Location: Hovenden Room
Sabrina Hogan (Christ Church): States of attention in Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine and Scève’s Délie
This paper will consider the themes of attention and distraction in Guillaume Du Bartas’ La Sepmaine (1578) and Maurice Scève’s Délie (1544), two texts which form part of the corpus in my wider poetic project on states of attention in sixteenth-century French poetry. The theme of attention in its various forms permeates a wide spectrum of poetic genres of period, notably devotional poetry, love poetry and creation poetry. A sustained form of attentiveness, vigilance, has a special place in the sixteenth century, a time of poetic vigils and devotional culture privileging the contemplative life, and an age when apocalyptic and prophetic discourses acquired renewed vigour amid the Wars of Religion. I will consider how in his epic creation poem, La Sepmaine (1578), Du Bartas reflects upon the reach and limitations of his ability to recreate the wonder of divine creation revealed in Genesis 1-2. The poet’s depiction of his own attentive state as writer probes the rhetorical figure of copia – popularised in the sixteenth century, notably by Erasmus’ De copia (1512). Scève’s Délie is hailed as the first French canzoniere, displaying the impact of Petrarch's Rime in France in a series of 449 love poems (dizains) addressed to the poet's mysterious object of desire, Délie. States of attentiveness and wakefulness are central to exploring Scève’s evocative sensorial depictions and the staging of the poet’s innamoramento.
Beverly Adrian (Wadham): Charles Nodier and the eternal recurrence of the merveilleux
This paper explores how Charles Nodier’s 1830 essay ‘Du fantastique en littérature’ makes the case for a renewed interest in supernatural fiction in the early half of the nineteenth century. Nodier’s essay will be examined in light of Louis de Bonald’s remarks in ‘Du Style et de la littérature’ (1806), in which the latter suggests that ‘la littérature est l’expression de la société’, establishing a hierarchy of literary forms, and traces the development and perceived decadence of French letters up until the revolution, when literature took a philosophical turn. Almost twenty-five years after Bonald, Nodier observes that the merveilleux or rather its offshoot, the fantastique, fulfills society’s aching need for transcendence in a decadent age of scepticism and positivism. Nodier suggests that emphasis on imagination in storytelling should supplant literary classicism, in order to rejuvenate the human spirit, thereby paving the way for a newfound age of innocence which favors illusion over doubt. My paper will consider the tensions between the merveilleux and the fantastique, as envisaged by Nodier, alongside questions of genre and canonicity. I will highlight the ways in which Nodier’s propositions correspond with an upsurge in ideas of spiritual regeneration in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
