Présentation de mes cours et conférences à l'IMLR du 8 au 10 mai 2019: Baudelaire, Becket, Benja
Baudelaire and the Second Empire
8 May 2019, 5.30pm - 7.30pm Lecture Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
FRENCH WEEK
Speaker: Professor Jean-Michel Gouvard (Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne)
With his uncompleted Paris Spleen, whose writing was interrupted by illness and a soon coming death, Baudelaire made a last attempt to reflect upon the situation of the artist in society of the Second Empire, “in the age of high capitalism”, to quote the famous – but also problematic, as we will see – phrase by Walter Benjamin’s. Following Marc Berdet’s proposal, what Baudelaire did in his prose poems could be compared to a ragman’s work, the poet collecting wastes of the Napoleonian Paris to reveal the true face of the society he is living in. But metaphorical rags of the 19th century are not only objects, places or monuments, they are also people living on the margins of society, and especially female figures as comedians, prostitutes, lesbians, black women, freaks, whose shadows haunt the Paris of Baudelaire – which will lead us to reevaluate women’s role in his work. Cliquez ici pour plus de détails.
References: Marc Berdet, Le chiffonnier de Paris: Walter Benjamin et les fantasmagories, Paris, Vrin, 2015. Jean-Michel Gouvard, Charles Baudelaire. Le Spleen de Paris, Paris, Ellipses, 2015.
Beckett and Translation 9 May 2019, 11.00am - 1.00pm Workshop Bloomsbury Room, G35, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
FRENCH WEEK
Speaker: Professor Jean-Michel Gouvard (Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne)
Before being his own translator, Samuel Beckett translated many texts in English from French, Italian, or Spanish and, among them, many recent French poems, from Rimbaud’s "The Drunken boat" to surrealist poetry. In this workshop, we will compare French original versions of Rimbaud’s and Eluard’s poems with Beckett’s translations, with a special attention to versification, rhythm and musicality. Cliquez ici pour plus de détails.
Reference: Samuel Beckett, Complete poems, London, Calder, 1993.
Walter Benjamin and 'The Task of the Translator' 9 May 2019, 3.00pm - 5.00pm Lecture Bloomsbury Room, G35, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
FRENCH WEEK
Speaker: Professor Jean-Michel Gouvard (Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne) Walter Benjamin worked several times on “The Task of the Translator” in the end of the 1910s and at the beginning of the 1920s, before publishing it in 1923, as a Preface to his translation of Baudelaire’s Parisian Scenes. Almost a century later, his article is still mentioned as a reference in translation studies, but to understand it we have to link it with Benjamin’s philosophical thought, and especially with his conception of language, perception and knowledge at this early period of his career – otherwise risk misunderstanding the specificities of his proposals, and reducing them to mere common-sense rules. Cliquez ici pour plus de détails.
Reference: Walter Benjamin, “The task of the Translator”, in Selected Writings I – 1913-1926, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge (US), Harvard University Press, 2004.
Jules Verne and the Nineteenth Century, in light of Walter Benjamin 10 May 2019, 6.00pm - 8.00pm Lecture Gordon Room, G34, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
FRENCH WEEK
Speaker: Professor Jean-Michel Gouvard (Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne) Jules Verne’s work is often presented as a pleasant set of adventure novels, with a travel-guide aspect and a more or less scientific background. But this lecture offers another approach to Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages, in light of some Walter Benjamin’s proposals. Jules Verne was a middle-class writer, fed with common bourgeois ideology, and his novels reflect the way the French society he was living in “dreamt its future”, to paraphrase Benjamin’s words, especially in Verne’s never-ending dialog about prospective science, or his numerous descriptions of landscapes and machineries. In brilliant stories, the writer echoes the anxiety of a society shared between the attractive promises of science, progress and industry, and an inextinguishable fear that the promise land might collapse in a final apocalypse. It is the coexistence of these two contradictory tendencies that defines Jules Verne’s “modernity”. Cliquez ici pour plus de détails.
This lecture coincides with the publication in France of Jean-Michel Gouvard’s Le Nautilus en bouteille. Une lecture de Jules Verne à la lumière de Walter Benjamin [The Nautilus in a bottle. Reading Jules Verne in light of Walter Benjamin], Rennes, Pontcerq, May 2019.
