Seminars will take place either online, on Microsoft Teams (6-7.30pm, UK Time), or in the Warwick Faculty of Arts Building (4.30-6pm), unless otherwise stated. All are welcome to both the online and in-person events. To access the online events please click on the Teams link for the relevant seminar, displayed below. We recommend you download the (free) Teams app for ease of access. Please email the convenor, Philippe Le Goff, at P dot Le-Goff at warwick dot ac dot uk, with any questions.

Recordings of selected papers from 2022-3 can be found here, those from 2021-2 can be accessed here and those from 2020-1 here.

Wednesday 9 October: 'Where next for Macron and for France?'

A roundtable discussion of recent developments in French politics featuring Adam Agowun, Nick Hewlett, David Lees and Jessica Wardhaugh. Chaired by Philippe Le Goff

This event will take place in Social Sciences Building, room SO.20, 4.30pm-6pm.

Wednesday 20 November: Annabel Kim (Harvard), 'For Sale: The Personal is Political'

This seminar will be a discussion of a pre-circulated journal article, abstract immediately below. Download the article here.

The rise of autofiction in the contemporary French literary landscape coincides with a general evacuation of fiction as the dominant mode of literary creation. Christine Angot and Édouard Louis, who are both associated with autofiction despite their disidentification with the genre, unveil the trauma they have lived through, thus operating, as does self-writing in general, in a confessional mode. Angot and Louis, however, turn confession into complaint, where they assume the position of a plaintiff filing charges against a society put on trial for its hypocrisy and the structural violence that characterizes the authors’ traumatic experiences of class, sexual, and gender violence. This article demonstrates how this transformation of confession into complaint, which is what gives Angot’s and Louis’s texts their political edge, is also what makes them open to being coopted by late capitalism, which has turned the self into a commodity, devoid of political potential.

Annabel L. Kim is Chair and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature. Kim is also the editor of a special issue of Diacritics, "Citation, Otherwise," on the politics of citation, and co-editor (with Morgane Cadieu) of a Yale French Studies volume, "Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig."

This seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams, 6-7.30pm UK time. Click here to join.

Wednesday 22 January: Hannah Halliwell (Edinburgh), 'Morphine, Medicine and Masculinity in French Visual and Material Culture, 1870-1914'

Event co-organised with the departments of History and History of Art.

Morphine addiction was a significant public health issue in late nineteenth-century France. Following the invention of the hypodermic syringe in the 1850s, morphine was prescribed by doctors for everything from headaches and menstrual pain to cancer and palliative care. A proliferation of artworks created in France engaged with this new social concern, and those artworks almost always depicted morphine users as female. Yet statistical studies at the time show that men, particularly those working in the medical sector, made up the majority of habitual users. This talk explores the conspicuous absence of both male figures and medical professionals in the visual culture of morphine addiction; it argues that the medicalisation of morphine in French society implicates the doctor within these artworks, despite his figural absence, and offers a covert criticism of the medical sector that appears only overtly in the form of caricature. An analysis of the material culture of opiate paraphernalia (the hypodermic syringe and the opium pipe) reveals that the medicalisation of morphine also functioned to promote the colonisation of Indochina by France. The French posited morphine as western, modern and in opposition to opium, which was perceived as foreign and regressive.

Hannah Halliwell is a lecturer in nineteenth-century French art at the University of Edinburgh. Hannah specialises in the visualisation of addiction and drug use in French art and visual culture; gender, sexuality, and medicine are recurring themes in her research. Hannah’s monograph, Art, Medicine, and Femininity: Visualising the Morphine Addict in Paris, 1870-1914, was published in 2024 with McGill-Queen's University Press. She is the book reviews editor for the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs journal.

This seminar will take place in the Warwick Faculty of Arts Building, room FAB3.30, 4pm-5.30pm.

Wednesday 5 March: Louise Kari Méreau (University College Cork/Trinity College Dublin), 'Cynisme et féminisme, une nécessaire convergence autofictionnelle ?'

Dans un monde en perpétuelle mutation, le cynisme et le féminisme émergent comme deux forces réflexives puissantes qui interrogent les normes sociales et les constructions identitaires. Cette présentation propose d'explorer la rencontre entre ces deux courants de pensée, en s'intéressant particulièrement à la dimension autofictionnelle qui leur est intrinsèque, notamment dans les romans d’autrices contemporaines. À travers une analyse de textes littéraires et théoriques de Virginie Despentes, Christine Angot et Camille Laurens, j'examinerai comment le cynisme, souvent perçu comme un antidote au désenchantement depuis le 19eme siècle, peut enrichir le discours féministe en offrant une perspective critique sur les injustices systémiques. Cela me permettra d'ouvrir le débat sur la manière dont l'autofiction, grâce au mordant du cynisme, permet aux voix féminines de s'exprimer, en faisant du récit personnel une critique sociale.

Louise Kari Méreau is a lecturer of French at the University of Cork and a visiting research fellow in Trinity College Dublin where she did her PhD. Her doctoral research, funded by the Claude and Vincenette Pichois Award, focused on cynicism in the novels of Frederic Beigbeder and Virginie Despentes (1990-2010). She is working on the publication of her first monograph and continues to explore cynicism and autofiction in contemporary French novels.

This seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams, 6-7.30pm UK time. Click here to join.

Wednesday 30 April: Laura MacMahon (Cambridge), 'Restless traces: family archives in recent French documentary'

This paper explores the repurposing of family archives in two recent French documentary films, Une histoire à soi (Amandine Gay, 2021) and Les années super-8 (Annie Ernaux and David Ernaux-Briot, 2022). Drawing on studies of archival remediation in cinema, and of home movies as particularly restless sites of familial memory, I consider how both films engage with latent histories of subjectivity and dispossession. Gay, Ernaux and Ernaux-Briot explore the politics of gender, race and class, in France and beyond, during the periods addressed by their films. While these films trace different conflicts of identity (around motherhood in Les années super-8, and adoptive childhood in Une histoire à soi) and different kinds of archival gaps, my paper seeks out points of contact between them.

Laura McMahon is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (Legenda, 2012). She is currently working on a project on feminist historiography and archival engagements in recent moving image practice in a global context.

This seminar will take place in the Warwick Faculty of Arts Building, room FAB2.48, 4.30pm-6pm.