French Graduate Seminars, Michaelmas 2024, Seminar 1

Location: Hovenden Room

Carrie Heusinkveld (St John’s, Cambridge): ‘“Avez-vous dans les airs entendu quelque bruit?” Sound and Air in Racine’s Theatre’

Jean Racine has often been regarded as the great psychological dramatist of the seventeenth-century. With their emphasis on emotional interiority and spatial and narrative simplicity, his plays have been said to take place primarily in the characters' minds, while the observable action is limited to a single, nondescript chamber from which the wider world is largely excluded. While significant critical stress has been placed on their psychological and emotional complexity, little attention has been paid to the wider material and environmental contexts of his tragedies. This reception is perhaps reflective of a widespread and longstanding strand of critical thought, which has perceived the seventeenth century – a period frequently associated with the consolidation of a modern scientific mentality - as the mainspring of an increasing alienation of the natural from the human. Early modern French theatre, widely regarded as one of the critical paradigms of knowledge during this period, has been interpreted as a crystallisation of this apparent human-nonhuman binary, modelling a wider impulse to separate the material world from the thinking mind. However, ecocritical theory and environmental history have recently started to reframe early modern conceptions of nature-human relationships as more complex and entangled than previously recognised. I will give further impetus to this reappraisal by extending this line of inquiry to early modern theatre. In examining representations of sound and air in Racine’s theatre, I will show that it is possible to discern in seventeenth-century tragedy an awareness of the imbrication of the human with the nonhuman.

Lynn Ngyugen (St John’s): ‘Migrations in language’

What does it mean to choose another language to be your own? Can it ever be your own? This talk explores several Francophone writers’ relationships to French, a language that they have adopted and/or one that they have actively chosen over their langue maternelle to write their literary works. Reading selections from texts by Nancy Huston, Assia Djebar, Anna Moï, and Alice Kaplan, among others, I will consider what significance French specifically holds for these writers as a language of literary self-fashioning, as well as examine the complex experience of inhabiting the language more broadly—either as a total outsider or from a postcolonial influence—and of grappling with the contradictions of identity that the language might bring.