cénacle appear
to represent the possibility of the emergence of a group of
cultural producers who eschew large-scale production for personal
and artistic autonomy. But does d’Arthez, whose novels
hark back to those of Walter Scott, point forward or backward
in French literary or cultural history? The same question might
be posed concerning the two novels focusing on Lucien de Rubempré.
Do these works depict the necessary failure of projects of
autonomy during the decades that preceded the emergence of
the art novel and aestheticism? Or do they suggest, within
the evolution of the novel as a popular form, the emergence
of a different kind of artistic autonomy within the field of
popular cultural production?
|
Witt, |
Catherine A., Princeton University: “On Balzac and
Constantin Guy, or the Spirit of Epic according to Baudelaire.” (7.3)
Baudelaire’s conception of epic is paradoxical, for,
while he praises Delacroix and Balzac for their ability to
recapture in their works the essence of an ancient héroïsme, he fundamentally questions the viability of epic poetry in
the modern era. The contrast between the affected classicism
of poems by Ménard or Quinet and Hugo’s Légende
des siècles (1859) suggests the ineluctable tessellation
of the epic mode of representation. This paper examines Baudelaire’s
idiosyncratic take on epic poetry as it transpires in the Salon
de 1846 and Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863). Against this
backdrop, I reconsider the filiations between the Spleen
de Paris and literary tradition. I then proceed to interpret Baudelaire’s
proclivity for anecdotes in the prose poems as an attempt to
reclaim the epic for poetry and for the everyday, and, more
radically, to challenge the boundaries between poetry and history.
|
Wolff, |
Mark B, Hartwick College: “Dispositions: Rhetoric and
Taste in Late Nineteenth-Century French Education.” (33.1)
Gérard Genette’s essay “Rhétorique
et Enseignement” (1966) frames the study of the history
of nineteenth-century literary education in terms of a fundamental
shift in rhetoric. Before the educational reforms of the Third
Republic, students at the secondary level actively imitated
texts and incorporated in their own writing the stylistic devices
they observed. The emphasis on elocution gave way to a more
passive approach that emphasized disposition: the explication
de texte and the dissertation applied to works by French writers
gained prominence as pedagogical practices that stressed the
apprehension of structure. In Bourdieusian terms of reproduction,
the shift in rhetoric reflects a fundamental change in how
cultural capital was created and distributed in the French
school system. Unlike the literary pedagogy of elocution, which
reproduces a habitus by teaching that taste is eternal and
best exemplified by works from Antiquity, the pedagogy of disposition
teaches that taste itself is historical, creating a new habitus
that encourages students to recognize and appreciate Frenchness.
|
Worth, |
Jeremy, The University of Western Ontario: “Dynamic
Dust and the Fossilized Body: Shaping Identities in the Rougon-Macquart.” (42.3)
This paper proposes a thematic and metaphorical analysis of
dust and powder in Zola’s novels. Dust will be shown
as both a dynamic and an immobilizing symbolic force: a falling,
flowing, and filling agent of change, produced and propagated
by the Second Empire capitalist "body without organs" (Deleuze
and Guattari) in order to permeate and shape the organs, tissues
and psychic structures of the human subjective body, the body
politic and the giant social body of Paris. The importance
of dust as a metaphor for psychic change and determination
will be explored in detail, as will its place in a complex
metaphorical system. This analysis will bring us, logically,
to a discussion of images of eventual “fossilization” in
the series, in the context of Haussmanization and of the “building” of
urban political centres, citizenry, and ideology.
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Zachmann, |
Gayle, University of Florida,:“Exposing Change in Mallarmé:
Window Dressing in La Dernière Mode and Etalages.” (44.2)
Exposing Change in Mallarmé articulates how the étalage
figures in Stéphane Mallarmé’s work and
thought from the 1874 La Dernière mode, a fashion magazine
he wrote, designed, and marketed, to the ingenious 1894 article
entitled, Etalages. An insightful and ironic discussion of “le
haut commerce de Lettres,” Etalages flaunts and then
flouts the spreading of a rumor: a literary glut attaining
calamitous proportions complete with burgeoning book displays
proliferating unbound that, quite simply, never happened. First
called into question as rumor and then undermined by the poet’s “en
tirez-vous un retrospectif rire, égal au mien?,” the
uncompromising deployment of the anecdote itself as literary
merchandise unfolds a discourse on poetry, merchandising, readerships,
modern consumption and the Press in the press. Indeed, Etalages serves as a journalistic showcase, a
vitrine for an ironic
poetic exposition on modern exhibition.
|
Ziegler, |
Robert, Montana Tech University: « Nigredo: Là-bas.” (20.2)
In his 1891 novel Là-bas, Huysmans frames the central
conflict, not as one between Christian thaumaturges and Satanic
renegades but as one between materialists and alchemists who
transmute base matter into gold. On the level of science, art,
and metaphysics, Huysmans questions whether human life is inevitably
governed by lust and cupidity, or whether, through study, sacrifice,
and self-purification, man can sublimate the materia prima of his material existence and refine it into the ultima
materia of a spiritually transformed essence. Not only the soul, but
also the body and the book are the battlefield on which opposing
forces clash, struggling to degrade humanity by focusing it
on the stomach, the genitals, or the pocketbook, or trying
to direct its gaze upward by teaching nobility, love, and service.
|
Ziolonka, |
Anthony, Assumption College: “Genetic Criticism: (Over-)Expanding
the Canon?” (34.3)
Nineteenth-century French authors’ preparatory writings,
drafts and working notes are increasingly being integrated
into the canon of primary literature that is deemed worthy
of study. Recent developments in genetic criticism, including
the editing and publishing of a wide range of preliminary texts
and documents have consequently been enriching our knowledge
of authors’ writing methods and ideas. They have also
been transforming the objects of literary analysis, placing
the emphasis on the writing process itself, rather than on
the finished works of literature. Only a few major writers
have so far been singled out for this detailed scrutiny of
their preparatory materials. This shift has wide-ranging implications
for the study of literature in the coming years. My paper will
address both the positive and possibly more negative implications
of these developments.
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