Participation à la "French Week", 7 - 10 May 2019, Institute of Modern Languages Research
INSTITUTE OF MODERN LANGUAGES RESEARCH
School of Advanced Study • University of London
Tuesday 7 – Friday 10 May 2019
French Week
Spanning the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, French Week at the IMLR incorporates an eclectic mix of talks and a translation workshop, based around the work of major French cultural figures including Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus; the writings of the best-selling contemporary francophone author Leïla Slimani; and a film screening of Saudi Arabian director Faiza Ambah’s short film, Mariam (2016), which takes an outsider’s view on France and on controversial laws banning the wearing of the niqab and the burqa in public spaces.
Led by specialists in their field, each event sheds new light on literature, translation and film that has emerged in the French context from the 19th to 21st century.
All are welcome to attend these free events but please register in advance.
Faiza Ambah’s 'Mariam' (2016) and the Embodied Politics of Veiling in France
7 May 2019 5-7pm
Speaker: Kaya Davies Hayon (Lincoln)
Over the past few decades, Muslim women who cover in France have been subjected to a series of controversial laws that have positioned their bodies as incompatible with the supposedly secular values of the French state. The 2004 law banning the headscarf in state schools was followed by a 2011 law that outlawed the wearing of the niqab and the burqa in public spaces. In 2016, French fears over the veil resurfaced when the mayors of Cannes and Nice (amongst others) prohibited Muslim women from wearing so-called burkinis on the beach. These laws have contributed to a view of the Muslim headscarf as a symbol of religious and patriarchal oppression, and have sparked debates in France (and the wider world) over Muslim women’s place in the French Republic.
Set in 2004 in France, Saudi Arabian director Faiza Ambah’s short film, Mariam (2016), intervenes into these debates through its focus on a French teenage girl of Arab descent named Mariam (Oulaya Amamra) who chooses to wear the headscarf after performing the hajj with her grandmother one summer. This talk argues that Mariam uses its eponymous heroine’s lived and embodied experiences of veiling to explore the impact of the 2004 law on Muslim schoolgirls’ everyday lives and identities in France. Rather than representing the headscarf as synonymous with radicalisation or patriarchal oppression, Ambah portrays it as the primary means by which her protagonist is able to resist male patriarchal authority and negotiate her hybrid subjectivity. I conclude that Mariam offers a nuanced representation of veiling that troubles the perceived distinctions between Islam and secularism, religion and reason, oppression and freedom, tradition and modernity, and the veil and feminism in France and the wider (Western) world.
The talk will be followed by a screening of the film.
Towards an eco-critical reading of Albert Camus
8 May 2019 3.00-4.30 pm
Speaker: Joseph Ford (IMLR, London)
Albert Camus’s concern for the natural environment has been extensively examined by critics of his work. Whether explored from the perspective of the indifferent worldview of his characters and the implications for absurdist philosophy or described by postcolonial critics as representative of the author’s unconscious colonial sympathies, the Algerian land is setting to almost all of Camus’s fiction. Despite regular invocations of the environment, there has never been an eco-critical reading of Camus’s work. This paper retraces the representations of the environment in Camus. Rather than focus on philosophical or postcolonial readings, it is argued that an eco-critical lens reveals an increasing concern in Camus for the effect humans exert over the natural environment – a concern that can be read beyond the specific contexts within which he was writing.
Baudelaire and the Second Empire
8 May 2019 5.30-7.30pm
Speaker: 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 re-evaluate women’s role in his work.
Beckett and Translation
9 May 2019 11.00-1.00pm
Speaker: 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.
Walter Benjamin and 'The Task of the Translator'
9 May 2019, 3.00-5.00pm
Speaker: Jean-Michel Gouvard (Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne)
Walter Benjamin worked several times on “The Task of the Translator” at 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.
Working with Feminism in the Writing of Leïla Slimani
10 May 2019, 2.00-4.00pm
Speakers: Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London); Sarah Arens (Edinburgh)
The talks will look at key areas of interest for feminism in two works by the best-selling contemporary francophone author Leïla Slimani: Dans le jardin de l'ogre (2014) and Chanson douce (2016). Slimani's work has been praised for its radically realistic treatment of motherhood, female sexual expression, and the compromises professional working mothers have to make in order to 'have it all'. Slimani has acknowledged the profound influence of Simone de Beauvoir's Le deuxième sexe on her thinking, and this session will discuss how Slimani's work can be read from a feminist perspective.
Jules Verne and the Nineteenth Century, in light of Walter Benjamin
10 May 2019, 6.00pm - 8.00pm
Speaker: 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”.
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.
