La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 La Terre

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 La Terre

All sessions will take place at the Providence Biltmore

Thursday, October 27, 2016 Session I: 12:00pm - 1:30pm

Panel I.A: Landscape Painting (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Britany Salsbury (Rhode Island School of Design)

Nicole Georgopulos (Stony Brook University), “‘The Cradle of Things’: Origins and Ontogenesis in Late Landscapes of Gustave Courbet” In early 1864, Gustave Courbet returned to his home region of Franche-Comté and painted a series of landscapes that took as their subjects various natural points of origin: grottoes, caves, waterfalls, etc. Through his loose and expressive facture, Courbet renders visible in these landscapes the ongoing becoming of the world, investigating the nature of origination and evolution. Courbet’s interest in such subjects comes just two years after the publication of the French translation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which irreversibly unsettled the traditional understanding of humankind’s position within the world. The early years of evolutionary biology made clear the human body’s implication in the history of the earth: no longer could the body be understood in isolation from its environment; rather, it was embedded within a geological history that tied it irrevocably to the earth itself through a common point of origin. This paper situates these natal or ontogenetic landscapes within the context of the wider dialogue concerning the nature and origins of the body in mid-nineteenth-century France, extending from evolutionary biology to proto-phenomenology, and culminating in Henri Bergson’s notion of creative becoming. Seen through a phenomenological lens informed by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz, it becomes evident that though Courbet’s landscapes do not take the body itself as their immediate subject, they constitute a reimagining of corporeality as both an epistemological and ontological category, a reordering of the understanding of the body’s place in the world.

Érika Wicky (Université de Liège), “L’art du paysage à l’ère de la photographie” L’avènement simultané, au milieu du XIXe siècle, de la photographie, de la critique d’art et de la peinture de paysage1 a donné lieu à la publication de nombreux textes critiques sur le paysage photographique qui témoignent des réflexions suscitées par cette triple rencontre. Il s’agira de s’interroger sur la façon dont ces textes (critiques d’art, essais journalistiques, traités techniques, etc.), visant le plus souvent à valoriser le médium photographique, ont abordé les premiers paysages photographiques. On verra notamment comment, tout en l’articulant à la pratique picturale du paysage, certains auteurs ont dessiné une conception spécifique et une poésie particulière du paysage en photographie. Alors que le modèle pictural de la composition idéalisante prévalait souvent dans l’appréhension du paysage, ces auteurs ont souligné la possibilité qu’offre la photographie à l’opérateur d’effectuer un choix à travers le

1 Au sujet de la mode du paysage au salon de 1855 : « Étrange bizarrerie! C'est quand la nature est condamnée à mort, c'est quand l'industrie la dépèce, quand les routes de fer la labourent [...] que l'esprit humain s'empresse vers la nature, la regarde comme jamais il n'a fait, la voit, cette mère éternelle, pour la première fois, la conquiert par l'étude, la surprend, la ravit, la transporte et la fixe, vivante comme flagrante dans des pages et des toiles d'une vérité sans pair ». Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, La peinture à l’exposition de 1855, Paris, E. Dentu, 1855, p.19. NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 cadrage. Or, dans la mesure où l’absence de choix dans la pratique photographique constituait une des principales objections à l’attribution d’un statut artistique au nouveau médium, l’insistance portée sur les exigences du cadrage, présenté comme un mode d’expression de soi, constituait un argument majeur en faveur de l’art photographique. Cependant, en plaçant le cadrage au cœur de l’activité du paysagiste, les défenseurs du statut artistique de la photographie réactualisent une conception ancienne du paysage pictural à l’origine de laquelle se trouve le cadre. En effet, le paysage a souvent été évoqué comme le fruit du découpage opéré par une fenêtre2. Une anecdote parvenue jusqu’à nous rapporte même que le premier paysage de l’histoire de l’art serait né au XVIe siècle, alors qu’un soldat découpait un morceau choisi de la fresque de Lorenzo Lotto Le Mariage mystique de Saint Catherine34. Paradoxalement, les premiers auteurs qui, au XIXe siècle, ont évoqué le paysage photographique en termes de cadrage ont donc à la fois souligné et valorisé la spécificité du médium ainsi que son potentiel artistique tout en l’inscrivant dans une tradition ancienne.

Therese Dolan (Temple University), “Terre-atorialism in the Art of the Pennsylvania Impressionist Painters” The sojourns in France taken by the Pennsylvania Impressionists, their exposure to the Impressionist aesthetic through the Paul Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York in 1886, and their contact with other American Impressionists helped them to see the potential of conveying their American landscape subject matter in newly expressive ways. Their depiction of seaside pleasures, secluded rural roads softened by snow, and quiet villages gently warming to the sun of late winter gained authenticity from their exposure to foreign art. They saw how they could infuse the feel of their home country, its particular light and native plantings, its colonial architecture and hand-crafted farm implements with a sense of their native traditions. They wed practical knowledge learned from hours in the studios at the Académie Julian, encounters with Monet at Giverny, and painting campaigns in the forests of Fontainebleau with their observations of the farmhouses, local streams and quiet villages of their native Bucks county environment to create a body of work that resonated with uniquely American freshness and spontaneity. If some of the technique of their art originated in a French syntax, the prose that emerged from their work was decidedly American, but not to the point claimed by William Gerdts who denies most of the French influence and credits its aesthetic as more related to the naturalism of Winslow Homer and the contemporaneous painting of George Bellows.

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Panel I.B: Women Exploring Unfamiliar Territories (WIF) (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Cecilia Beach (Alfred University)

Meera Jagannathan (University of Houston), “Trauma of Deracination in Flora Tristan: The Pariah as Traveling Metaphor” Poetics of dislocation is a recurring trope that haunts the colonial and postcolonial worlds, where the trauma induced by deracination is an overriding preoccupation. A similar sense of deracination

2 On retrouve encore cette conception sous la plume critique de Baudelaire : « Ils ouvrent une fenêtre et tout l'espace compris dans le carré de la fenêtre, arbres, ciel, maison, prend pour eux la valeur d'un poème tout fait » (Baudelaire, « Salon de 1859 : le paysage », Variétés critiques, Paris, G. Crès et Cie, 1924, p. 172). 3 Daniel Arasse, « Sept réflexion sur la préhistoire de la peinture de genre », Majeur ou Mineur ? Les hiérarchies en art, Georges Roque (dir.), Nîmes, Jacqueline Chambon, 2000, p.46.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 pervades Flora Tristan’s memoir where Flora, the dispossessed, struggles to find her place, and Florita, the narrator, facilitates this recovery through the act of narration. Recent investigations into this French- Peruvian feminist-traveler have focused on the wound of illegitimacy that contributed to her trauma of dislocation. Her dislocation within French society fueled Tristan’s search for her father’s family in the New World, where she discovered her abilities as a fine documentarian and recorded her impressions in the Peregrinations of a Pariah. I argue here that the Peregrinations is conceived by the writer to be, both a fine documentation of Peruvian life during the mid-nineteenth century and an affective trauma narration that helps the narrator-victim reconstitute herself. In this effort, the readers are conscripted by the narrator, who relies on their empathy for recuperating from the many wounds as they become her surrogate community. Taking my cue from Freud who writes in Studies of Hysteria that narrative recall helps victims of trauma work through its effects (what Freud calls “abreaction”), I study this work as Tristan’s attempt at recuperative exercise where she employs the mute figure of the Pariah in her self-refashioning. In this effort, Tristan relies on a very predictable appropriation of the marginalized Pariah who stands at once for the abject Other and for unspeakable, mute trauma. Here in lies a curious paradox: if the Pariah stands for both, a singular victimhood and for incommensurability, how does she then become a traveling metaphor that moves effortlessly from the Indian subcontinent to the New World? I argue that the figure of the Pariah, at once unique and universal, makes this possible by becoming a mask of performance for the transnational narrator who was urgently seeking a new identity.

Cecilia Beach (Alfred University), “André Léo’s Italian Novels: An Ecocritique” Socialist and feminist writer André Léo, who is best known for her role in the Paris Commune, spent most of the final decades of the century in exile in Italy where she continued to write novels infused with the social and political issues of her time. During this period, she published five works of fiction that take place Italy: four novels published serially in Le Siècle and Le Temps between 1879 and 1889, and one children’s novel signed Bénédict and published by Heztel in 1887. In all of these novels, André Léo explores the relationship between the environment—both rural and urban—and the economic and cultural situation of the regions described. Though she recognizes the beauty of some areas and the rich historical heritage of archeological sites, she focuses primarily on the austerity, isolation and insalubrity of the natural landscapes, and the poverty and unsanitary conditions of the human environment. These popular novels, published between 1879 and 1889, shift constantly between titillating adventures replete with bandits, kidnappings, vendettas and murders, and quasi-anthropological observations about the cultural, political and environmental conditions in Sardinia and the coastal area around Naples where the author eventually settled. In a recent volume dedicated to the life and works of André Léo, we analyzed the feminist and social critiques in her Italian novels (Les Vies d’André Léo PUF, 2014). Here, we will focus not only the description and function of the natural and human environment in her novels, but also environmental issues she raises such as deforestation, malaria, agricultural techniques, and the mistreatment of animals. While reinforcing the republican ideals championed in the majority of André Léo’s novels, these relatively unknown works give us new insight into her ecological values.

Catherine Schmitz (Wofford College), “‘Lettres sur l’exposition, à vol d’oiseau’ : Madame de Rute et l’exposition universelle de 1889” Les objectifs d’une exposition universelle sont à la fois politiques et commerciaux. En quelque sorte, les nations s’y exposent afin de montrer leurs nouvelles technologies, leurs nouvelles productions artistiques et commerciales. Bref, ce qu’elles ont atteint « en matière de culture ». Dans une autre perspective, le voyage ou le déplacement à l’exposition universelle ainsi que le récit des événements et

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 présentations culturelles qui s’y déroulent, deviennent un véhicule significatif pour le point de vue féminin et sa perception des identités « autres ». En 1889, la poète, romancière, dramaturge, journaliste et éditrice Madame de Rute, antérieurement connue sous les noms de la Princesse Wyse-Bonaparte, Madame de Solms et Madame Rattazzi, se rend à l’Exposition de Paris pendant toute sa durée de 6 mois afin de couvrir les dernières nouvelles qui s’y sont produites et les nations qui s’y affichent. Cette même année, elle publiera une série d’articles parus tous les 15 jours dans La Nouvelle Revue Internationale. Ces articles sont particulièrement pertinents dans la mesure où ils nous révèlent le regard d’une femme à l’intérieur d’un espace public cosmopolite, percevant et représentant des cultures et identités multiples. Dans ses articles, Madame de Rute s’intéresse aux autochtones des pays présents à l’exposition, et surtout aux gens des colonies (plus précisément les colonisés), ainsi qu’à la modernité que la révolution industrielle des pays dits civilisés ont su engendrée, à la fois au niveau de ses technologies et sa commercialisation dont elle critique ses excès. Dans cette présentation, je propose donc de révéler le dialogue culturel ou plutôt l’incompréhension culturelle entre colonisés et colonisateurs présents à l’exposition universelle de Paris en 1889.

Arline Cravens (Saint Louis University), “Landscaping the Feminine in Sand’s Laura ou le voyage dans le cristal” George Sand's Laura is a récit fantastique that intertwines imagination, science and sexual discovery. Drawing upon her scientific knowledge of botany and mineralogy, Sand brings together the flora of fantasy and the real in her descriptions of the mineral world. The hero, Alexis, sets out on a voyage to discover the scientific realm of minerals, fossils and crystals, which leads to a discovery of sensual desire. By juxtaposing the real and the imaginary, Alexis is confronted with visual marvels as well as the dangers of the scientific world, which serve as corresponding symbols in his discovery of the sensual world. At the opening of the novel, the reader discovers that all stones have magical properties, especially geodes. With this description, Sand puts into play one of the scientific debates of the century: evolution and the ability of an object to transform into another. Through the image of the subterranean world within the interior of the geode, Sand will launch Alexis on a hallucinatory voyage fantastique. By a subtle process of mise en abyme, Sand portrays a voyage that is both fantastic as well as scientific: the contents of the crystalline world are borrowed from the terrestrial landscape, thereby underlining the complex duality affirmed from the beginning of the novel. In this paper I will argue that Laura offers a new vision of the transforming identity of the feminine. Through Sand's unique blending of science and fantasy in the form of a quest narrative, I posit that Laura brings a fresh perspective to writing the feminine that incorporates the cultural politics at play in relation to geology and identity in the nineteenth century.

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Panel I.C : Le Culte de la Terre (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza (Brown University)

Maxime Foerster (Southern Methodist University), “Aux racines du fascisme français : l'importance de la terre chez Gobineau, Drumont et Barrès” Le roman Les Déracinés, publié en 1897, marque un tournant dans l’itinéraire politique de Barrès en ceci qu’il inaugure une trilogie intitulée Le Roman de l’énergie nationale et développe les fondements

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 d’une idéologie nationaliste et raciste qui connaîtra un succès croissant jusqu’au régime de Vichy, incarné par Pétain et résumé par ce dernier dans cette phrase : « la terre, elle, ne ment pas ». Dans ce nationalisme barrésien d’extrême-droite qui accompagne la transition de la mouvance ultraroyaliste et contre- révolutionnaire du début du 19ème siècle vers le fascisme français au 20ème siècle, le rôle de la terre, comme l’indique le titre Les Déracinés, est particulièrement important. Cette intervention propose de rétablir les racines négligées du nationalisme de Barrès en liant les thèses développées dans Les Déracinés d’une part au racisme élaboré par Arthur de Gobineau dans son Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-1855) et d’autre part à l’antisémitisme élaboré par Édouard Drumont dans La France juive (1886). Outre la généalogie reliant Barrès à Gobineau et à Drumont, le but de cette étude consistera aussi à comparer le rôle de la terre chez ces trois penseurs et à montrer que sa valeur théorique, quasi nulle chez Gobineau, va gagner en importance chez Drumont pour finir par devenir cruciale chez Barrès à partir de ses Déracinés. Il sera ainsi démontré que si Barrès doit beaucoup à Gobineau et à Drumont, l’originalité de sa contribution au fascisme aura résidé dans le rôle primordial conféré à la terre en général et au terroir en particulier.

Leila Ennaili (Central Michigan University), “Région et nation : la pensée de la terre chez Maurice Barrès au lendemain de la guerre franco-prussienne” La terre est un thème cher aux écrivains et penseurs nationalistes. Elle est alors associée aux racines, aux ancêtres et à l’identité. À l’heure où l’on réédite en France de nombreux écrits de Maurice Barrès et où la question de la souveraineté nationale reste cruciale dans les débats politiques, il est de bon ton de s’interroger sur la place centrale que le thème de la terre occupe dans la pensée de cet auteur. Dans son discours du 10 mars 1899 intitulé « La terre et les morts, » il développe des idées qu’il a déjà commencé à traduire en fiction dans sa trilogie du Roman de l’énergie nationale dont il publie en 1897 le premier volume intitulé Les déracinés. Pour Maurice Barrès, la terre est avant tout celle de sa Lorraine natale, celle-là même qui fût conquise par les Prussiens en 1870. Cette étude aura pour objectif d’étudier la mise en fiction du thème de la terre chez Maurice Barrès. Nous examinerons d’une part la dimension régionale du concept de terre en analysant les modalités de transplantation des personnages de leur Lorraine natale à Paris, ainsi qu’en considérant les contrastes entre la représentation de la capitale française et celle des régions de l’est. D’autre part, nous mettrons en lien nos remarques sur Les déracinés avec le traitement du thème de la terre dans un roman moins connu et plus tardif de l’auteur, Colette Baudoche (1909), ceci afin de déterminer l’évolution de la pensée de l’auteur dans le domaine fictionnel.

Brigitte Krulic (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre), “Maurice Barrès : Refonder le peuple français par les injonctions de la Terre et des Morts” L’Appel au soldat (Le Roman de l’énergie nationale) retrace le voyage initiatique à travers « les pays lorrains » qui, au rebours du patriotisme « déraciné » d’une « France idéale », exalte un nationalisme ancré dans la réalité des terroirs, appelé à conjurer la menace de dissolution du principe générateur de la nation, le peuple. Selon Barrès, la froide logique du contrat social et la « congestion » centralisatrice vers Paris « épuisent et dessèchent les énergies » qui ne sauraient, dans sa vision organiciste, se déployer que selon leurs lois propres, irréductibles aux normes définies de l’extérieur. Le peuple ne résulte pas d’un acte contractuel fondé sur la raison abstraite ; il est une réalité donnée, créée par une « dynamique de sédimentation géologique », où chaque élément prend sa place et son sens en fonction du tout. Le culte de la terre et des morts fonde la nationalité, c’est-à-dire l’appartenance assumée à une communauté enracinée dans un terroir et dotée d’un sens inséparablement local et national : l’attachement

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 instinctif à la « petite patrie » des provinces, cadre concret d’exercice des besoins et intérêts d’une communauté historique, renforce l’amour de la « grande patrie » par élargissement de la famille à la cité, à la province, à la nation, et non par résorption des diversités régionales dans le modèle unitaire issu de la matrice rousseauiste (principe d’unicité du peuple, éradication des « mots du terroir », substitution des départements aux provinces, etc.). Après l’affaire Dreyfus, le « fédéralisme » de Barrès se radicalise en « régionalisme » érigé en culte des bastions de l’Est et en national-populisme d’exclusion, qui se définit lui-même comme l’acceptation d’un déterminisme, l’assentiment aux injonctions de la Terre et des Morts.

Philippe Chavasse (Rochester Institute of Technology), “De la terre à la terre promise” Écrivain belge régionaliste, émule de Léon Cladel plus que de Zola, Georges Eekhoud est le chantre de son terroir natal, la Campine anversoise, à une époque, la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, où les lettres belges sont fortement tournées vers la France. Eekhoud cite Barrès sur la sédimentation du sol par le corps des ancêtres morts. Il sera imprégné un temps par l’idéologue raciste Edmond Picard, ce «Drumont belge» qui définit l’essence d’une race belge supérieure tout en rabaissant les Sémites, Juifs et Arabes, ainsi que les noirs du Congo au rang d’espèces ignobles. Séduit par ce versant de la rhétorique nationaliste qu’est le naturisme, Eekhoud, à la suite de son célèbre compatriote Camille Lemmonier, adopte les préceptes énoncés par Saint-Georges de Bouhélier et Maurice Le Blond. La terre qui est au cœur de l’œuvre d’Eekhoud est une terre exsangue. Autrefois terre d’abondance et de plénitude, elle n’est plus que le ferment du malheur. C’est la terre de l’émigration, avec la déportation des populations de paysans affamés vers l’Amérique du Sud, une terre trop longtemps travaillée et désormais improductive. C’est la terre aride, ingrate, sur laquelle poussent les pénitenciers, là où l’on met au rebut une jeunesse insoumise. C’est surtout la terre témoin de ce grand bouleversement que provoque l’inexorable urbanisation des campagnes, la poussée toujours plus loin des banlieues interlopes, la dégradation du paysage familier par les usines qui déforment et qui tuent toute une humanité à la dérive. La terre chez Eekhoud est aussi le lieu d’une mémoire associée à la petite enfance. À la mémoire individuelle, faillible, fragmentée, vient se greffer une mémoire collective, tantôt historique tantôt légendaire, qui nourrit le flot de la rêverie, une rêverie volontiers prophétique. En filigrane de l’oeuvre d’Eekhoud se lit l’espoir d’une réincarnation de l’humanité, qui passe par le retour à une terre promise. Nous verrons dans cette communication comment le traitement du thème de la déterritorialisation et de l’errance chez Eekhoud se fait l’écho d’une volonté de subvertir une réalité contraire en plaquant tour à tour sur le réel les images d’un passé collectif national et international, qui à la fois légitiment un enracinement tout patriotique et créent un effet de distorsion et d’éclatement dans lequel la rêverie individuelle—on serait presque tenté de dire communautaire pour cet homosexuel engagé que fut Eekhoud--trouve finalement son compte. La terre des ancêtres dans l’œuvre d’Eekhoud se substitue ainsi au terreau que viennent nourrir les hommes qu’il aime, territoire non pas empreint de souveraineté mais de cosmopolitisme, ouvert à la fois dans l’espace et dans le temps à des horizons qui fondent une race particulière, celle d’un peuple évangélique sensible aux amours homogéniques.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

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Panel I.D: Travel & Adventure (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Bénédicte Monicat (Pennsylvania State University)

Mary Anne Garnett (University of Arkansas, Little Rock), “Conquering the North Pole in Fin-de- siècle Adventure Novels” The search for the North Pole and a Northwest Passage fascinated the French public throughout the nineteenth century even though France played a relatively reduced role in Arctic exploration compared to her British and other rivals. As international competition to reach the North Pole intensified towards the end of the nineteenth-century, French publishers , including Flammarion and Hachette, produced adventure stories that continued to follow yet departed in significant ways from earlier novels epitomized by Jules Verne’s Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1864). In the context of the “scramble for Africa,” France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and anticipation of a new conflict with Germany, these novels appealed to French chauvinism and demonstrated a faith in science and French character to successfully conquer the pole, if only in fiction. My presentation will discuss four of these novels: Louis- Henri Boussenard’s Les Français au pôle nord (1892); Une Française au pôle nord (1893) by Pierre Maël (the pseudonym of Charles Causse and Charles Vincent); Léon Ville’s Au pole nord en ballon (1899); and Un dirigeable au pôle nord (1909) by Émile-Cyprien Driant, writing as “Capitaine Danrit,” published the year that both Cook and Peary claimed to have actually attained the pole. In addition to being “compensatory” fictions for France’s lack of involvement in polar exploration, these novels subvert the theme of the Arctic “sublime” (for example, by the importance of comic elements) that predominated in earlier travel narratives and fiction, particularly British representations. These novels also, it will be shown, served to reinforce conservative, paternalistic concepts of social relations in their treatment of subordinates, whether they be “natives,” crew members, servants, or the women characters who now participate in the polar adventures.

Bettina Lerner (The City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY), “Territories Unknown: Norbert Truquin’s Mémoires et Aventures d'un Prolétaire” By the time Norbert Truquin published his autobiography with the socialist Parisian editor Bouriand in 1888, the one-time canut had traveled from his native Somme to Algeria and then to all the way to Argentina, returning only briefly to France before finally settling in Paraguay in the early 1880s. Only a few years before prior to penning his memoirs, Truquin was still practically illiterate: he did not learn to read or write until well into his forties. Born the child of small-time metallurgist and would-be entrepreneur who went bankrupt before Truquin turned 7, he never attended school and supported himself instead through an unstable series of dead-end jobs: as a wool comber, a stone breaker, as an errand boy to two aging prostitutes and as a silk weaver before the collapse of the silk industry and his participation in the commune of Lyon in 1870 led him to seek a new life in Latin America. It’s thus fair to say that there is only the slightest whiff of salesmanship and exageration in the title he chose for his life story, Les mémoirs et aventures d’un prolétaire. Indeed, Truquin’s adventures narrate a subject formed in and through the experience of displacement and deterritorialization. Historians like Mark Traugott and Michelle Perrot routinely refer to Truquin as a “déraciné,” pointing to his early years as a vagabond and later life as an intrepid traveler as proof of his inability to find his footing on French soil or in French society as it underwent upheaval after upheaval. In this paper, however, I read his memoirs for what they tell us about how Truquin found personal stability and political conviction through movement and travel. I argue that part travelogue, part social manifesto, Truquin’s

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 autobiography contains a profound meditation on and challenge to the Enlightenment universalisms that shaped French ideology throughout the nineteenth century. Looking back on his native France from beyond its national and colonial borders, Truquin critiques the domestication of liberty and equality, showing where these values exceed the world view promoted by the Third Republic.

Michelle Lee (Bowdoin College), “Retracing the Travelogue in Maxime Du Camp’s Egypte, Nubie, Palestine, Syrie” Maxime Du Camp’s photography album Egypte, Nubie, Palestine, Syrie (1852), the first book of calotype prints successfully published in France, was heralded as nothing short of revolutionary. Unlike the earlier modes of representing the world such as the travelogue, painting and lithograph, which depended much more on human intervention, critics at the time celebrated Du Camp’s photographic project for its ability to capture the “precision of reality” and reproduce the Near East in its “true nature.” Yet to insist that the camera guaranteed the album’s supposed “objectivity” is to ignore the larger ways Du Camp’s photography album in fact borrowed from the conventions of these earlier and more subjective forms. In “Re-tracing the Travelogue in Maxime Du Camp’s Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie,” I turn my attention to these precise moments of friction, arguing that far from erasing the author from the album (the hallmark of the album’s supposed objectivity), it is precisely traces of Du Camp’s subjective experience that establishes the photographs’ realism. Moreover, with images of hieroglyphic wall inscriptions, the very goal prompting Du Camp’s commissioned photographic journey, appearing on photographic paper, the album (now literally with words on paper) transforms into a textual book. The theme of “la terre” is central to this presentation project, where I ask: How does Du Camp transform the experience of travel in foregin land from a somatic understanding to a semiotic photographic and then a linguistic, textual one? Spanning these generic borders, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine, Syrie offers insight into how the orientalist photograph played a key role in the development of nineteenth-century realist aesthetics.

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Panel I.E: The Emergence of fin-de-siècle Homosexual Identities at the Intersection of Autobiography and Medicine (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: David Powell (Hofstra University)

Clive Thomson (University of Guelph), “Hérelle’s Correspondence and Investigations into Homosexual Desire” George Hérelle’s unusual intellectual and personal evolution, as evidenced in his reading notes that are contained in his extensive archives from the 1880s, shows that ‘fin de siècle’ medical science was just one sounding board that he used to forge an identity and to theorize homosexual desire. When he set about recording systematically the life stories of his homosexual friends, it was a concrete step in his efforts to establish an archive that would allow future generations a glimpse of the enormous challenges faced by gay men in the 1890s. Hérelle’s voluminous correspondence includes very frank letters to adolescent friends (such as Paul Bourget), hundreds of letters to his sister and parents, professional letters to Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ferdinand Brunetière and to other prominent writers of the period, and letters to directors of libraries. In his diaries, Hérelle describes himself as “timide, un peu sauvage” and obsessed by “la crainte d’être indiscret”. Whereas the main focus of our book, Georges Hérelle: archéologue de l’inversion sexuelle ‘fin de siècle’ (2014), is the way in which Hérelle constructed his archive, the ambition of this paper is to explore a different thread that runs throughout the archive – the narrative and other rhetorical/survival strategies used by Hérelle to tell the story of his life. On the surface, it appears that

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Hérelle just wanted to be seen as “un homme convenable et modeste”, but a deeper look shows that he was capable of assuming, not one, but a wide variety of guises/disguises, depending on his message and his addressee. At the end of his long life, he adhered to a position that was essentially idealistic. Like André Gide, he expressed a profound nostalgia for the kind of love between men that existed in Antiquity. Unlike Gide, however, Hérelle, perhaps remembering the tragic fate of Oscar Wilde and that of other homosexual writers, continued to live in the shadows.

Wannes Dupont (Yale University), “Craving Arcadians: Bucolism, Cross-Class Desire, and Homosexual Identity in the fin de siècle” Court records from late nineteenth-century archives in Brussels offer plenty of examples of how middle- and upper-class men cruised the streets in search of sex with adolescent working-class boys. This risky undertaking often served more than the satisfaction of a physical urge. The bourgeois homosexual who anxiously struggled to preserve an aura of social respectability envied and idealized these street urchins for their raw sensuality, undiluted and uncurbed as it was by the suffocating restraints of propriety. To white-collar gay men, such ‘roughs’ served as the focal point of the frustrated desire for a life in which such open sexual self-expression would not imply social suicide. The homosexual novelist, Georges Eekhoud, rhapsodized over the rugged masculinity, the unapologetic intemperance, and the primitive simplicity of rustics and riff-raff. Both in his works and in his daily life, Eekhoud’s yearning for those Arcadians who moved everywhere around him, but always remained painfully out of reach, were key to his sense of self: that is, a homosexual identity deeply rooted in suffering, isolation, and strong feelings of resentment towards the unforgiving heteronormativity of ‘good’ society. Intellectual ‘inverts’ like Eekhoud turned to science for their redemption and used medical concepts to develop a narrative of oppression and injustice around the homosexual condition. Drawing on a wide array of sources, including Eekhoud’s diary, this paper will show how Eekhoud found resonance and consolation in the autobiographical accounts of other homosexuals that were published in psychiatric literature. The shared sense of hardship encouraged him to structure his life, identity, and literary activism around the yearning for a pastoral inversion of the world he inhabited: one in which interclass, intergenerational, and same- sex relations constituted the norm.

Michael Rosenfeld (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3/Université Catholique de Louvain), “Autobiographies of French Homosexuals from the Zola and Saint-Paul Family Archives” Our recent archival research has lead to the discovery of letters that were addressed to novelists and medical doctors by young homosexual men. In the closing years of the 19th century, these "confessions" were, in fact, a mainstay of case studies on sexuality. The doctors’ primary aim was to make the case material conform to the medical theory being developed and censored versions of the letters were included as illustrations of the theory. Through our study of these original documents, we are able both to observe the controlling role of the doctor and to appreciate the raw value of the letters. Our conference paper will focus on an important document that was believed to have been lost – the original manuscript of the long autobiographical letter sent to Emile Zola in 1889, by a 23-year-old homosexual Italian aristocrat. Zola used this document to construct homosexual characters in two of his novels, La Débâcle (1892) and Paris (1898). Zola gave the manuscript of the letter to a young army doctor, Georges Saint- Paul, who published an extract from it in his 1896 book, Perversion et Perversité, with a preface by Zola. The Italian aristocrat read Saint-Paul's book and, in September 1896, wrote a response, part of which Saint-Paul publishes in his 1910 edition of the same book. This response (16,000 words) is a treasure trove of personal details related to the family of the Italian aristocrat and to gay life in upper-class Italian and European society. Our paper will also focus on our recent, important discovery of the Saint-Paul family

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 archives which include a cosmopolitan mix of letters from several homosexual men. The letters reveal the harsh realities of homosexual life at the turn of the 20th century. Our analysis of these autobiographical documents will emphasize their intertextual dimension, that is, their intersections with medical and literary discourses.

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Panel I.F: Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet I (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Andrea Goulet (University of Pennsylvania)

Andrew Stafford (Lycoming College), “‘Roses are red, genders are new’: Harvesting Gender Identity in Bouvard et Pécuchet” Gardening is the first of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s many endeavors in Flaubert’s eponymously titled unfinished final literary venture. As with all of the duo’s experiments, the exhibition of their finished garden results in catastrophe, inciting fear in those invited to witness its unveiling. Bouvard and Pécuchet’s garden is encumbered with socio-symbolic meaning, reflecting the exotic novelty of their chosen horticulture and the differing mentalities between the Parisian pair and their provincial neighbors. I, however, would like to offer an alternative reading of both the gardening practice and its reception. The cultivation of their garden, I argue, parallels a process enacted by many of Flaubert’s characters in the creation of their textual gender identities. Similar to the author’s own creative process, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s gardening venture suggests nonlinear progression. Indeed, the pair’s approach to the horticultural process is one marked by countless failures, unexpected setbacks, and ultimate disapproval from social opinion. In this paper I will explore this inconsistent path to the completion of their garden as an elaboration of new ways to read gender in literature. Like the garden, gender identity is also presented as a creative endeavor, subject to the same failures as any other artistic practice. In spite of these failures and setbacks, however, there is an undeniable textual progression nourished by Bouvard and Pécuchet’s various experiments. I contend that Flaubert, through the characters of Bouvard and Pécuchet, underscores the creative potential of even failed experimentation. Although ultimately rejected by society, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s garden exposes an important dimension of gender identity as both a creative and experimental process.

Jacques Neefs (Johns Hopkins University), “Les terres de Bouvard et Pécuchet” « Ce qui les ébahit par-dessus tout, c'est que la terre comme élément n'existe pas. » : au cours de leur apprentissage de la chimie, Bouvard et Pécuchet découvrent ainsi un objet d’étonnement et de trouble épistémologique. La dimension « encyclopédique » du roman implique la multiplication des interrogations sur les composantes du monde, des mondes, et tout particulièrement sur ce qu’est « la terre » : celle sur laquelle on marche, et où l’on se perd, celle dont on est « propriétaire » pour la cultiver (les expériences agronomiques sont particulièrement précises), mais aussi cette « terre » de la géologie dont l’histoire est vertigineuse : « Devant un paysage, ils n'admiraient ni la série des plans, ni la profondeur des lointains, ni les ondulations de la verdure, mais ce qu'on ne voyait pas, le dessous, la terre ; — et toutes les collines étaient pour eux “encore une preuve du Déluge” » ; ou cette terre de la cosmologie, qui peut disparaître : « Cependant le feu central diminue et le soleil s'affaiblit, si bien que la Terre un jour périra de refroidissement. D’abord elle deviendra stérile ; tout le bois et toute la houille se seront convertis en acide carbonique — et aucun être ne pourra subsister. » Nous suivrons dans le roman de Flaubert ces variations sur « la terre », qui toutes renvoient à la fois à des thématiques prépondérantes du siècle, et à un comique philosophique qui revient toujours à la question du « sol » incertain des certitudes et des savoirs.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Patrick Bray (Ohio State University), “Cultivated Readers, Deterritorialized Copyists: The Stakes of Reading in Bouvard et Pécuchet” While literary critics have focused on the figure of Emma Bovary as emblematic of the supposed dangers of reading, I propose to look at Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet as a novel about the formation, or deformation, of a good reader. At the start of their retirement to the Calvados, Flaubert's idiot copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet take up agriculture and leave behind their books in Paris, following the opposite path of Emma Bovary. Quickly, however, they seek the help and inspiration of books as their agricultural experiments fail. The case of agriculture, and then of gardening, sets the pattern for the rest of the novel, as Bouvard and Pécuchet, unable to root themselves in a countryside not their own, continually fail to align discourse with reality. But this narrative of failure masks a success story: failing to cultivate plants, animals, or other people, they nevertheless cultivate themselves as readers. They develop taste, discernment, and a sense of humor. Their much studied "return to copying" in the unfinished second volume does not correspond to the blind occupation of copying from the beginning of the novel, but rather amounts to a refusal to reproduce faithfully other texts. They select, analyze, juxtapose, and highlight tics of language, unconscious idiocies, the mechanical nature of language Bergson would later identify in Le Rire. In short, they become the ideal readers of their own book – but what happens to us, the actual readers of their book? In our current moment of institutional interdisciplinarity, when literary scholars are asked to read across and not against disciplines, what would happen if we were to behave like Bouvard and Pécuchet, as uncultivated, undisciplined readers?

Luke Bouvier (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “The Semiotic Alchemy of la terre in Bouvard et Pécuchet” When Bouvard and Pécuchet discover that “La terre, comme élément, n'existe pas,” their astonishment ironically points up to what extent la terre looms large in Flaubert's novel as a foil for their zealously misguided search for knowledge. Utopic dreamscape turned dystopic wasteland, intellectual proving and dumping ground, semiotic and financial sinkhole, artistic canvas, scientific compost heap, intractable materiality that resists the projection and imposition of meaning, the elusive “real” that persistently thwarts the desire to master it, understand it, and act upon it, la terre serves as corrective and counter-argument, deflator of the pretensions of human stupidity, mute judge that renders an irrevocable verdict on Bouvard and Pécuchet's experimentation and logical reasoning. In this paper, I trace the role of la terre in Bouvard and Pécuchet's theorizing and “fieldwork” in agriculture, gardening, geology, archeology and other areas of practical and theoretical knowledge, focusing on the strange reverse alchemy that it effects, transforming gold – both intellectual and monetary – into base substances, and coherent systems of thought into disorder, chaos, and incongruity. The work of semiotic decomposition carried out by la terre, like the inscrutable “pourriture instantanée des choses” that Madame Bovary finds undermining her search for meaning, ultimately serves as a reflection on method, as an underlying principle of composition that distills the signifying waste produced by the encounter with a recalcitrant material world and recycles it as art. In this regard, the (de)compositional action of la terre figures as part of a larger consideration of the material object in Flaubert's work and its role in the resistance to meaning, in particular as concerns the breaking down of the signifying coherence of realist description.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Thursday, October 27, 2016 Session II: 1:45pm - 3:15pm

Panel II.A: Baudelaire (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Seth Whidden (Oxford University)

Scott Carpenter (Carleton College), “Does Baudelaire Matter?” What does it mean to select La Terre as a theme for the 2016 NCFS Colloquium? For one thing, it marks a departure from our long tradition of ampersands—Fossilization & Evolution (2009), Theories & Methods (2010), Law & Order (2011), Feast & Famine (2012), Thresholds & Horizons (2013), Fuite & Évasion (2014)—and even from the implied duality of last year’s interpenetrational Contamination. In contrast, La Terre is a sturdy theme, a return to earth evoking all that is solid, gritty, natural, fertile, original, authentic, material—indeed, all that is human (by way of humus, soil). And for once we have selected a conference title the general public might plausibly understand— and perhaps even care about. Indeed, in an era identified with disappearing natural resources and worldwide climate change, a conference on La Terre might almost be deemed “relevant.” In short, this year’s conference blends, wittingly or not, with a general desire and a growing need to demonstrate the pertinence of a field (our own) associated with dusty and indecipherable literariness. The goal of this paper is to engage critically with the question of the relevance of nineteen-century French studies: Does our work matter? To ground my discussion, I will use the least earthy example I can dig up: not just a literary work, but a piece of poetry of a marginal sort (one that partakes of prose), written by an author well known for eschewing the earth in favor of asphalt, for always having his head in the clouds, and for never coming to the point: “Laquelle est la vraie?” by Charles Baudelaire.

Kevin Newmark (Boston College), “Baudelaire's Providence: ‘Les Sept Vieillards’” Three of the most important poems in the Tableaux parisiens section of Les Fleurs du Mal are based on unexpected but momentous encounters that are recounted and reflected upon retrospectively by the lyric subject: “Le Cygne,” “A une passante,” and “Les sept vieillards.” All three poems can be read as prime examples of a poetry of modernity in the sense which Walter Benjamin has given the term. The experience at issue contains an element of “shock,” since the encounter in each case befalls the lyric subject with unpredictable force, and it has far-reaching effects on the capacity of the poetic I to integrate the experience into a coherent pattern of consciousness after the fact. But once we consider more closely the pattern shared by the three poems, significant differences begin to emerge. On a thematic level, both “A une passante” and “Le Cygne” can be regarded as rather traditional in terms of subject matter. One is personal in nature; it is a love poem—even if it comes with a twist. The other develops a chance meeting with a captive bird into a far-reaching reflection on history as a process of loss and exile. Also of note is the way these two poems treat singularity and plurality. “A une passante” concerns the uniqueness of a single woman, while “Le Cygne” gradually expands a meditation until it stretches to infinity: “...à bien d’autres encor!” There is of course a clear difference in the grammatical temporality of the two poems: “Le Cygne” is narrated in the present tense (albeit as a recollection of past events), while “A une passante” begins with the past tense and ends by addressing the disappeared woman in the present with a question about an unknowable future. “Les sept vieillards,” on the other hand, stands out from the other two texts in a number of significant respects. By comparison to a poem about love at first sight—or last sight—or to a poem about a general philosophy of history conceived as loss, “Les sept vieillards” is very difficult to characterize in

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 terms of anything special at all. It is perhaps its very ordinariness—its thoroughly prosaic nature—that gives the poem its uncanny, other-worldly charge. Neither about a single individual (the one in the erotic phantasy of the lyric I), nor about an infinity of particular examples (gathered into a universal meaning of history), “Les sept vieillards” disturbs the lyric subject by confronting it with a kind of “multiplication” that does not “add up” to anything remotely meaningful. My paper will suggest that the truly distinctive feature of “Les sept vieillards” is the way the lyric subject here encounters not another body—human or animal, woman or swan—but rather a spectral undoing of the body as a stable basis—solid ground, terra firma, terre solide—for experience and knowledge. By the same token, even those points of reference that seem to remain secure in poems like “Le Cygne” and “A une passante”—day/night, past/present/future, sensible/intelligible, perception/memory, stasis/motion, self/other—will undergo a radically unsettling alteration in “Les sept vieillards.”

Elissa Marder (Emory University), “Hell on Earth: Baudelaire’s Cigars” In several pivotal moments in La Comédie humaine, references to tobacco expose how the material conditions of colonialism and the slave trade undergird the erotic fantasies that populate the imagination of some of Balzac’s memorable characters. In one of strangest moments in Le Père Goriot, for example, Vautrin attempts to entice Eugène de Rastignac into becoming his accomplice in a murder in Paris so that he can live out his pipe-dream of becoming a slave-owning plantation tobacco farmer in America. In Vautrin’s fantasy, his slaves will be like children and tobacco, two forms of “capital noir” that will simultaneously make him rich and give him pleasure. Similarly, laboring under the false impression that he has successfully seduced and conquered “la fille aux yeux d’or,” Paquita Valdès, Henri de Marsay strolls out into the Parisian morning delighting in the thought that he can trade in the passing pleasure procured from his creole mistress for the enduring delights of a Havana cigar: “La bonne chose qu’un cigare! Voilà ce dont un homme ne se lassera jamais, se dit-il.” Baudelaire was apparently particularly taken with Balzac’s cigars. A reference to De Marsay’s cigar from La Fille aux yeux d’or shows up in the following description of Samuel Cramer in La Farfarlo: “Cependant, il ne s’ennuya jamais d’elle; jamais, en quittant son réduit amoureux, piétinant lestement sur un trottoir, à l’air frais du matin, il n’éprouva cette jouissance égoïste du cigare et des mains dans les poches, dont parle quelque part notre grand romancier moderne.” Cigars —initially imported from Balzac—figure prominently in many of Baudelaire’s prose writings. In contrast to Balzac’s references to tobacco, which remain more or less rooted in a recognizable material history, Baudelaire’s cigars are explosive delivery devices for a form of modern desire that Baudelaire has called “criminelle jouissance.” Some of the cigars are actually function as explosives. A cigar lights the exploding fuse in “Le Mauvais vitrier,” for example. In Baudelaire’s cosmology, cigar smoke opens up secret passages between the world of the living and the dead. In “Le Tir et le cimetière,” seduced by a peculiar emblem into stopping at an “Estaminet” to smoke a cigar and drink a glass of beer, the narrator finds himself drawn into a cemetery : Et il entra, but un verre de bière en face des tombes, et fuma lentement un cigare. Puis, la fantaisie le prit de descendre dans ce cimetière, dont l’herbe était si haute et si invitante et où regnait un si riche soleil. Seemingly conjured up by the cigar smoke, voices of the living dead rise out of the tombs and recount the horrors of their existence. In this paper, I propose to show how Baudelaire’s cigars are central to his perverse cosmology. Active agents of devils’ work, cigars expose the material underpinnings of modern life as hell on earth.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

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Panel II.B: Mining (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Sara Phenix (Brigham Young University)

Margot Irvine (University of Guelph), “Recovering Les Ensevelis (1887)” Mme George de Peyrebrune (1841-1917)’s novel Les Ensevelis (1887) will be republished in 2017 for the first time since 1918 as one in a series of events to mark the centenary of her death. This novel recounts the collapse of the Chancelade quarry on October 25th 1885. Peyrebrune had a residence in Meulières, very near Chancelade, and was immediately affected by the disaster and its aftermath. Together with the quarry workers, she tried to enlist the authorities to rescue the men trapped in the underground galleries by publishing articles in local and national papers (République française, Avenir de la Dordogne). In response to this campaign those authorities accused her of having a “Parisian” understanding of the facts, of becoming overly emotional, and “vouloir faire du roman”. Peyrebrune did, ultimately, decide that a novel was the most fitting tribute to the lost workers. Published just two years after Germinal, the images associated with the quarry in Les Ensevelis clearly evoke Zola’s animistic descriptions of le Voreux (« [les ouvriers] foulaient le crane de ce monstre au ventre vide qui menaçait de les engloutir », 95). The research Peyrebrune undertook to prepare this novel: assembling an extensive dossier préparatoire based on her visits to the site, interviews with the workers and their families, and gathering press clippings, also show her following a démarche naturaliste. Peyrebrune understood that the dismissal of her initial response to the catastrophe was marked by gender prejudice. This paper will argue that her reaction was to take a more “masculine” position in her novel by associating it with naturalism.

Shiloh Stone (University of Minnesota), “Mining Hope: Forging Community in the Depths of the Earth” The mining industry became prominent in the public psyche during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. The need for coal and iron ore to power the marketplace required an increase in the production of mining operations. Mining flourished and prospered in new and exciting ways. The rapid and intensified excavation of the earth heightened the risk of injury or death to the miners who carried out the laborious work of extracting the earth’s minerals. As a result, mining accidents began to proliferate and became a public spectacle. Images of mining accidents transformed the mining narrative as they were consumed by a public eager to delve into the mysterious darkness of the mine. Mining accidents in this era more often than not ended in tragedy. Tragedy often breeds solidarity and in no case is this statement truer than in the mining communities impacted by the injury or death of a miner. Each mining accident produced trauma for the entire community. The call for mine rescue brought the townspeople to the mine’s edge awaiting word on the condition of their loved ones. This collective body shared a solidarity because of the never-ending wait for the ensuing tragedy. I will examine community through the mining narrative of two interrelated texts separated by roughly two decades in nineteenth-century France. The first text was written by Louis Simonin in 1867 and examines the history of mining from the perspective of a miner. The second text, Germinal, written by Emile Zola in 1885, was inspired by Simonin’s poetic depiction of the mining world. Zola transforms Simonin’s history into a fictional novel that reconstructs the mining narrative in late nineteenth-century France. I will use these two texts to demonstrate how a shared sense of tragedy engenders hope in a mining community.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Kathryne Corbin (Haverford College), “Reporting from the ‘Entrails of the Earth’: Séverine’s Descent into Le Pays noir” As private secretary to Jules Vallès, Séverine quickly absorbed through first-hand experience Vallès’s innovative reportage based on the “chose vue,” and the role of empathy, emotion, and sensualism for the journalist. As Vallès had done with his “Lettres de province: Au Fond d’une mine” for Le Figaro in 1866, Séverine descended into the mines of Saint Etienne for Le Gaulois in 1890. As the first parisienne to visit the mines just hours after an explosion, Séverine’s motivation (publicity aside) was to “dire, en toute vérité, aux lecteurs du Gaulois quelle est la vie et quelle est la mort des pauvres gens de là-bas” (Séverine). Her series of articles, printed under the headline Au Pays noir, chronicles Mother Nature’s vengeance on industrialization and underscores man’s bond to the earth by illustrating the lives of the living dead who toiled underground to provide for their fellow citizens. During her investigation, Séverine literally becomes the bodily representative of the disenfranchised people. We are one with her body and the earth, crawling through the mole hole of a miner, coal dust penetrating the lungs, eyes, and ears and impairing the senses. Because we cannot be present in the depths of this “hell” on earth, Séverine uses her body as a proxy for the people, her journalistic gaze unifying the experience for everyone (Muhlmann 36), bringing the singular experience to all in the spirit of democracy. In this paper, I will examine Séverine’s representation of the mining community in respect to the democratic gesture that is a foundational aspect of grand reportage. The reporter is motivated by news and aims to serve the people, so she must identify with them through a unifying gaze and also be representative of them and of democratic inclusiveness (Thérenty 295), an extraordinary position for a woman in 1890s France. Through her journalistic poetic and position as “witness ambassador” (Muhlmann 6), Séverine transgressed the traditional role held by most nineteenth- century women journalists and instead inserted herself squarely into the public eye, a move that exposed social injustices and led to a greater understanding of the effects of industrialization and the evolution of modern investigative reporting.

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Panel II.C: The French Countryside in Turn-of-the-Century Painting and Cinema (Salon 2) Chair: Grant Wiedenfeld (Sam Houston State University)

Marika Knowles (Harvard Society of Fellows), “Naturalist Film, Symbolist Landscape: André Antoine’s L’Arlésienne” This paper asks how André Antoine’s film L’Arlésienne (1922) complicates Naturalism by borrowing imagery from painters who used the French terre as a vehicle for early modes of Symbolism and Expressionism L’Arlésienne, a feature-length silent film, tells the story of a well-to-do young farmer who has fallen in love with a mysterious woman, the ‘Arlésienne’ of the film’s title. Shot on location in the South of France, this tragic love story unfolds against a landscape of sun-drenched wheat fields, dotted with figures clothed in the region’s picturesque local costume. As an influential director of theater in late nineteenth-century Paris, Antoine had promoted a ‘jeu naturel,’ a style of acting that rejected traditional declamation and attempted to recreate the small, inconsequential gestures of everyday experience. The conditions of silent film, however, forced him to relax his requirements, and the acting style in L’Arlésienne is markedly histrionic. The ‘natural’ does emerge in Antoine’s film through the extensive landscape imagery, which firmly locates the melodrama in an agrarian paradise of plenty. Surprisingly, the Naturalist Antoine borrows much of his pictorial

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 imagery from the painted repertoire of Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, who pioneered an early style of Post-Impressionism while living and painting together in Arles and its surrounding countryside in the late 1880s. Antoine’s references to the landscapes and character studies of Van Gogh and Gauguin reveal the significance of these late nineteenth-century painters to early twentieth-century ways of visualizing of the French countryside. Yet Van Gogh and Gauguin did not offer a ‘naturalist’ vision of the countryside; rather, they experimented with ways of making the landscape into an expression of personal sentiment. Analysis of L’Arlésienne points to three shifts in the meaning of Naturalism: the adaptation of naturalist aesthetics to silent film, the ‘naturalizing’ of the Symbolist landscape through the filmic medium, and the enduring legacy of nineteenth-century visions of Provence. The French countryside as subject facilitates comparison among different periods and media.

Grant Wiedenfeld (Sam Houston State University), “Voyage à travers le paysage français: Comic Tableaux in Two Grand Méliès Films” Film historians have divided early cinema spectacle into actualities and trick films (trucages), two categories that correspond to Naturalism and Symbolism. Lumière films exemplify the reality effect of the Cinematograph, especially the legend of spectators who jumped aside from The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896). Meanwhile Méliès films perform special effects in the fantastical mode of a magician. However, comparing landscapes in Lumière and Méliès softens that binary distinction and reveals an unexpected similarity among them. Scale, this paper claims, offered a distinct avenue of spectacle in early cinema that was unique within the visual arts. This study analyzes the use of scale in several French films to establish a new perspective on our understanding of early cinema and turn-of-the-century spectacle. It concentrates on the variation of scale in two kinds of landscape. First, the motion from far to near (or vice-versa) was a specifically cinematic attraction shared by the Lumière train, by the famous tracking shot in A Trip to the Moon, and by other lesser-known films. Second, Georges Méliès discovered a way to play with scale laterally in a film produced for the Folies Bergère, An Adventurous Automobile Trip (1904). The action comedy includes an animated shot of a car traversing the Jura mountains, using a “side scroll” technique now common in video games. It simulates motion of the viewer using a different effect of scale. Detailed examination of landscape depth and panorama in these films affords a perspective on early cinema that differs from the literary categories of realism and fantasy, or Naturalism and Symbolism, by suggesting a form of spectacle common to both.

Brett Brehm (Amherst College), “Manet’s River” Images of unpeopled natural landscapes are scarce in Édouard Manet's oeuvre. In 1874, however, Manet completed a series of eight etchings to accompany publication of his friend Charles Cros's extended poem "Le fleuve." As a series, the etchings illustrate both continuity and a certain divide between untrammelled nature and modern industry, between country and city. The first few images in the series, furthermore, represent perhaps Manet's most intimate portrayals of a certain timelessness in nature. And yet, these remarkable etchings by Manet of animals and natural settings have rarely been considered by scholars. In this paper I will demonstrate how this series of etchings offers us a singular means of assesing Manet's perspective on the natural world. While my emphasis for this paper will be on the etchings, I will also comment on the collaboration between Cros and Manet, between poet and painter. We can conceive of the collaboration (and the publication it produced) both as a dialogue of sorts between text and image and as two distinctive perspectives on changes to the relation between rural and urban ways of life in nineteenth-century France. This paper is drawn from my current research on the friendship between Cros and Manet and their artistic collaborations.

Marshall Olds (Michigan State University), Respondent

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

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Panel II.D: Rural Uprisings (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Dean de la Motte (Salve Regina University)

Sarah Bernthal (Independent scholar), “Peasantry and Political Consciousness in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-Treize” In Hugo’s final novel, three powerful men—a former priest, an aristocrat, and a soldier—return to Brittany, attempting to control its territory and ideology. Two are dispatched from Paris to quell the revolt, another from England to fan the flames of rebellion. Along the way, they and the French Revolutionary Army fall into communication and miscommunication with the Breton peasantry, and the question arises: what does Brittany have to say to Paris? As Suzanne Guerlac shows in “Exorbitant Geometry,” these men form a triangle of oppositions, interactions, and doublings. Set apart from this masculine symmetry is the Breton peasant, Michelle Fléchard. Discovered by the Revolutionary Army, she is a “paroissienne” among Parisians. We are led to see her as naive and uncivilized, bestial yet superhuman in her maternal devotion. Her unexpected appearance catalyzes a melodramatic series of events that leads to the death of Gauvain, romantic hero par excellence. Yet despite her pivotal role, Fléchard is whisked away before the novel ends, her fate unknown. Fléchard’s meanderings between two waring factions illustrate the cost of political violence. She galvanizes the novel’s male characters as they attempt to interrogate, protect, console, and kill her. As she acts, others react to her. And yet the narrator expresses doubt as to whether Fléchard possesses any kind of political awareness. Is she enlightened by her suffering, or does she exist as maternal instinct, a force of nature? I propose to answer this question by reading Fléchard as the novel’s alternate Romantic hero, a female parallel to the effeminate Gauvain.

Mary Rice-DeFosse (Bates College), “The Revolution in Rural France in Sand and Hugo” Victor Hugo and George Sand each wrote on revolution in France in a variety of genres, notably in works that foreground revolution in the French capital like Horace (1842) and Les Misérables (1862). However each author, at the end of a long career and in the aftermath of the Commune, chose to turn to rural France to represent the revolution of 1789. Hugo, in Quarevingt-treize (1874), contrasts the values of revolutionary Paris with those of the provinces, where the traditions of the Ancien Régime persist as civil war rages in the countryside. His setting, the Vendée at the height of the civil war, allows the writer to explore the landscape and character of la France profonde, notably in long descriptions of the Vendée in the third part of the novel and in the reactions of rural peasants to the events of ’93. George Sand, for her part, set her novel Nanon (1871) in her native Berry as well as in the Creuse, one of the 83 departments created by the revolution (corresponding to the former county of La Marche). In Nanon, Sand traces the impact of the revolution of 1789 on life in the provinces through the first-person narrative of a young peasant girl. The protagonist’s travels through the rural heartland of France at the height of 1793, like Hugo’s representation of the civil war in the Vendée, underscore the difference between Paris and the provinces and suggest a vision of the French Republic dependent as much on the countryside as on the capital. There are numerous studies that consider the political significance of the rural environment in each of the novels in question, but scholars have rarely compared them. This paper juxtaposes the two texts in order to explore the writers’ responses to revolution and civil war. It compares their representation of the impact of the revolution in rural France, the distinctive points of view of peasant characters, and the significance of their depictions of the rural landscape.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Robert Daniel (Saint Joseph’s University), “Ourliac’s Contes du Bocage (1843): History, Culture, Character, Polemics” In the twentieth century, the Vendée proved to be a notable symbol and a fertile terrain for ideological conflict -- before, during and after the celebration of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. Indeed, the place of the Vendée in French memory has become a fault line. Tension over the the region’s history has raised questions of ethics, of national character, of the riskiness of political conflict, of the significance of national memorializing, veering toward recrimination and indictment. In a number of works, most notably his 1985 thèse de doctorat d’état and his 2011 Vendée: Du génocide au mémoricide, Reynald Sécher evokes genocide and programmatic suppression of cultural memory. His characterization of the Vendée as a genocidal victim was contested by Jean-Martin Clément, for whom the 1793-1796 civil war was a more complex and nuanced affair. Polemical exchanges over the meaning of the Vendée continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. The text that I propose to comment on is an early instantiation of literary-fictional discourse about the Wars of the Vendée. When in 1843 Waille published Ourliac’s Contes du Bocage, précédés d’un tableau historique des premières guerres de la Vendée, the book does not seem to have been intended -- or received -- as a salvo in a Culture War. Indeed, the collection of stories was reviewed by one of the most vehement Catholic polemicists of the time, Louis Veuillot, as little more than an aesthetic object. The volume seems to have been understood as a heartfelt narrative about tragic events and about individual and collective character, rooted in tradition and regional specificity. Even though Veuillot did not exploit it as such in the 1840s, he eventually came read it as a contestation of Republican values and a condemnation of a progressively secularizing France. This modulation prefigures the controversies of the 1980s and 1990s.

Paul Young (Georgetown University), “Terre et Terreur: The Phantasmagorical Poetics of Les Chouans” “La terre” occupies a central place in the first novel that Balzac published in his own name, Les Chouans, ou la Bretagne en 1799 (1829). Through its title, Balzac evokes the bloody struggle between the Chouans and the Republican army in the final months of the Revolution and the beginning of Napoléon’s Consulate. At stake in this combat over a small piece of land is control of Brittany, and, more importantly, France’s future identity. The novel’s central characters (the marquis de Montauran and Marie de Verneuil) offer reflections on France’s past, present, and future, as they navigate a countryside whose very landscape seems hostile. For Marie de Verneuil, especially, the Breton landscape becomes associated with terror. However, in Les Chouans, terror seems to be widespread, and manifests itself in an almost uncanny manner. In this novel, both Montauran and Verneuil appear at times as ghostly doubles: Verneuil as she is mistaken for a recently killed Chouan (whom other Chouans believe has risen from the dead), and Montauran, as Hulot and Verneuil ask him if he has adopted a dead man’s identity. Throughout this text, Balzac uses a vocabulary of ghosts, dreams, trances, moonlit landscapes, and unnatural occurrences to evoke the bloody and chaotic events of 1799. In this paper, I examine the role of the phantasmagoria in Balzac’s writing of Les Chouans. Drawing on work by Andrea Goulet, Terry Castle, and studies of eighteenth-century magic lantern shows, I argue that Balzac, faced with writing the events of the recent past, chooses to describe them with expressions borrowed from the phantasmagorical spectacles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Les Chouans, Balzac appears to reach a kind of epistemological and ideological impasse, and chooses to transform history into a kind of magic lantern show, offering the reader an experience of the uncanny and the spectacular, while displaying and containing the terror he evokes. An analysis of Balzac’s

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 use of the phantasmagoria in this, his first novel, allows us to deepen our understanding of these ideas in his later work.

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Panel II.E: Anticipating the Anthropocene (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Atticus Doherty (Brown University)

Cassandra Hamrick (Saint Louis University), “Gautier and the Ecological Challenge” Wai Chee Dimock, who recently became editor of PMLA, recently wrote that “literary studies can do much to meet the demands of the twenty-first century”, mentioning in particular the unprecedented challenge of climate change, which invites us to be inventive in our response (MLA Newsletter, Spring 2016). Théophile Gautier, a figure typically associated with the concept of l’art pour l’art, is a case in point. A close reading of texts by the writer reveals another, very different dimension: a profound consciousness of the interconnections of la terre and climatic or environmental questions. Beyond the lieux communs associated with Nature in the case of the early Romantic writers, the vision of Nature as a self-sufficient entity whose diverse and powerful components are in equilibrium is detected in Gautier’s poetic expression, his art criticism and his prose writings. Young paysagistes who revolted against the lifeless paysage historique are praised for capturing Nature’s “sévères beautés ... que ‘du livre de Dieu la main de l’homme efface’”. The ever-present life found in a natural environment, “la sève forte et généreuse de la terre” and its struggle against the intrusion of “l’homme mal élevé et barbare fou”, is at the center of his preoccupations in La Nature chez elle” (1870). In his newspaper series, Les Vacances du lundi (1866), “une divine beauté” envelops the “formes harmonieuses et nobles”, a reminder that la terre is, in fact a planet whose original star-like qualities have largely disappeared leaving visible only “la plaine déformée et défigurée par le travail de l’homme”. While Baudelaire, whose earlier thought reflected a sense of the fundamental unity and harmony of Nature, moves toward what has been perceived as a more modern position that favors the artificial over the natural, Gautier continues to adhere to a pantheist-grounded vision of Nature as a network of interconnected elements composing “le grand Tout”. Paradoxically, it is perhaps Gautier who moves closer to a modern position by remaining “un vieux romantique”.

Christy Wampole (Princeton University), “Our Vegetal Fear” In 19th-century France, a period of urban encroachment into vegetal territory, a preemptive fear of vegetal revenge manifested itself in the literary consciousness of the age. From Zola to Huysmans, from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, poets and novelists looked with uneasiness toward the places where plants lurked, waiting for a future in which they might erase the architecture and accomplishments of the nation: the Jardin des plantes, in parks and woods scattered across Paris, or at the periphery of the city. Would Paris, capital of the 19th century, be swallowed under green and slow growth, like the ruins of the Greeks or the Romans? Perhaps the botanical undulations of Art nouveau, which filled interiors and served as gatekeepers to the subterranean world at metro entrances, were meant as surrogates to real plant life, masking the fact that new habitats were anything but natural. Before the development of ecology, before the concept of the anthropocene or vegetal democracy – a new term in postmetaphysical philosophy – French writers of the 19th century had already begun to anticipate life after the death of the nation when plants would reclaim their rightful property. Factory smokestacks along the horizon were only place holders for forests that would eventually replace them.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

This paper begins in the present, with a variety of examples of this inherited vegetal fear – such as the last scene in Houellebecq’s La Carte et le territoire in which thick vegetation creeps up to cover old cell phones, keyboards, and the digital detritus of our age – and then moves backward to show the ways in which this is a direct legacy of the 19th-century.

Daryl Lee (Brigham Young University), “Catachronism and the roman d’anticipation” Representations of 19th-century Paris in ruins took into account ecological factors in the city’s demise. This is the case in several futuristic novels that depict the rediscovery of the dead city thousands of years in the future as if an archeological ruin. While not prophetic, the ecological dimension of these tales becomes pertinent today through the debate surrounding the “Anthropocene,” the tentatively proposed geological epoch according to which anthropogenic activity has set in motion a dangerous and irreversible course of catastrophic change for the earth. I propose to reread these texts through Aravamudan's notion of “catachronism,” a catastrophic determinism shaped by climate change, here applied to this moment of apocalyptic futures in which the exceptionalism of Benjamin’s “capital of the 19th century” also figures centrally by turning Paris into the Anthropocene’s capital city.

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Panel II.F: Plots and Property (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Barbara Cooper (University of New Hampshire)

William Paulson (University of Michigan), “Terre et temporalité chez Paul-Louis Courier" Auteur mal aimé (et peu vendu) de la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paul-Louis Courier (1772-1825) est aujourd’hui peut-être mieux connu comme victime d’un assassinat que comme pamphlétaire libéral de la Restauration. Défenseur de la petite propriété, de l’exploitation industrieuse de la terre pour le bénéfice du plus grand nombre, il rassemble, dans la plupart de ses écrits, des arguments assez prévisibles qui ne mériteraient à nos jours qu’un minimum d’attention. Mais dans les Lettres au rédacteur du “Censeur” (1819-1820) on trouve non seulement une dénonciation quasi-benjaminienne des héritages culturels, mais aussi et surtout une description (fictive) d’une nouvelle forme d’imprimerie qui, de fait, semble annoncer les réseaux sociaux et même Wikileaks. Partisan avant la lettre de ce l’on a désormais coutume d’appeler présentisme, Courier n’en analyse pas les dangers, mais il a pourtant averti que “le dernier degré de bassesse n’est pas connu….”

Daniel Desormeaux (University of Chicago), “La plantation n’est pas la terre : rêveries et cartographies coloniales” Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763-1813), abolitionniste français, girondin, député de Saint-Domingue, ancien avocat au Parlement de Paris, avait décrété dès 1790 "Les terres de St-Domingue doivent appartenir aux noirs, ils les ont acquises à la sueur de leur front", sans avoir jamais mis les pieds dans cette colonie. Un peu comme Victor Hugo, dans Bug Jargal, qui arpentera en imagination les contours d’une terre en révolution, l’homme de loi n’avait aucune connaissance concrète du territoire. Et quand plus tard il est commissionné officiellement par la Convention pour tranquilliser la colonie en rébellion contre la métropole, il comprend que le territoire colonial, vu de près, est autre chose que ce que l’on à l’habitude de croire de la simple possession d’une terre : il décréta même unilatéralement en 1793 l’abolition de l’esclavage et la distribution du revenu des propriétés qui risquaient de tomber sous le contrôle des autres grandes puissances comme l’Espagne et l’Angleterre. Jusqu’au début du XIXe siècle, un colon planteur ne voit rien de la terre conquise mais parle beaucoup de la plantation qu’il faut sauvegarder. Pourquoi la

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 plantation n’est pas la terre? Comment des militaires, des commissaires civils et même des anciens esclaves ont-ils représenté la plantation? Comment la première constitution (1801) de Toussaint Louverture envisage la terre en voie de décolonisation? Comment les premiers récits indigènes voient la terre historique? À partir d’une série de lettres de colons, des mémoires militaires, des documents historiques et des romans, nous analyserons, en grappillant dans les précieuses réflexions de Gaston Bachelard et de Michel Serres, les dimensions surprenantes de la cartographie superposée de la plantation et de la terre en révolution.

Susanna Lee (Georgetown University), “L’idée du cadastre: Land Ownership and Individual Worth” One year after the publication of Madame Bovary, that paean to possession and its discontents, Flaubert’s close friend and correspondent Ivan Turgenev published A Nest of the Gentry. In that 1858 novel, which opposes frivolous Western corruption to a Russian sense of duty and passivity, the vacuous character Panshin boasts that while in government service, “he had been entrusted in Petersburg with the duty de populariser l’idée du cadastre.” This very statement marks Panshin as a dull bureaucrat, both for his pride in spreading Western ideas in Russia and for his willingness to elevate cadastral bean-counting to the status of an idea. In 1901, when Jean Jaurès started his massive Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, he used cadastre in a deliberate and self-consciously philosophical sense, as a code for perspective on partitioning and parceling. He writes of “cahiers des paroisses qui ont un accent révolutionnaire paysan beaucoup plus marqué que les cahiers des bailliages atténués par la bourgeoisie. C' est comme un merveilleux cadastre passionné et vivant, tout bariolé d' amour et de haine: Ce bois est vaste: il est au seigneur; cette terre est riche: elle est au bourgeois; voici une pauvre terre: elle est à moi et je l' aime: mais quand j' ai bien peiné, on me prend, par l' impôt, les meilleures gerbes...” In this paper, I use the idea of the cadastre as a basis for examining the connection between real property ownership, narrative agency, and emerging concepts of the self. Because land is limited, it is the ideal illustration of capitalism as a zero-sum game; its parceling comes to parallel the contours of individual human agency and worth. Jaurès’s use of cadastre thus enables a sort of cadastre idéologique, wherein ownership ownership relation to the land finds echoes in one’s relation to ideas and to notions of the future.

Dorothy Kelly (Boston University), “Odd Lots: Love, Death, and Enclosed Outdoor Spaces in Zola” In a number of Zola novels, outdoor lots, surrounded by enclosures or buildings, stage the scene for an encounter of love with death and/or with the death of that love. Four of these highly symbolic scenes create an area outside normal social space. The first lot to be explored is the hedged-in yard that surrounds the house of the Croix-de-Maufras in La Bête humaine, where Jacques crawls through a hole to find Flore cutting up cords, and where he tries both to love and to kill her. The second, appearing in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, is the Paradou, the walled garden that closes off the outside world. There, just after Serge and Albine find love beneath the great tree, Archangias enters through a hole in the wall and “kills” their love, dragging Serge back to civilization and thus leading to Albine’s suicide. L’Assommoir contains the third, very famous scene, in which Gervaise and Goujet escape to a vacant lot between a saw-mill and a factory. They express their love there, only to kill the future for that love as they sit by an odd, dead tree and renounce any plan of escape. The final scene is one of the first of the Rougon-Macquart series in La Fortune des Rougon. Miette and Silvère, who are soon to die, court in a former graveyard while sitting on a tombstone, and where the trees produce monstrous fruit. We shall explore the meanings of this

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 coupling of love and death in these odd lots, in which trees or hedges, holes, and cutting of various kinds play an important role.

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Break: 3:15pm - 3:45pm (State Suite Hallway, 2nd floor & L’Apogee, 17th floor)

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Thursday, October 27, 2016 Session III: 3:45pm - 5:15pm

Panel III.A: Art and Nation (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Katherine Clark (Brown University)

Michele Hannoosh (University of Michigan), “An Art of the Nation: Michelet’s Géricault” Between the publication of Le Peuple in January 1846 and the Histoire de la révolution in March 1847, Michelet reflected deeply on an art of the nation and the people. In two lectures for the Collège de France in February 1846 he argued that the Revolution had brought the reign of the people but not an art to go with it. Not until the Empire and the Restoration would a “national” painter emerge: that painter was Géricault. In a dazzling analysis, Michelet presents the Chasseur à cheval (1812) and the Cuirassier mourant (1814) as images of the end of the Empire, and the Radeau de la Méduse (1819) as a double image of the wreck of the nation under the Restoration and, simultaneously, a future belonging to the people. As a passage in Michelet’s Journal indicates, these ideas had been formulated long before, in 1840. Moreover, as other notes suggest, the art of the people had a genealogy. He saw the seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists and the Marseillais sculptor Pierre Puget as creators, in their own ways, of a people’s art which he later finds realized in the “national” painter Géricault. In this paper, I will suggest the ways in which Michelet’s interpretations of these three artistic moments define his concept of an art of the people and the nation. I will also explore how this concept inflects his vision of moral and social action as he returns to Géricault in a lecture of January 1848, on the eve of the February revolution.

Irina Markina-Baum (Princeton University), “Dreaming francité in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ Hôtel de Ville de Paris murals” During the “semaine sanglante” of the Paris Commune, the Hôtel de Ville was burned. In 1872 the newly minted Third Republic decided to rebuild the city hall in the image of the old structure, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of civil discord. It also conceived a costly decorative project to remind Parisians, shaken by the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, of the city’s more distant history and its contemporary identity. One of the first artists commissioned by the committee was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He designed a pair of murals, Été and Hiver, for one of the building’s introduction halls. Although quite different, both works convey the sense of an eternal France by drawing on suburban landscapes surrounding the Seine. The murals create a dreamlike impression of stillness and timelessness, distancing the viewer from the rumble of modernity and erasing any overt historical associations. The paintings lack any easily identifiable allegories and therefore remain opaque, complicating the mural genre’s traditionally didactic role. Instead, Summer and Winter appeal to viewers’ subjectivity, urging them to “complete” the ambiguous scenes using their own visions of ideal France. However, la terre is here depicted in a disjointed fashion, with a classicizing vision of leisure in Summer and a quasi-medieval image of duty in Winter. The murals, which first appear as anesthesia administered to forget the trauma of recent history, constitute a commentary on the recently challenged francité. Whereas the nude figures in Summer erase social hierarchies, Winter monumentalizes the poor working classes, creating a disjunction which suggests a society unsure of its own origins and identity. In this paper I argue that the set of murals Puvis designed for the City Hall employs an unlikely combination of dreamlike and political imagery to grapple with the difficulty of reconstructing French identity. I explore the striking contrast

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 between Summer and Winter to problematize the seemingly timeless and orderly atmosphere for which Puvis was acclaimed.

Sara Pappas (University of Richmond), “When did the Salon End?” The annual state-sponsored art exhibition in France known as the Salon was from the start attached to cultural and national identity. Though Rome's Accademia was its model, France sought to distinguish itself as a European leader in painting and sculpture through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and struggled to establish an annual exhibition even after the creation of the Académie de peintures et de sculptures in 1648. Although various exhibitions took place during the second half of the seventeenth century, scholarly consensus decided long ago that the "first" Salon took place in 1699, and the choice of this date is tied to space: one of the reasons this exhibition would be considered the first is because of its location in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. By the mid-eighteenth century the Salon had become "a permanent fixture of French cultural life," not to mention a "central Parisian institution," and even as the Romantic movement began the nineteenth century's increasing critique of the Salon, art critics and journalists still implied France's superiority and dominant role in the European art world through their descriptions of the exhibition.5 The nineteenth century is forever linked to the Salon's demise, but what do we mean when we talk about the end of the Salon in the nineteenth century? When, precisely, did the Salon end?6 State sponsorship was terminated in 1880, but the Salon kept going under the direction of the Société des artistes français. This exhibit is still held today. The Salon d'automne, established in the early twentieth century as an official avant-garde counterpart to the Société's Salon, also still holds annual exhibitions. Does the famous nineteenth century divide between official Salon and upstart avant-garde still play out, in a kind of infinite loop? If the Salon did not end, does it still relate to French cultural and national identity?

Karen Carter (Kendall College of Art and Design), “Paris, Capital of 19th-Century Lithography: The Centenaire de la Lithographie Exhibition within a Colonial Economy” The 1895 Centenaire de la Lithographie exhibition, held in Paris and sponsored by the French government, celebrated lithography as a unique French industry and art form. By displaying lithographs by French artists along with tools, inks, motorized printing presses, and chemicals used by commercial lithographic firms, the exhibition flaunted the centrality of lithography to the French economy, fine arts, sciences, teaching, and the “industrial arts” that included advertising and package manufacturing. The exhibition was only one instance in the 1890s in which the French government positioned the medium of lithography within nationalistic concerns and the exhibition was deliberately planned to contest a German exhibit scheduled for Leipzig the following year. While not contesting the national origins of lithography—the “German” Aloïs Senefelder was responsible for the medium’s invention—the exhibition emphasized the French transformation of a little-used printing technology into an art form with a lineage extending from Delacroix to Redon. The nationalistic stance of the exhibition is not surprising given the tension between Germany and France following the Franco-Prussian war. Nevertheless, the cultural positioning of France, and more accurately, Paris as the capital of lithography also depended on the cultivation of natural resources not within the nation but in a larger international and colonial economy. This paper, then, will examine both the nationalistic interpretation of French lithography at the Centennial exhibition as well as the medium’s reliance on natural resources for

5 From the introduction to Thomas Crow's Painters and Public Life in 18th-Century Paris, Yale University Press, 1985. 6 Patricia Mainardi's book The End of the Salon (Cambridge University Press, 1993) takes the "end" both literally and figuratively: she situates the final Salon at the end of state sponsorship and at the same time examines a more figurative end-- the end of the Salon's relevance and dominance in the art market.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 the mass production of printed matter—in this case, gum Arabic, the hardened sap of the African acacia tree, a required component in the lithographic process. As this paper will show, the nationalistic association of lithography as French depended as much on colonial networks as it did on the centralization of lithographic printing in Paris.

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Panel III.B: France-Allemagne (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Laurin Williams (Brown University)

Pamela Genova (University of Oklahoma), “German Geopolitics a Real Threat? A Geopoetic Response by La Revue Wagnérienne” The relationship between France and Germany has never been simple, and in the late 1800s, much conflict materialized between the two countries, most obviously in historically concrete, violent forms, but also in the more subtle realm of aesthetics, as questions of the fluidity of national borders reflected also ambivalent transformations in national and personal identities. A rich resource for passionate discussion of these key issues emerged in the French petites revues, particularly of the last 30 years of the century. I focus here on La Revue Wagnérienne, which embodied the primary rallying flag for the French supporters of the work of Richard Wagner. Édouard Dujardin, Teodore de Wyzewa, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain directed the journal in the late 1880s, taking on a significant role in the expansion of Wagnérisme throughout fin de siècle Europe. A truly multifaceted enterprise, La Revue Wagnérienne encouraged the development of trans-national and trans-disciplinary experimentation, providing a framework for innovative literary journalism, incorporating aesthetic issues, while simultaneously questioning the geopolitical and geopoetic relationship of the artist to his or her home terroir. In La Revue Wagnérienne, the directors wrote of the expansion of popular Wagnerism, while treating heady philosophical analyses of the ideological elements in Wagnerian art. Dujardin and his colleagues believed that the work of Wagner was the salvation of modern art, no matter the mapping of its origins, and they aimed to enlighten their compatriots, to dissipate the prevalent misrepresentations of a xenophobic anti-Wagnerism, and to educate those who were suspicious of what they considered the German composer’s invasive Teutonic, nationalistic style. In sum, their endeavor contributed significantly to the dialogue between “French” and “not-French,” as it encouraged inquiry into what the French terre actually embodied, a concern still active today in questions of French nationality and regional identities.

Lynn Wilkinson (University of Texas at Austin), “For the Love of the World: George Sand and Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics” In the haunting Prologue to The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt writes with fear and horror of the reactions of some scientists to the first space rockets, which they saw as the first step to leaving the world behind. Like weapons engineers, they not only tampered with the conditions for human life and survival but also called into question what makes us human in the first place. For Arendt, human beings are profoundly worldly creatures, dependent on the earth for survival but also able to transform it through art and democratic politics. In fact, art and politics may be the only means we have to prevent the destruction of the world as we know it. Almost one hundred years earlier, George Sand addressed similar issues in Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre (1871) and in several essays published in Impressions et souvenirs (1873). Rather than space travel and atomic fission, Sand’s points of departure are the Franco-Prussian War and the extremely

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 effective Prussian war machine. These threaten not only the lives of individual French people but also what Sand believes is the best of French culture: the republican tradition that dates back to the French Revolution. In contrast to many of her peers, who saw the extension of suffrage to all French men as a mistake, Sand believed that the right to vote transformed many peasants, who took seriously their rights and duties as citizens and gained a new independence and dignity. Like Hannah Arendt, she highlighted the role of labor in preserving life. Unlike Arendt, however, Sand did not insist on a separation between labor, on the one hand, and art and politics, on the other. On the contrary, for Sand, prejudices and policies which confine peasants to the labor of the land violate their potential and rights as human beings. Peasants, like everyone else, deserve educations that enable them to perform meaningful work and participate in politics. There are many reasons for the two women’s differences on this point. Sand was a committed socialist, as well as republican or democrat. Arendt wrote in the wake of National Socialism and Soviet Communism, both of which she characterized as totalitarian in her famous book on the subject. In consequence, she believed that to mix social or economic issues and politics could easily lead to violence and a loss of freedom. But her insistence on the separation of politics and labor has the unfortunate consequence of excluding large numbers of people – laborers, slaves, women – and issues from politics. Sand’s Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre and her essays on education in Impressions et souvenirs help us rethink the issues at stake in the relationship between labor and the life of the household, on the one hand, and democratic politics, on the other. Here the writer insists not only on the dignity and intelligence of the inhabitants of Berry and other nearby regions but also on the crucial role of the know- how of the local people in helping Sand and her family survive the war and also a devastating drought. While Arendt located labor in households – oikia – inhabited by women and slaves, while male citizens debated in the public spaces of the polis, for Sand, individuals played several roles. Already by the late 1860s, many peasant men were on their way to becoming citizens. But at least one woman in the Journal, an excellent manager who kept a bathing house open during the drought, has also developed skills that take her outside conventional gender and social roles. Sand’s Journal d’ un voyageur pendant la guerre offered some comfort to her countrymen and women : the Franco-Prussian War not only brought the Second Empire to an end but also, she hoped, would bring into focus the potential of the French republican tradition. But this text does more than record conditions in the countryside during the war or offer comfort for its losses; it represents a significant meditation on the conditions for democracy and its fundamental role in opposing the ravages of war and dictatorships. Like Hannah Arendt, George Sand imagined politics in relation to different spheres of human activity, including the labor of peasants, workers, and some women and the work of artists and intellectuals. Both saw politics as fundamentally related to a love of place and the earth. If they differ on the relationship of democratic politics to economics and social issues, both share a passion for democracy and its survival in dark times. Juxtaposing the two reveals that George Sand, like Hannah Arendt, is an important contributor to an ongoing conversation about democracy in the world.

Kory Olson (Stockton University), “Teaching the New Border: Vidal de la Blache’s 1886 Frontière Nord-Est et Alsace-Lorraine” There were many reasons for France’s disastrous 1870 defeat. One contributing factor to that loss was a lack of geographic knowledge at all levels of the army. As a result, politicians proposed significant educational reforms in the 1880s, which included an enhanced role of geography in the national curriculum. In order to improve access to and understanding of that subject, French geographer Vidal de la Blache published a series of Cartes murales that appeared in classrooms throughout the nation. Maps such as “Carte 4 France: Départements” and “Carte 8 France: Agriculture” used bright colors and easy-

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 to-read fonts to introduce the nation to generations of school children. However, his “Carte 10 France: Frontière Nord-Est et Alsace-Lorraine,” deviates from his primary mission and focuses instead on the delicate topic of France’s new border with Germany. This paper will examine Vidal’s France “Frontière Nord-Est” map and how it addressed the new boundary within a larger mission of teaching geography and presenting France to the nation’s children. How should the nation teach its children about military defeat? To begin, Vidal’s cartographic discourse minimizes France’s territorial loss. Unlike most of his other wall maps, Vidal displays only the Northeast quadrant of the nation. This perspective removes any chance that a student would see “la France coupée” when discussing such a sensitive topic. Furthermore, although Vidal rightfully displays the new international border between France and Germany, he fails to remove the former pre-1871 one. This inclusion offers hope and validation for those who felt that the lost provinces belonged with Paris and allows a map reader to question their current legal status. Vidal downplays French military inferiority too. To mitigate future military loss, for example, he proudly identifies “villes fortifiées” and “victoires,” though defeats also appear, and a map insert showing “La France Militaire” where the nation’s battalions are based.

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Panel III.C: Women, Genius, and la Terre (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Isabelle Naginski (Tufts University)

Jean-Alexandre Perras (Oxford University), “Réécrire les ‘génialogies’ : Génie des femmes et des nations chez Germaine de Staël” On connaît les remarques des Goncourt, qui témoignent de leur conception particulièrement restrictive du génie : « Le génie est mâle. L’autopsie de Mme de Staël et de Mme Sand auraient été curieuses [sic.] : elles doivent avoir une construction un peu hermaphrodite7. » Que les noms de Germaine de Staël et de George Sand soient associés le temps d’une réflexion sur la prétendue incongruité du génie des femmes fait bien plus que de persifler platement l’importance de ces deux écrivaines dans le champ littéraire et social de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle. En les réunissant ainsi, les Goncourt élaborent dans même élan les prémisses d’une sorte d’histoire du « génie féminin », par ailleurs soigneusement exclu des histoires littéraires traditionnelles. Envisagé comme une construction sociale, le génie est avant tout le produit d’une reconnaissance, servant à jalonner le champ culturel et social de valeurs autour desquelles les communautés se constituent. Cette fonction exemplaire du génie est dès lors un lieu de débat et de conquête symbolique, en particulier pour les femmes, si longtemps exclues des panthéons littéraire, artistique et scientifique. C’est également dans cette mesure que la réaction exclusive des Goncourt à l’égard du génie féminin de Staël et de Sand peut être lue comme une réponse à une reconfiguration des panthéons rompant avec la conception étroite d’un génie exclusivement mâle, qui a prévalu jusqu’alors. Or justement, l’une des instigatrices de cette conception ouverte du génie permettant de reconfigurer le Panthéon de manière inclusive est Germaine de Staël, dans l’œuvre de qui cette question est de la première importance. Il ne s’agit pas chez elle de penser un « génie au féminin », qui s’inscrirait en parallèle au panthéon des hommes, mais bien se donner les moyens de réécrire l’histoire littéraire de manière à ce qu’elle puisse inclure des génies femmes aussi bien que des génies hommes. Cela ne se fait pas sans difficultés, comme le montre le chapitre « Des Femmes qui cultivent les Lettres » de De la littérature, publié à l’aube du XIXe siècle, où Staël montre combien, dans les monarchies comme dans les républiques, l’opinion est réfractaire à la gloire littéraire féminine. Ainsi, l’« ordre social » est « tout entier

7 Jules et Edmond de Goncourt, Journal, tome I, Robert Laffont, 1989, p. 295.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 armé contre une femme qui veut s’élever à la hauteur de la réputation des hommes8. » Corinne ou l’Italie constitue un exemple particulièrement éloquent de cette entreprise. Pensons à la grande scène de couronnement triomphal de la poétesse au Capitole, « ce lieu si fécond en souvenir », où, sur les traces de Pétrarque, Corinne est couronnée de lauriers par un peuple fervent qui reconnaît en elle le génie italien. Tout en Corinne transpire le génie : poétesse enthousiaste, elle improvise des vers qui soulèvent les foules ; danseuse, comédienne, elle possède à un suprême degré tous les talents, mais en particulier ceux qui lui permettent de faire en public la monstration de ses dons particuliers. Le génie, chez Corinne, est spectacle du génie ; la reconnaissance immédiate dont il jouit est de l’ordre de l’enthousiasme, de l’exacerbation du pathos. Le génie de Corinne est produit par le génie italien (de sa langue, de son climat), tout autant qu’il en est parfaitement exemplaire. «Corinne ou l’Italie»... L’Italie racontée par Germaine de Staël est emportée par l’imagination forte du Midi. Prise entre la force de son héritage et les possibilités de son avenir, il s’agit du terreau idéal pour l’épanouissement du génie de cette femme où se mêlent pourtant les sangs anglais et italien, la froide raison et les élans de la passion. Ainsi se trouvent intimement mêlés la description d’un génie d’un genre nouveau et l’idéalisation d’une nation à la fois passée et à venir. Si de nombreuses études se sont déjà intéressées à la question du génie chez Germaine de Staël9, il conviendrait à présent de questionner plus spécifiquement cette association entre le génie « au féminin » (non pas dans sa différence de fait mais tel qu’il est perçu) et le génie des nations, dans la mesure où elle met en lumière la fonction politique du génie chez l’auteure, et plus spécifiquement le rôle et la présence des femmes de lettres dans la société. Si la théorie des climats, héritée du siècle précédent, intervient à de nombreuses reprises dans l’élaboration de cette articulation, celle-ci s’avère davantage un ressort poétique servant à la caractérisation des personnages dans leurs types nationaux, qu’une véritable et effective théorie philosophique soutenant une conception physiologique du génie fondée sur l’influence de l’air et du sol. Le récit insiste davantage sur la singularité du génie de Corinne (qui bénéficie d’ailleurs d’une multiplicité d’influences contradictoires) plutôt que sur la production univoque d’un terroir particulier. Dès lors, le traitement du génie des nations serait plutôt une figuration de l’espace politique mettant en lumière les conditions de réception du génie des femmes, questionnement élaboré par l’auteure tout au long de son œuvre, et en particulier dans De l’Allemagne, contemporain de Corinne. L’articulation entre le génie des femmes et celui des nations pourrait ainsi indiquer les conditions d’une réécriture inclusive des « génialogies », dont Germaine de Staël a esquissé les prémisses.

Isabelle Naginski (Tufts University), “Le génie du terroir: Berry in Sand’s Fictional Universe” According to the ethnographer Laisnel de la Salle, George Sand was the writer who “discovered” the Berry, a province that was of little interest to the general public until the 19th 10 century. She was its Christopher Columbus, he claims, and its James Fenimore Cooper. What she “discovered” in this forgotten part of France and then exposed to her readers was its genial language, its ancient legends as recounted during the customary veillées, and its ideal form of community. Sand’s descriptions of the Berry gave her readers a sense of discovering a new country and her exploration of their modes of life seemed to insist on the privileged nature of the Berry

8 Germaine de Staël, « Des Femmes qui cultivent les Lettres », De la littérature, éd. Gérard Gengembre et Jean Goldzink, GF Flammarion, 1991, p. 339-339. 9 Entre autres : Simone Balayé, « Le génie et la gloire dans l’œuvre de Mme de Staël », Rivista di letterature moderne et comparate, t. XX, nos. 3-4, 1967 ; Claudine Hermann, « Corinne, femme de génie », Cahiers staëliens, t. XXXV, 1984 ; Gale A. Levy, « A Genius for the Modern Era : Madame de Staël’s Corinne », Nineteenth Century French Studies, 30, nos. 3/4, 2002. 10 Laisnel de la Salle, Introduction à Croyances et Légendes au Centre de la France, Reédition, 2013, p. 11.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

countryside. Her evocation of its terroir seems to correspond to art historian Du Bos’ theories about climate and location as being essential for the determination of the characteristics of genius.11 The genius of peoples is part of their life-style – their laws, customs and moral attitudes. While Du Bos seems to believe in a certain determinism of climate on humans with regard to their genius, Sand insists rather on the fact of their location and isolation from the world at large. An isolated region such as le Berry, cut off for centuries from the other provinces of France, has thus been able to retain much of its authentic genius. The first aspect is its language, as the Berry still retains the purest form of the langue d’oil in present-day France.12 Furthermore, Sand adopts the role of an explorer, in Cooperian fashion, and is thus able to reclaim in the Berrichon life-style the lost history of its people through the tales transmitted orally by generations of illiterate story tellers. In Sand’s texts, the chanvreur is the incarnation of the genial conteur. Through the telling of his oral fictions, the traditions of the history of humble folk have not been irretrievably lost. Thanks to writers such as Littré, Renan and others, she explains, “nous arrivons aujourd’hui à regarder l’histoire des fictions comme l’étude de l’homme même […] elle seule nous révèle cet homme primitif [doué d’une] exubérance d’imagination.”13 She is convinced that the Berrichon peasant is “le seul historien qui nous reste des temps anté-historiques” – and that this has been achieved in part through the medium of ancient fictions, transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Thus Sand finds in her province, if not the genealogy of humble individuals, at least the very stuff of the history of humanity. This explains why the Berry and its adjoining region of the Creuse reveal in their genial and primitive state, full of imagination, guilelessness and innocence, a reminiscience of what the Golden Age of the past might have been. As she puts it: “Quand on se trouve dans une de ces solitudes où semble régner le sauvage génie du passé, on se croirait à deux mille lieues des villes et de la société […] et à deux mille ans de la vie actuelle.”14 Her heroine Jeanne (in the eponymous novel) is a character of mythic stature. She embodies the ideal type, living in a private world of her own making in which perfection already exists and perfectibility – that buzzword of the left in 19th-century social thought – has become redundant. Jeanne is an innocent, a genius living in a poetic daydream and mostly deprived of a modern intellectual mind. Her mythological representation likens her to the figure of Astrée, the last deity to have lived among humans in a pastoral cadre, where war and evil did not exist. Jeanne and her peers already possess the virtues that are necessary for the elaboration of such an ideal genial society.

Adrianna Paliyenko (Colby College), “‘Sciences’ de la Terre: The Philosophical Genius of Poets Louisa Siefert and Louise Ackermann” During the nineteenth century, the term “science” (from Latin scientia, “knowledge, a knowing, expertness”) became closely associated with the scientific method itself as a systematic way to study the phenomena of the physical world. In discussing how the French tradition of poésie scientifique concurrently evolved, literary historian Casimir Fusil begins with the period from 1750 to 1820: “La science se forme. Les poètes, aussi bien que les savants, travaillent à répandre les lumières nouvelles.”15

11 Cf. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 1719. 12 “Le français du Berry était un français très ancien et longtemps inaltéré. Il avait mille originalités et mille grâces qu’on ne retrouve point ailleurs, et certaines locutions heureuses et bizarres dont nous n’avons nulle part l’équivalent.”, Sand, Préface à Croyances et légendes du Centre de la France, p. 7. 13 Ibid., p. 8. 14 G. Sand, Jeanne, Editions de l’Aurore, p. 28. C’est moi qui souligne. 15 Casimir Alexandre Fusil, La Poésie scientifique de 1750 à nos jours: son élaboration, sa constitution (Paris: Éditions Scientifica, 1917), 25.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

During the Romantic era, from 1820 to 1850, he adds: “La poésie, toute subjective et transportée d’élans lyriques, consentit mal à se modeler sur la science toujours progressante” (25). After the 1850s, France saw “la poésie scientifique” triumph, albeit not without resistance, as shown by the disparate ways that Louisa Siefert (1845-1877) and Louise Ackermann (1813-1890) consider what la terre reveals about the human condition. The narrative of pain that traverses the phthistic Siefert’s life and work is radically more complex in the creative realm. Rather than writing about her particular diseases along the lines of an autopathography, Siefert transcends the embodied experience of suffering through creative reverie and philosophical detachment, as in the poem, “Vivero memento” (from Rayons perdus, 1868). Siefert embeds therein the scientia of stoic teachings. In “Souvenirs d’enfance” from the same volume, and elsewhere, she references her particular source: “Épictète mourant prêchant le stoicisme.” Siefert’s second poetic collection, Les Stoïques (1870), explores the problem of knowledge we face in our earthly dwelling, treating stoicism as a practice that leads to apatheia or freedom from passion. Closely related is ataraxia, a state of consciousness characterized by lucidity, calm, and release from suffering. In the foundational poem, “Bonheur,” Siefert engages with the core problem of knowing: human beings are so easily moved by all their senses as well as by external circumstances outside the realm of their control that they are unable to sustain happiness for long. Inextricably tied to the mind-body split, for Siefert, this weakness is human nature. Louise Ackermann would agree with the line from Siefert’s poem “Soir d’hiver,” that “La terre est dure à l’homme & la mort est dans l’air,” but offers the advent of modern science as proof of her intellectual pessimism. In her autobiography, Ma vie, Ackermann recalls the 1850s and 60s, years she spent in solitude in Nice, following the advances of evolutionary science: “Les théories de l’évolution et de la transformation des forces étaient en parfait accord avec les tendances panthéistes de mon esprit. [...] Les côtés poétiques de cette conception des choses ne m’échappaient pas non plus. Par ses révélations, la science venait de créer un nouvel état d’âme et d’ouvrir à l’esprit des perspectives où la poésie avait évidemment beau jeu.”16 In her Poésies philosophiques, first published in 1871, Ackermann exposes the quest for truth against the vast expanse of the universe. In poems such as “À la Comète de 1861” and “Le Nuage,” the poetic thinker shows how origins, like final causes, lie beyond “la science humaine.” As she reasons in the poem, “Le Positivisme,” the attempt to apprehend reality via sense perceptions and the data of experience, though based on rejecting an abstract ideal, does not suppress the lack (“cet abîme obscur”) that informs all systems of knowledge. Like any scientific inquiry, positivism cannot eradicate the desire of the unknown (“ce gouffre défendu”), which calls into question whether fuller meaning is possible through continued discovery. One can imagine how Ackermann’s turn to science might have struck Siefert who, in a letter of 8 January 1873 to her mother, stated regarding George Sand’s Les Ailes du courage that “l’analyse scientifique [...] ne sera jamais de la poésie, quoi qu’on fasse.”17 Though both poets raise the same question, “Que fait l'être l’humain sur la Terre?” they reveal how differently creative minds bridge the gap between what lies above and below to shape understanding of what it means to dwell between heaven and earth.

16 Louise Ackermann, “Ma vie,” La Nouvelle revue (1882), 432. 17 Louisa Siefert, Souvenirs rassemblés par sa mère (Paris: Fischbacher, 1881), 183.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

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Panel III.D: Balzac in the Provinces (Renaissance Salon, 17th) Chair: Melanie Conroy (University of Memphis)

Melanie Conroy (University of Memphis), “The Global Geography of Le Curé de village” The French provinces—especially the central and Western regions—are sometimes considered less cosmopolitan than Paris or the Eastern border regions. Drawing upon my multi-year mapping study of all of the place references in La Comédie Humaine, I show that, in Balzac’s work, the provinces are directly connected to Russia, China, the Middle East, and the Americas. In this paper, I compare—both quantitatively and qualitatively—the global geography of Le Curé de village to the other Scènes de la vie de province and to the series as a whole. Through a close reading of Le Curé de village this paper reveals that the provinces are connected to the world beyond France to a remarkable degree and that the provincial novel is a window onto Balzac’s world geography. While Le Curé de village is a particularly cosmopolitan provincial novel, it bears several traits in common with Balzac’s other provincial novels. For example, Limoges is compared to many foreign places both ancient and modern. These analogies construct Balzac’s global geography, of which the provinces are a central part. The cosmopolitanism of Le Curé de village is multiplied by the unusual circumstances of the Tascheron family, who are driven to flee France. This complication leads to one of the only episodes in La Comédie Humaine that takes place in the Americas: the founding of the utopian colony of Tascheronville in Ohio. It is through the cultivation of the land and the family’s attempts to create a model farming community that Le Curé de village creates ties between the most far-flung reaches of the world— that is, between la France profonde and the still-developing mid-Western towns of the United States.

Sylvie Goutas (University of Chicago), “La Bienfaisance au féminin de la province balzacienne” Contrairement à leurs homologues masculins, les bienfaitrices de province de La Comédie humaine peinent à incarner la charité scientifique qui révolutionne la société française du XIXe siècle. C’est avant tout au sein de leur vie domestique et sous l’égide du clergé que leurs actions s’inscrivent. Cette tendance a pour effet de donner à leurs initiatives un aspect de prime abord maternel ou filial, qui n’est pas le fait d’héroïnes œuvrant dans la capitale, car, comme le souligne si justement Nicole Mozet en évoquant le monde balzacien, « la province constitue le dernier refuge de la maternité ». Ces protagonistes apparaissent donc le plus souvent telles de traditionnelles figures du dévouement, avant d’éventuellement incarner un type de bienfaisance plus collectif, en phase avec le cadre rural ou urbain dans lequel elles évoluent. Malgré ces limitations, d’Eugénie Grandet à Blanche-Henriette de Mortsauf, en passant par Véronique Graslin et la Comtesse de Montcornet, ce sont des portraits d’êtres d’exception que dresse toutefois Balzac, ceux d’actrices d’une Histoire en marche, qui ne se contentent pas d’assurer le maintien de coutumes surannées locales, mais renouvellent, en les modifiant de façon durable, les mœurs de leur siècle.

Allan Pasco (University of Kansas), “Balzac, Literary Sociologist” Balzac's Scènes de la vie de province is particularly important for insight into the author's sociology, since it introduces a number of his most significant ideas. In this "gallery" of La Comédie humaine, the author discussed and illustrated his thought on economics, fiat vs. "hard" money, the opposition between Paris and the provinces, celibacy, art and journalism, creation and imitation, class structure, law, education, fatherhood, and the dissolution of families, to mention but those that are the most clearly emphasized. The sociologically oriented author incisively considers the condition of

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 families, since the traditional family seemed to be atrophying if not disappearing. He considered it one of the three major pillars of society (with church and state). He similarly put his finger on the results of a weakened church and the aristocracy. Likewise, he assails a corrupt system of justice. Still, he recognizes that France was coming alive, providing the capital, transportation, and communication necessary for a modern nation. He rehearses many of the twentieth and twenty-first century conclusions of sociology, though in some cases the results that the novelist saw would not be apparent to other observers for well over a century.

Armine Kotin Mortimer (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “Story vs. History: Functions of a City Description in Balzac’s Les Chouans” The language authors use to describe a real geographical location must be precise and detailed so readers can see the land well enough to follow the action taking place there. In Balzac’s case, such a description falls into the category of what I have called his “explications nécessaires”: what you need to understand if you are going to appreciate the story. The city of Fougères in Les Chouans has a dramatic geography including hills, valleys, rivers, bluffs, cliffs, roads, promenades, and a famous chateau, all of which Balzac takes pains to locate on a verbal map of the land. Analyzing the passages describing the city and projecting images, I address the question of the status and nature of descriptions in La Comédie humaine. How well can we see what the language describes? Ultimately the description of the city serves different functions in the story (plot, events, actions by the characters) and in the history (of which Balzac claims to be the ideal historian).

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Panel III.E: Ground Transportation (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Masha Belenky (George Washington University)

Aimée Boutin (Florida State University), “George Sand and the Railway” George Sand is known to most readers for her portrayal of the terroir. Her romans champêtres trilogy celebrate the land by elevating the work of agricultural laborers and locating the potential for change in the values of peasants. In the appendices to La Mare au diable, Sand expresses a note of alarm that the intrusion of the railway into the pastoral landscape will destroy the values associated with la terre: “Encore un ou deux ans peut-être, et les chemins de fer passeront leur niveau sur nos vallées profondes, emportant, avec la rapidité de la foudre, nos antiques traditions et nos merveilleuses légendes. ” These concerns are cotemporaneous with the Paris-Chateauroux railway connection and the extension of the railway into the remote region of the Berry in 1847. In the 1840s, her views might be summed up by an exchange in Les Sept Cordes de la lyre (1839) where the beauty vs the ugliness of the industrial landscape is at issue: whereas one voice proclaims to the other: “Et maintenant, lui dit-il, écoute! Ces myriades d’harmonies terribles [...] c’est la voix de l’industrie, le bruit des machines, le sifflement de la vapeur, le choc des marteaux, [...] Écoute, et réjouis-toi ; car ce monde est riche, et cette race ingénieuse est puissante !” And the other responds with scepticism that the industrial world “[n’est] qu’une masse de fange labourée par des fleuves de sang.” In other novels such as La Vallée noire, however, Sand presents a more nuanced view of the railway and at times shows a more open mind to the advantages of industrialization. How do Sand’s views on the railway evolve? In this paper, I contrast Sand’s treatment of the railway in the 1840s with its representation in one of her last novels titled Malgrétout (1870), written at a time when the railway is established and the author’s concerns from the 1840s are out of date. In this novel rich in descriptions of the Ardennes, the railway allows the narrator

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 to reach the valley of the Meuse. No longer that which unequivocally denatures la terre, the railway and canal infrastructure enhance natural beauty of the landscape.

Rachel Williams (Eastern Kentucky University), “French Women Riding the Rails in the United States: Wor(l)ds in Motion” At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States was a popular travel destination for many continental women travelers, certainly including a number of French women, who both traveled the country and published extensively about their voyages. Moreover, they did not limit themselves to the traditionally popular destinations of Boston and New York, but rather traveled the country extensively: from the Northeast, they made their way to the South, the Midwest, even the West coast, via train. “French Women Riding the Rails in the United States: Wor(l)ds in Motion” aims to explore the ways in which several of these women constructed their voyages specifically through the experience of traveling the country by rail, navigating the linguistic and natural differences of this new territory. Olympe Audouard’s Le Far West (1869) and A travers l’Amérique (1871); Thérèse Bentzon’s Notes de Voyage: Les Américaines Chez Elles (1896) and Nouvelle-France et Nouvelle-Angleterre (1899) ; and Louise Bourbonnaud’s Les Amériques: Amérique du nord, les Antilles, Amérique du sud (1889) all discuss extensively, in addition to the sites they see at their diverse origins of destination, the experience of train travel in the United States. As Audouard, Bentzon, and Bourbonnaud navigated both new landscapes and new customs, railway travel served simultaneously as a stabilizing factor and as a point of dislocation. This paper examines how this specific mode of travel shaped, first of all, how they perceived of these new environments, and, secondly, their textual reconstructions of said environments for their audience at home.

Larysa Smirnova (Boston College), “Diligences, trains, stagecoaches: Le voyage cinématographique de Boule de Suif” Boule de suif, le texte et le personnage, met en scène un corps multiple. Le corps de Mlle Elizabeth Rosset est à la fois le site de l’exclusion et de la différence ; de la résistance et de la générosité. Ce n’est pas surprenant que ce corps qui existe en surplus charnel et symbolique s’impose comme le sujet de prédilection de multiples adaptations cinématographiques de cette nouvelle maupassantienne. Il existe des dizaines de films et d’adaptations télévisées de Boule de suif, réalisées par des cinéastes aussi divers que l’Américain John Ford (Stagecoach, 1939), le Russe Mikhail Romm (Пышка, 1934) ou le Japonais Kenji Mizoguchi (Oyuki la vierge, 1935), parmi d’autres18. Comment expliquer cette abondance d’adaptations filmiques de Boule de suif sinon par le désir – des réalisateurs - de littéralement donner le corps au personnage de Maupassant ? Le corps, mais aussi l’espace dans lequel ce corps existe et le mouvement, car le corps de Boule de suif existe en se déplaçant : dans des diligences, trains, stagecoaches… Dans la communication que je propose pour votre colloque, j’aimerais relire Boule de suif à travers ses adaptations filmiques en orientant ma réflexion sur les questions suivantes : Comment les films suggèrent ou montrent le mouvement de la diligence (ou son équivalent dans les différents films : stagecoach, train, etc.) à travers l’espace marqué par les frontières géographiques, nationales et sociales ? Comment les films dépeignent en termes spatiaux le microcosme de la société ? Comment

18 The Woman Disputed (1928; Henry King, Sam Taylor), Shanghai Express (1932; Josef von Sternberg); Пышка (1934; Mikhail Romm); Maria no Oyuki (1935; Mizoguchi Kenji); Stagecoach (1939; John Ford); Night Plane from Chungking (1943; Ralph Murphy); Mademoiselle Fifi (1944; Robert Wise); La fuga (1944; Norman Foster); Boule de suif (1945; Christian-Jaque); Hua guniang (1951; Zhu Shilin); Peking Express (1951; William Dieterle); Onna no hada (1957; Shima Koji); Stagecoach (1966; Gordon Douglas) – cette liste n’est pas exhaustive

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 interrogent-ils le rapport entre l'intérieur et l'extérieur? En d'autres termes, comment les films rendent- ils spécifiquement « cinématographique » le voyage de Boule de Suif.

Elsa Stéphan (Smith College), “De la terre au globe : Transports dans Travail de Zola” Travail de Zola, roman publié en 1901, est non seulement une œuvre peu connue et devenue presque introuvable en librairie19 mais aussi interprétée à tort comme une utopie exclusivement politique. Le roman, dans lequel Charles Fourrier est fréquemment cité, décrit en effet la transformation d’une ville ouvrière, Beauclair, en une cité idéale dans laquelle on célèbre la mort du capitalisme, la disparition des classes sociales et la mise en commun des moyens de production. Les chercheurs qui ont étudié le roman, tels Frederick Ivor Case20 et Fabian Scharf 21, l’analysent donc comme une utopie socialiste. Cet article montre comment les transformations sociales de la cité décrite par Zola ne peuvent voir le jour que grâce aux nouvelles technologies qui révolutionnent les moyens de production et de transport, technologies célébrées par Zola tout au long du roman. C’est en effet l’électricité qui anime les machines, soulageant l’homme des travaux les plus pénibles, et qui fait aussi fonctionner les trains. Dans les usines de la cité, la fabrication des armes est remplacée par celle des rails de chemin de fer. Zola décrit les trains comme « des instruments de paix et de solidarité sociale »22. L’utopie décrite par Zola s’éloigne des utopies précédant la Révolution Industrielle qui décrivaient des lieux isolés souvent représentés comme des îles exotiques ou des jardins d’Eden. L’utopie est ici globale et fondée sur la révolution des transports, c’est-à-dire sur la technologie plutôt que sur la nature.

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Panel III.F: Terroir et Patois (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Youenn Kervennic (Brown University)

Renée Altergott (Princeton University), “Musiques de terroir” During the wave of renewed interest in folklore during the nineteenth century, Jules Champfleury presents a musical map of twenty-seven regions of France, entitled Chansons populaires des provinces de France (1860). In his introduction, he acknowledges the influence of Théodore de la Villemarqué’s Barzaz Breiz, chants populaires de la Bretagne, first published in 1839. If this earlier collection continues to be a patrimonial gem in Brittany to this day, its authenticity was nonetheless called into question by Ernest Renan in 1854, due to the questionable ethnographic methods used to put these songs into writing. Renan’s criticism ultimately brought about new attention to methodology for later transcribers of Breton music such as François-Marie Luzel (Gwerziou and Soniou, 1868) and Maurice Duhamel (Musique Bretonne, 1913). In light of these developments, I will therefore examine the way in which Champfleury has chosen to represent the relationship of music to the land, or “les musiques de terroir,” in his collection. Since Champfleury has included lyrics and a piano score transcribed by J.B. Wekerlin for three songs per region, along with engravings and an ethnographical essay, his collection raises questions about language and translation, instrumentation and musical variants, and authentic performance conditions. Furthermore, his

19 Morice, Alain. “Mysticisme, scientisme et messianisme: La rédemption de la “ race ouvrière “ vue par Emile Zola “. Le Monde Diplomatique. Octobre 2002. P.24-25. 20 Case, Frederick Ivor. La Cité Idéale dans Travail d'Émile Zola. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. 21 Fabian Scharf. Émile Zola : De l'Utopisme à l'Utopie (1898-1903). Paris : Honoré Champion, 2001. 22 Zola, Emile. “Les Quatre Évangiles: Fécondité, Travail, Vérité, Justice.”. Ed. Mitterand, Henri. Oeuvres Complètes, vol.8. Paris : Nouveau Monde Editions, 2002. p.119

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 ethnographical essays reveal a keen attention to the psychology of the peasant worker. For example, he writes that the ‘noël’ song form “best characterizes the intimate mindset of the paysan” (137). 23 Focusing on the songs that specifically thematize work, such as La Chanson des Moissonneurs (Touraine) and Le Piocheur de terre (Orléans), I will investigate Champfleury’s methodology sur le terrain. How does Champfleury preserve patois in writing? How does Wekerlin account for variations in performance in his musical scores? Finally, does the act of transcribing preserve, or rather undermine, the essential truth of the peasant song?

Dominique Bauer (University of Leuven), “Terroir as a literary code. Frédéric Mistral’s Trésor du Félibrige” Between 1879 and 1886, the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral published his elaborate Provençal- French dictionary, the Trésor du Félibrige. From this treasure he and his fellow félibres could draw ammunition for the preservation of traditional, pre-industrial Provençal culture and its language. On the one hand, Mistral’s lexicographic project fits into the broader cultural need to preserve regional and local dialects in the province. Dictionaries were in this respect symptoms of the often anti- modern endeavor to safeguard the particular and unique nature of the terroir against the modern bureaucracy that had ripped apart France in ‘unnatural’ departments. Paradoxically, they were witnesses to the regionalists’ ambition to freeze lingual universes that had however never existed in these unchangeable, or even written, forms. The notion of terroir constitutes in this context a hybrid reality. It emerges from the intersection of language and literature and their particularly spatial imageries on the one hand and on the other hand its socio-cultural dimensions. This is also the case for Mistral. However, research has underlined the particularly toponymic, terroir orientated nature of Mistral’s understanding of words, traditions, expressions and narratives that pass in review in the Trésor. This makes his case all the more interesting, especially because of the way the Trésor can be understood in the larger picture of Mistral’s poetic œuvre. It is the aim of this paper to analyze the cultural and literary significance of the Trésor in terms of ‘a terroir as toponymy’ approach. This approach is understood as part and parcel of Mistral’s broader imagery of ‘terroir’ as a reality outside space and time in poetry and yet so over-abundantly connected with places, a tension that eventually may uncover a cultural aporia.

Frédéric-Gaël Theuriau (Université François Rabelais, Tours), “Lecture géopoétique de l’œuvre de Ferdinand Fauchereau” Le néologisme de Kenneth White, la textonique, est issu d’un phénomène de croisement linguistique. Il concerne les forces créatrices textuelles en rapport avec le support de la vie, la terre, s’inscrivant dans son concept géopoétique qui étudie les relations de l’Homme au monde dans l’espace de la dynamique fondamentale de la pensée littéraire, philosophique ou scientifique afin d’en communiquer le sens. Raccrocher, aux théories modernes, l’analyse des rapports qu’entretenait un écrivain bourguignon d’expression populaire avec le terroir lui évite l’écueil de l’isolement. Ferdinand Fauchereau (1838-1916), qui avait été cultivateur, tonnelier, directeur de tuilerie et agent général de la Mutuelle de Seine-et-Marne, devint un bouquiniste reconnu comme le plus érudit du département en son temps et un acteur de notables évolutions dont les ramifications dépassèrent les limites de l’Yonne, son département natal. En tant que biographe, bibliographe, historien et chansonnier, il laissa une œuvre littéraire très modeste mais exploitable. L’enjeu est de déterminer les visées géopoétiques qui se manifestent à travers ses écrits et ses actions. Une telle démarche s’inscrit, par ailleurs, dans l’histoire des représentations et de la culture.

23 “Le Noël est... une des formes de la poésie populaire qui caractérise le mieux la pensée intime du paysan” (137).

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Trois lignes de forces textoniques, ou mouvements textuels, dessinent les principales préoccupations de Fauchereau, et soulignent, autour du travail de la terre, des conseils pour les récoltes et de l’instruction des paysans, son enracinement au sol rural.

Martine Gantrel (Smith College), “Accent de terroir et patois : Proust et le discours régionaliste” Dans la Recherche, les manières de parler et les tics de langage font partie des moyens les plus rapides et les plus mémorables par lesquels le narrateur « croque » ses personnages. C’est par là aussi que celui-ci se pose en historien et spécialiste de la langue toutes les fois qu’il accompagne ces instantanés de la parole de commentaires métalinguistiques. Deux personnages en particulier lui permettent de jouer ce rôle : Françoise, la cuisinière, dont le parler provincial garde la trace de formes anciennes, et la duchesse de Guermantes dont on apprend dans Le Côté de Guermantes qu’elle roule les « r » à la façon des paysans. Etroitement associés à Combray, ces deux personnages complètent la représentation de ce lieu mythique de l’enfance et de la province en lui faisant jouer le rôle, hautement célébré par le narrateur, de berceau symbolique de la langue française. Est-ce là l’indice chez Proust d’une tentation régionaliste ? A y regarder de près, les choses sont beaucoup moins claires et c’est ce que cette communication se propose de mettre en évidence. Le va-et-vient constant que le discours métalinguistique effectue entre la synchronie et la diachronie, entre les idiolectes et « le pur parler d’autrefois », autrement dit ce « génie de la langue française » si cher à la Troisième République, entre les différences régionales et celles liées à la classe sociale, et entre la linguistique et la phonétique, a pour effet de déconstruire le mythe régionaliste de l’intérieur. Au bout du compte, ce que Françoise et Mme de Guermantes permettent de montrer chacune à leur manière, c’est comment une réflexion sur la langue mène à une appropriation de la langue et comment, au terme de celle-ci, se dessinent pour le narrateur les contours de cette « patrie intérieure » qui est la marque de tout génie artistique.

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L’heure verte

Reception at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University 6:00pm - 7:15pm

(Shuttles to this reception will leave at 5:45pm from the front door of the Biltmore and drop off on the George St. side of Brown’s main green. Shuttles will begin returning to the Biltmore at 7pm. It is a 20- minute walk from the Biltmore to the JCB library)

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Friday, October 28, 2016

Breakfast: 7:30am - 8:30am (State Suite Hallway, 2nd floor & L’Apogee, 17th floor)

Session IV: 8:30am - 10:00am

Panel IV.A: Enjeux écopoétiques chez les poètes urbains (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Julien Weber (Middlebury College)

Karen Quandt (University of Delaware), “A Watershed Poem: Baudelaire's ‘Le Cygne’ and the Hygienic Seine” While on a retreat from what he noted as Paris’s lack of “arbres” and “ciel”, Victor Hugo viewed trees during his excursions along the Rhine as inextricably intertwined with civilization’s handiwork: “La ville pousse comme une forêt” (Le Rhin, 1842). Just over a decade later, Baudelaire would similarly and famously imagine the city from the forest in his oft-cited letter to Fernand Desnoyers: “Dans le fond des bois […] je pense à nos étonnantes villes”. Yet I argue in this paper that Baudelaire’s urban poem “Le Cygne” from Les Fleurs du mal (2nd ed., 1861) is a watershed poem that diverges from Hugo’s aesthetics of a unified landscape of nature and culture. What I read as the hygienic flow of Baudelaire’s Seine leaves behind a stark yet purified urban landscape, expressed through sharp and condensed poetic language as well as sparse yet arresting visual impressions suggestive of etchings and vibrant watercolors, that suggests a veering away from Hugo’s impulse to attenuate the landscape into soft, crepuscular, and harmonious tones reminiscent of bygone pastorals. Considering how “Le Cygne” asserts an ecopoetics within the city, I show how Baudelaire envisions a post-modern conception of the urban landscape that eschews ‘going back’ to nature as a means of sustaining the environment. Baudelaire’s clearing of Hugo’s romantic fog with a “ciel ironique et cruellement bleu” at the same time frees his poems of the taint of urban and industrial pollutants. Throwing into question customary readings of Baudelaire as resolutely ‘anti-nature’, I show how the transformative healing and cleansing impact of Baudelaire’s “petit fleuve” acts as a transformative intermediary between the natural and urban environments that embraces the contemporary metropolis as part and parcel of a global ecosystem: “Jadis locale – telle rivière, tel marais – , globale maintenant – la Planète-Terre” (Michel Serres). If Hugo rued and averted the smoke stacks and factories that dotted the Rhineland, Baudelaire fully interacts with the din and dirt of his urban environment only to go on to de-smog the atmosphere through the figure of the “fertile” Seine that symbolizes the medium of his poetry.

Julien Weber (Middlebury College), “Drame astral et poétique du lieu dans ‘Conflit’ de Mallarmé” Treizième et dernier poème de Divagations, « Conflit » de Mallarmé nous invite à réfléchir sur les difficultés d’habiter « en poète » un monde dominé par l’équivalence numéraire et l’universel reportage. Le poète y évoque en effet comment sa retraite annuelle dans une maison de campagne abandonnée se trouva, un été, interrompue par la présence bruyante de chemineaux, employés à construire une ligne de chemin de fer en bordure de Seine. Bien qu’impliqué dans une sorte de lutte des classes contre ces intrus, Mallarmé s’attache pourtant à compliquer l’opposition des rôles. Le poète dans cette affaire n’est pas propriétaire et les chemineaux ne sont pas ses employés. Poète et prolétaires co-louent chacun , momentanément, une maison laissée à l’abandon, les uns utilisant son étage inférieur comme cantine et

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 l’autre son étage supérieur comme lieu de travail. Comment co-habiter dans cet espace retiré, quand l’absence de bruit est aussi essentielle au travail de l’un qu’étrangère à celui des autres ? Le conflit ne porte d’ailleurs pas seulement sur une question de cohabitation, mais aussi sur le « faire habiter » auquel chemineaux et poète œuvrent chacun à sa manière. Si le rail métallique installé par les ouvriers est voué sans équivoque à transporter les passagers d’un point à un autre du pays, qu’en est-il du drame astral imaginé par Mallarmé en conclusion du poème ? Au cours de cette communication, nous nous intéresserons à la manière dont Mallarmé s’attache, sinon à résoudre le conflit, du moins à l’inscrire dans un contexte plus vaste. Comment l’espace et le temps sont-ils configurés dans ce poème en prose ? Alors que selon les théories récentes de l’écopoétique anglo-saxonne (Jonathan Bate, Buell), ce sont avant tout les facultés mimétiques du poème qui lui garantissent le pouvoir de « chanter la terre », Mallarmé sollicite d’autres aspects formels – en particulier syntaxiques – pour donner au poème les moyens de reconfigurer notre rapport au lieu commun, à l’oikos.

Robert St. Clair (Dartmouth College), “Noël sur terre: Lyrical Material(ism) in Rimbaud (et cie.)”

Lauren Weingarden (Florida State University), “Naturalizing Modernity: Baudelaire’s Embodied Neural Aesthetics” This paper examines how Baudelaire’s encounters with nature are filtered through his knowledge of the physiology of the nervous system. As I have previously argued, Baudelaire’s textual references to the nervous system mark his knowledge of nineteenth-century brain science. These scientific markers provide the basis for explaining his aesthetic of rupture and defamiliarization as consonant with modernity and formulated in “The Painter of Modern Life.” However, for Baudelaire, the multisensory urban stimuli threatened his nervous system to the point of madness, a loss of control which he associated with hashish. In this paper, I turn to Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Artist’s Confiteor” to argue that Baudelaire’s familiarity with brain science also informs his encounters with nature as an equally harmful assault on his nerve system. Here Baudelaire describes how external stimuli --colors, sounds, movements and spatial vastness– if left unchecked, may cause painful neural “vibrations”: “When energy combines with sensual delight, it causes discomfort and a distinct suffering. My too strained nerves no longer produce anything but clamorous and painful vibrations.” In the second part of this paper, I will extend this model of embodied neural aesthetics to Baudelaire’s art criticism of the Romantic painters he praised. In Corot’s and Delacroix’s painting techniques, Baudelaire found the means of expression though which the sensory vibrations of nature’s phenomenon could be brought under control and, thereby, circumvent “the artist’s protests in terror, before defeat” in his duel with the beautiful in nature.

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Panel IV.B: Dedans/Dehors : Figures du territoire sandien (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Martine Reid (Université de Lille 3)

Martine Reid (Université de Lille 3), “Pour (ne pas) en finir avec le Berry” L’association entre George Sand et le Berry est au centre de la réception de son œuvre ; elle constitue aussi sa limite, quand on sait que les romans champêtres ont, dès après la mort de l’écrivaine, servi d’indices à l’œuvre entier, ramené à quelques aimables fictions pour enfants. Le propos voudrait revenir

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 sur les raisons particulières, historiques et formelles, qui ont conduit Sand à ancrer une partie de son œuvre dans un territoire particulier, ainsi que les effets multiples de cet ancrage sur sa pratique littéraire. Que signifie le Berry dans cet ensemble, quel place occupe-t-il, quel sens l’écrivaine lui donne-t-il ? Peut-on imaginer aujourd’hui de reléguer le Berry au rayon des accessoires de la figuration romanesque et dramaturgique de Sand tant il a servi? Autant de questions que le propos tentera de prendre en compte dans une reconsidération générale du sens de la référence « Berry ».

Anne McCall (Binghamton University, SUNY), “Global Entry: Refugees and Identity Politics in George Sand's Novels” From the 1832 Indiana to the 1876 Marianne, Sand’s novels showcase boundaries that cause movements of neighbors, fellow members of a nation, and colonized peoples to be synonymous with transgression. These same barriers generate a well-known cast of enforcers -- family members, armed guards, patrollers, police officers, and customs officials -- who stand watch over doors, fences, walls, and fortresses only to find barriers breached and identities questioned. This frequently chaotic backdrop creates a context for reflections on the tension between desires for territorial separatism and the very possibility of future identities. This paper postulates that George Sand’s narratives sketch the contours of what Arjun Appadurai claims our world needs today: “a new relationship between plot and character in modern nation-states and a world of forced exits, where there is yet no ethical foundation for seeing traumatic movement as the pivot of a serious identity for some citizens.“ The use of migrant narratives in Sand’s corpus serve as a corrective for essentialising narratives of nationalism and as a means for postulating new spaces of becoming.

Damien Zanone (Université Catholique de Louvain), “La leçon des romans ‘hors sol’ de George Sand” La communication prendra pour objet les romans « hors-sol » de George Sand, identifiés par opposition à ses romans « terriens » que sont les romans champêtres et plus largement ceux dont l’action se situe en Berry ou dans le centre de la France (comme Valentine, Le Compagnon du Tour de France, Le Péché de monsieur Antoine). Les romans « hors-sol » installent la représentation dans des territoires que Sand ne connaît que par les livres et par l’imagination (Le Piccinino en Sicile, L’Homme de neige en Suède, Consuelo en Bohême, Kourroglou dans l’Orient turc). La réflexion se construira à travers l’analyse du Piccinino et de L’Homme de neige : quels effets produit chez Sand le fait de produire du roman détaché de territoires connus ? Comment se fait l’appropriation fictionnelle de nouveaux espaces ? On se demandera si le romanesque ne prospère pas de façon privilégiée « hors-sol », à l’occasion d’expériences d’imagination qui semblent à l’état pur puisque délivrée de la contrainte de représenter une terre. Et s’il est tentant de répondre oui à cette question, il faudra préciser la nature de ce romanesque en revisitant la dichotomie entre un idéal (l’ailleurs) et un réel (le territoire proche). N’y a-t-il de « terre » que le proche, support de racines et objet d’observation ?

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Panel IV.C: Conquered Territories (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Justin Izzo (Brown University)

Mary Harper (Princeton University), “Debris of Napoleon’s ‘Expédition de l’Egypte’: Discursive Afterlives in 19th-Century France” Napoleon’s colonial project, the “Expédition de l’Egypte,” (1798-1801) was a military disaster, but its afterlives proliferated in an astonishing array of textual and visual artifacts throughout the early decades

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 of nineteenth-century France, launched by the work of Napoleon’s army of savants, the monumental 23 volume Description de l’Egypte (1809-28). Jean-Baptiste Fourier, Secretary to Napoleon’s Institut d’Egypte, outlines in his Préface historique to the Description an ordered, colonialist vision of the country as a fertile garden that, under French control, will nurture the world—and especially France. Edward Said has called the Description a “universe of discourse” that gave birth to, appropriated, and dominated France’s “Orient” through a language of “upgraded descriptive realism.” However, my paper highlights alternative discursive worlds that confront and evoke France's Egypt in this period: texts and images haunted by Napoleon’s colonial program but inhabiting the interstices of Said’s closed model of descriptive realism, or exploding its boundaries. In the Description's two volumes of engraved plates that accompany the texts on L'Histoire Naturelle, for example, the Institut's artists render the animals, insects, landscape, water, plants of this “garden” in such meticulously stunning visual detail that their enormous scale, pictorial and hyperrealist representation, give them a mesmerizing life of their own (sensuous dates, luscious lotus) that far exceeds the Linnaean taxonomies of the naturalists' descriptions. While Vivant Denon, the artist-writer embedded with Napoleon’s army during the campaign in Egypt, structures his own narrative of travel, Voyage dans la basse et la haute Egypte (1802), around representations of man- made landscapes—brutal campaign battles relieved by visits to "timeless" archaeological sites—these discursive “scenes” are interspersed with Denon’s disoriented, embodied encounters with Egypt’s natural world and its unfamiliar temporalities, “une nature vraie et tout à fait nouvelle,” oscillating between evocations of dynamic, generative forms of life along the Nile and degenerative or moribund life forms in the desert, a place that in its limitless, featureless absence of being confounds the capacity of the artist's imagination, and the narrator's language, to represent it at all.

Pierre Andre (New York University), “Lamartine’s Partition Plan for Syria: Towards a Colonial City-of-Refuge?” When Lamartine visited the “Orient” for the first time in the 1830s, he traveled in Greater Syria as a direct observer of the military conflicts between the Egyptian army of Mehmet-Ali and the weakened power of the Ottoman Empire. Well aware of the politics of his time, he was convinced of the ineluctable collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and thought about the benefits European powers could reap from its fall. Almost a century before the dismantlement of the Empire after World War One, he already proposed his own partition plan for Syria in the “supplément politique” of his Voyage en Orient. At a time when France was an emerging “nation”, in the wake of the Revolution of 1830, Lamartine’s project of settlers’ colonies in Greater Syria informed the way he thought about nationalism in its relation to the land. His project had a peculiarity: it didn’t plan to colonize existing cities, but to build new “free European cities”. These new cities, he didn’t doubt, would attract and shelter local populations fleeing the anarchy and instability that would certainly result from the collapse of the Ottoman power – and effectively achieve the saint-simonian project of fusion between East and West. But what conception of the land, in its relations to nationalism and identity, is at stake in this notion of a shelter city welcoming refugees on their own land, but under European rule? This paper proposes to analyze Lamartine’s colonial project as the overlap of imperial colonial policies and the philosophical notion of the “ville-refuge”, from Kant’s treaty setting the standards for perpetual peace to Derrida’s preoccupation with recent refugee crises, and to question the ambiguous status and validity of a “colonial city-of-refuge”.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Pramila Kolekar (Boston College), “Chimeric victory: Staging French Supremacy in Étienne de Jouy’s Tippô-Saëb” Ne combattons-nous pas l’ennemi des Français? C’est ici, cher Lalley, qu’un jour, vengeant la terre, Un bras victorieux doit frapper l’Angleterre. (Act II, Scene IV) These lines are spoken by Raymond, the hero of Étienne de Jouy’s tragedy, Tippô-Saëb. They illustrate the bitter hostility between France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both on the continent and in India. Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore and obdurate enemy of the British, sought help from the French in defeating the English. The French, beleaguered with their own problems on the continent, failed to aid him. The Fourth Anglo-Mysore War saw the death of Tipu Sultan and the establishment of British control over the region. Jouy, however, refashions historical events to present a glorified image of France. In Tippô-Saëb, Raymond represents a France that is rational, honorable, and scrupulously righteous. He acts as the voice of reason to Tipu’s bellicosity, decries the treachery of the British and is a humanitarian savior of Tipu’s children. Jouy fashions a moral victory for France over the ruins of the fort of Seringapatnam. He presents the British as ruthless exploiters; the Indians as brave but doomed. Only the French acquit themselves creditably in the affair. In his rewriting of history, Jouy changes Tipu’s treacherous minister from a Muslim to a Hindu for the sake of dramatic value. The playwright molds historical events like clay. He sculpts images of the British, the French and the Indians that grant the French an opportunity to recoup their pride and establish their superiority. Displacing the action from the real world to the theater and situating it in far-away India allow Jouy to craft his illusionary victory.

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Panel IV.D: Zola, La Terre I (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Éléonore Reverzy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3)

Nicolas Bourguinat (Université de Strasbourg), “Jean Macquart, un soldat-laboureur entre guerres et paix” Ancien soldat venu dans la Beauce pour s'établir, Jean Macquart choisi de se réengager à la fin de La Terre, à l'annonce de la guerre franco-allemande. "Il la défendrait, la terre de France !"... Doté d'un passé qui lui vaut un certain prestige auprès des paysans, où se mêlent des échos de diverses violences de guerre, (et quelques fils de ce roman des guerres d'Italie que Zola avait envisagé pour son cycle), le personnage a aussi un avenir, que le lecteur des Rougon-Macquart connaîtra dans La Débâcle : celui du brave sous- officier, l'homme du peuple devenu sergent, incarnant la "bonne race" par opposition à un etit crevé tel que Maurice, et tenant finalement le rôle du soldat de l'ordre. Pourtant, ce guerrier qui montre résolution et force d'âme est un mou et un faible : la Cognette, qui se donne à tous, est presque obligée de le prendre de force ; ses assauts laissent Françoise complètement indifférente ; et il se retrouve humilié et chassé de chez lui, avec juste quelques hardes, à la fin d'un roman qu'il avait ouvert avec le beau geste du semeur. Objet de sympathie mais aussi de dérision, car il fait rire à ses dépens, et jusqu'aux paysans dont il défend virilement le sol, à la fin du roman, alors que leur principal souci est d'échapper aux gendarmes et de contourner le tirage au sort, bref de fuir leur devoir envers la patrie. Aussi peu crédible dans la paix qu'il a été solide dans le combat. ce soldat-laboureur n'est-il pas à sa manière une réinvention du personnage de Chauvin, qui a fait la fortune d'un certain théâtre sous la Restauration et la monarchie de Juillet ?

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Chantal Pierre (Université de Nantes), “La Terre, une question de ‘grandeur’” Dans l’Ebauche de son roman, Zola écrivait : « La Terre, c’est l’héroïne de mon livre. Un personnage énorme, toujours présent, emplissant le livre. L’homme, le paysan, n’est qu’un insecte qui s’agite sur elle. » La poétique du roman est placée sous le signe de la dépersonnalisation : la terre ne peut être montrée qu’au prix d’une réduction de ses personnages, même si l’un d’entre eux s’appelle « la Grande », devenant au fil des descriptions non plus des figures, mais de minces « traits », de simples « raies », pures et vaines abstractions graphiques. La Terre semble ainsi partir d’une insuffisance irréductible du personnage : comme individu, mais aussi comme idée. « Aucun ne serait assez grand » pour incarner la terre, note le romancier. Nous examinerons les soubassements idéologiques et les implications poétiques de ce principe d’écriture.

Jessica Tanner (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Weather Systems: Ecologies of Scale in Zola’s La Terre” In his 1845 study Des changements dans le climat de la France, Dr. Joseph-Jean-Nicolas Fuster asserts that France’s climate is changing, citing the combined action of natural phenomena and developments in “l’industrie de l’homme” as causes of this “révolution météorologique.” Though Fuster’s theory was met with skepticism, its connection of local and global phenomena and attentiveness to the evolution of spaces over time imply an expansive sense of scale and interconnectedness that was increasingly associated with climate in nineteenth-century France. From its opening pages, Émile Zola’s La Terre (1887) similarly engages the reader’s attention to plays of perception and scale: a close-up of Jean rhythmically sowing seeds yields first to a wider view of his fellow workers and finally to “de simples traits” that merge indistinguishably with the lines on the page, before ultimately zooming out further to a holistic vision of the Earth at the novel’s close. These shifts of spatial and temporal scale are frequently signaled by references to the weather, which as Lowell Duckert has observed, “resists drawing the separations between climate and culture, life and matter, and subject and object.” As a localized event, weather reinforces divisions and conditions plot(s); as climate, it serves to unite disparate figures and to connect individual parcels of land to the Earth beyond, an identitary and spatial expansion that pushes back against the territorial morcellement that is the novel’s thematic core. Tracing the interplay between weather, climate, and narrative in La Terre, I argue that the novel’s material and metaphorical échelles invite readers to make connections across space and time and across the volumes of the Rougon-Macquart, reconfiguring the rigid boundaries that delineate both la terre and La Terre as distinct ecosystems.

Mihaela Marin (University of South Alabama), “Terre et tragédie chez Zola : une association dissonante ?” Trop souvent, à l’époque de Zola comme dans la nôtre, on a identifié dans La Terre de Zola une sorte de Roi Lear moderne, capable de transposer les thèmes de la tragédie shakespearienne sur le terrain du roman naturaliste. Mais cette affirmation soulève plus de questions qu’elle n’en éclaire. D’abord, dans quelle mesure pourrait-on parler de spectacle tragique dans la vision du monde de l'écrivain naturaliste? Peut-on attribuer une fonction tragique au milieu sans trop créer de dissonances conceptuelles entre les références contemporaines de l'œuvre et les anciennes exigences formelles du genre? Dans ma communication, je voudrais démontrer que la représentation de la vie rurale que Zola crée dans La Terre témoigne plutôt d’un substrat archaïque de pensée et de comportement spécifiques aux formes primitives des rituels communautaires de la Grèce préhellénique. En prenant comme point de repère les portraits et les voix des personnages, je me propose d’analyser le caractère spectaculaire des événements au moyen de quelques accessoires scéniques privilégiés, lesquels relancent le jeu des

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 significations intertextuelles sur le terrain de la représentation théâtrale. En effet, une architecture scénique rigoureusement construite structure la scénographie des voix et des visages. Ainsi faudra-t-il remarquer le potentiel dramatique que Zola saisit dans les voix féminines (les rumeurs, les cris, les lamentations), archaïques et rituelles, où il est à même de recréer la scène ancestrale de l’émotivité ; alors qu’il attribue à celle des hommes les commentaires, les décisions concernant la question sociale, la guerre. Une attention spéciale sera donc accordée aux rituels mis en scène à partir de sons, de cris et de lamentations, ainsi qu’à leur distribution à travers la matière narrative du roman. C’est un éclairage de nature théâtrale qui révèle un Zola scénographe, attentif à la mise en scène des conduites et des mentalités, à leur manifestation rituelle, à leur expression tragique.

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Panel IV.E: Ecocritical Futures (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Daryl Lee (Brigham Young University)

Marie Sanquer (Bryn Mawr College), “La terre telle qu’elle sera en l’an 3000 : Le romantisme écocritique d’Emile Souvestre” Le Monde tel qu’il sera en l’an 3000 (1846) d’Emile Souvestre est un roman futuriste considéré comme l’un des premiers ouvrages de science fiction et la première dystopie. Dans un contexte d’industrialisation croissante où prédominent les idées positivistes de Saint-Simon et de Comte sur le progrès, le roman de Souvestre cherche à montrer les dérives que pourraient entraîner cette logique positiviste poussée à son comble. En faisant voyager deux personnages romantiques du XIXème siècle dans le temps jusqu’en l’an 3000, Souvestre dépeint l’effroi de ces deux contemporains fictifs à la découverte d’un monde dominé par une froide logique calculatrice. Dans cette communication, je propose de faire une lecture écocritique de l’un des thèmes principaux du roman : la mécanisation du vivant. Si le roman n’anticipe pas encore certaines grandes questions écologiques qui vont commencer à se poser à partir de la deuxième moitié du XXème siècle, comme l’épuisement des ressources naturelles et la pollution, il pose d’importantes questions sur le futur de la nature, et ces dernières entrent en résonnance avec les débats contemporains de l’époque de Souvestre. Le monde du futur tel qu’il est représenté pose le problème de la définition du vivant (humain, animal, végétal) sur le plan juridique comme sur le plan culturel et il permet d’anticiper des problèmes liés à la territorialité relatifs à l’exploitation des ressources, à la propriété individuelle et à la propriété collective, notamment en ce qui concerne l’aménagement du territoire. La description d’une nature dystopique dans le futur permet à Souvestre de réhabiliter la conception romantique de la nature qui, contrairement à la logique de profit appelée à diriger les hommes du futur, réaffirme l’importance de la gratuité du rapport romantique entre l’homme et la nature.

Caroline Grubbs (Southern Methodist University), “Setting Foot in the Past: Albert Robida and the Futuristic National Park” In his 1892 roman d’anticipation, La vie électrique, Albert Robida depicts the world of the 1950s as hyper-connected and industrialized, shaped by the technological imperatives and frenetic pace of modern “electric life.” Urban spaces are hyperbolically overbuilt, fenced in from above by a latticework of telephone wires and undermined from below by underground infrastructure; rural spaces are increasingly annexed into the urban sprawl. The futuristic society of the novel reflects this preference for

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 the artificial over the natural: laboratories produce synthetic foodstuffs, chemical weapons, and even human beings, grown entirely in incubators. In this landscape of accelerated industrialization, Robida establishes one territory as distinct from both futuristic space and time. The novel’s protagonists elect to honeymoon in the Parc national d’Armorique, a remote preservation in the Brittany which is governed by a strict set of rules: the society within its boundaries has chosen to remove itself from the progressive flow of historical time and to exist in a non-evolving, fixed past, namely, the nineteenth century. While the park functions as a refuge and as a site of living memory and cultural heritage, it is also a tourist destination and a deliberately-constructed historical re-enactment society. In this paper, I propose to read Robida’s speculative vision of la terre as an engagement with the rise in heritage tourism and historical conservation during the fin de siècle, trends which, as Stéphane Gerson and Elizabeth Emery have shown, were fueled by a concern for the way in which temporality (the past) and space (historical sites, both local and national) intersect. Through close readings of Robida’s novel as well as his caricatures of the regional past in Brittany, this paper explores the tension between natural and artificial worlds that shapes Robida’s images of futuristic historical immersion and, by extension, the cultural politics of historical preservation in late 19th-century France.

Audrey Doussot (University of Texas at Austin), “Vue du ciel, vue de l’esprit; or when Grandville, Verne and Nadar Looked at the Earth from Above” In the middle of the 19th century, the earth was still an object of both imaginative fantasy and actual physical exploration. Technological and scientific progress allowed major developments in transportation which, in turn, affected perceptions of space, landscape and territory. On the ground, the train and its unprecedented speed modified perceptions of distances on a horizontal level. As for the sky, it had not lost its appeal: experiments in air transportation testify to a strong interest in travelling vertically, high above the ground, with space travel as the ultimate dream. The materials examined in this paper – Grandville’s 1844 illustrated satirical text Un Autre monde, Jules Verne’s 1863 novel Cinq semaines en ballon and Nadar’s passionate incursions into “autolocomotion aérienne” and aerial photography – all reflect this fascination for heights and the unfamiliar perspectives that a heightened position can offer onto the earth. In some instances, the vertical distance is purely investigatory as it allows the elevated viewer to stand back and get a wider and more comprehensive look at things and people; in others, it becomes critical, if not satirical, as it reveals the grotesque peculiarities and shocking aberrations of a society that is being affected by multiple changes. Observing, recording, mapping, comparing, evaluating and judging appear, in this context, to be essential functions in these cultural products that focus on vision and the visualization of the earth as an object of scrutiny. This paper thus seeks to analyze the articulation between air travel and the emergence of new modes of vision in nineteenth-century France by examining how the possibility for elevated vision generated new representations of terrestrial space and civilization, of territories and populations, in literature and visual culture.

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Break: 10:00am - 10:30am (State Suite Hallway, 2nd floor & L’Apogee, 17th floor)

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Friday, October 28, 2016 Session V: 10:30am - 12:00pm

Panel V.A: The Parnasse contemporain, 150 Years Later: New Topographies (State Suite A) Chair: Nicolas Valazza (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Helen Abbott (University of Birmingham), “Le Parnasse contemporain: A National Poetics?” By including Baudelaire’s ‘A une Malabraise’ in the 1866 Parnasse contemporain, the grounds for inspiration for poetry are called into question. The poetic voice asks ‘Pourquoi veux-tu voir notre France?’ (l. 17), and Baudelaire goes on to characterise French soil as ‘ce pays trop peuplé’ (l. 18). This paper examines the concept of the apparently ‘overpopulated’ nation of France, to question whether – with the inclusion of 37 different poets, and 200 different poems – the French poetic landscape is, itself, overpopulated. It explores what a ‘national poetics’ would look like, in the context of poems which turn (still) towards the exotic, and which – by their collective title – nominally draw their inspiration from the sacred Greek mountain far removed from French soil. The paper will cross-examine poems from the collection which query the French land as a viable source for poetry – from Henri Cazalis’ ‘A la nature’ which equates the personified female persona of Nature to a ‘reine d’Orient’ (l. 1) to Philoxène Boyer’s ‘Concepion’ which suggests that the poetic voice is ‘converti aux douceurs du ciel espagnol’. (ll. 12). In so doing, it seeks to evaluate whether or not the poetic endeavour here promotes or undermines the concept of a national poetics.

Nicolas Valazza (Indiana University, Bloomington), “L’Enterrement des dieux et le désenchantement de la nature du premier Parnasse à Mallarmé” Dès la parution du premier Parnasse contemporain en 1866, le tableau de la poétique parnassienne qui a été brossé s’est le plus souvent réduit à un paysage caricatural peuplé de dieux aux noms archaïsants (Héré, Hèphaïstos, Phoïbos, etc.), d’où tout sentiment humain semble avoir été banni. Or si les dieux païens sont bien présents dans le premier Parnasse, ils y semblent tout près d’expirer, s’ils ne sont déjà morts ou exilés, comme l’illustrent, entre autres poèmes, « L’Exil des dieux » de Banville, « Prométhée » de Heredia et « La Dernière Vision » de Leconte de Lisle ; de sorte qu’en enterrant les dieux, les Parnassiens ont sapé l’un des fondements de la poésie lyrique, au point de poser le cadre d’une nature désenchantée. Dans ma communication, je me propose d’examiner dans quelle mesure ce désenchantement de la nature contient les germes de cette poétique négative qui allait bouleverser les assises du lyrisme dans les dernières décennies du siècle, de Verlaine à Mallarmé en passant par Rimbaud. J’analyserai en particulier la réception des poètes parnassiens dans Les Dieux antiques de Mallarmé, un ouvrage pédagogique qui, tout en fournissant un répertoire des mythes de l’Antiquité, procède surtout à la démystification des dieux païens, sur les traces de la mythologie comparée de Max Müller. Or Mallarmé avait publié dans le Parnasse contemporain le « Fragment d’une étude scénique ancienne d’un poëme de Hérodiade », dans lequel son héroïne se dépouille de sa légende (son mythos), voire de son humanité, jusqu’à n’apparaître que comme le reflet de l’environnement textuel qui lui donne lieu. Aussi la « scène » d’Hérodiade devient- elle le prototype d’un paysage poétique renouvelé, qui abolit tout référent externe (le mythe, la nature) pour se fonder sur un rapport spéculaire s’établissant entre le poète, la page, le poème et son héroïne.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

David Evans (University of St. Andrews), “The Rhythmical Landscapes of Parnassus: Le Parnasse contemporain as Park, Garden and Wilderness”

In a recent article proposing an ecocritical approach to translation studies, Clive Scott argues that ‘reading is in itself an ecological activity, is living-in-an-environment, where environment is to be understood as the continuous texturing of the life-dynamic and thus something which fully incorporates ecologies of all kinds, and of all kinds of perceptual/conceptual contact’.24 In C19th French poetry, the rhythmical nature of this texturing evolves dramatically, and the three volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain, appearing between 1866 and 1876, embody a critical tension between the regular metres and fixed forms of tradition, and the vers libéré of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Banville. In this paper I will explore the formal textures of this new Parnassus which constitute remappings of literary space, textual landscapes ranging from the well-ordered park or garden, to the sprawling, untamed forest or wilderness. Since natural imagery is a constant presence throughout the three volumes, it is as if, against the backdrop of the industrial revolution and a rural exodus, the striking changes wrought upon the habitat of the French people are reflected in the rhythms, by turns comforting and familiar, or strange and disconcerting, of the poetic text itself. I will suggest that, for a publication intended to represent the cutting edge of poetic production in France, much of its formal texturing is curiously conservative, and already by the 1880s, will seem almost archaic in its rhythms and rhymes, in comparison to the poetry of Rimbaud or Laforgue. As a snapshot of the poetic landscape, therefore, the Parnasse contemporain finds itself caught in precisely that tension between tradition and progress, the past and modernity, the rural and the urban, which characterises much of the French nineteenth century.

Erin Edgington (University of Michigan), “Uncharted Territory: Myths, Monsters and Modernity in Villiers’ “Esquisse à la manière de Goya” and Goya’s Caprichos”

In Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s “Esquisse à la manière de Goya,” metaphor and allegory collide in the image of the train. The poem is replete with references to macabre and fantastical beings that mimic the appearance of the train as it winds its way through the countryside. As it shifts between various identities, the locomotive is in turn a Cyclops, a centaur, a dragon, a Hydra, a monster, and an itinerant hell peopled with demons. Through all of these transformations, the metallic revolutions of the train’s moving parts and the deafening sounds it emits as it travels along the tracks recall the reader to the present day, balancing the poet’s many allusions to a mythical past with modern technology. Vivified by Villiers’ abundant comparisons, the train stands out against the silent natural landscape and, by the end of the text, becomes synonymous not only with technological progress, but also with social progress as Villiers envisions a utopic future in which the globe will be encircled by newly constructed railroads ensuring liberty for all. Building upon the text’s metaphorically rich foundation, the socially progressive envoi with which it concludes suggests the possibility of an allegorical reading of the poem comparable to the allegorical interpretations sometimes made of Goya’s Caprichos, themselves overrun by monsters. This paper identifies parallels between Villiers’ characterization of the train as a democratizing monster and the monstrous figures that appear in Goya’s etchings. In so doing, it seeks to highlight “Esquisse à la manière de Goya” as a poetic work that is emblematic of the ways in which Villiers’ oeuvre, like Goya’s, straddles opposing aesthetics.

24 Clive Scott, ‘Translating the Nineteenth Century: A Poetics of Eco-Translation’, in Ecopoetics / L’Ecopoétique, ed. by Daniel Finch-Race and Julien Weber, special issue of Dix-Neuf 19/3 (Nov. 2015), 285-302 (286).

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

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Panel V.B: Geography and Gender (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Dorothy Kelly (Boston University)

Mark Cladis (Brown University), “Rousseau in the Long Century: Julie and the Precarious Work of Alpine Geography & Mountain Manners”

My paper explores the profound shift in European sensibilities that are manifested in Rousseau’s Julie and its influence in such 19th century Romantic authors as Victor Hugo and George Sand in France, Dorothy and William Wordsworth in Britain, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the U.S. Rousseau’s most important political, aesthetic, environmental, and religious vision and fantasy is found not in the social institutions of Social Contract but rather in la terre—specifically, the alpine geography— of Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. In his famous epistolary novel, alpine geography and Clarens’s mountain manners (nature and culture) do not fight and struggle against each other—as in most of Rousseau’s other works—but rather they support and augment each other. And in this fusion of land and culture in Julie (the novel and the character), Rousseau brought about a transformation of Western aesthetic and religious sensibilities as well as notions of work and the rural—all in response to modernization, industrialization, and nascent capitalism (for “Rousseau capitalism’s most perceptive critic”). Moreover, the combination of land and culture in Julie produces an environmental vision of a household economy embedded in a larger economy of the workings and ecosystems of the natural world. The alpine geography and mountain manners of Julie’s Clarens incarnate Rousseau's deepest fantasy and his greatest attempt at the precarious balance between the natural and the social. Julie expresses Rousseau’s hope in a natural sociability—a concept that would be deeply influential in 19th century texts—where artifice and nature are so intertwined that it is impossible to determine where one begins and the other ends. And women are essential to this fantasy, for Julie—like her Elysium , her hidden garden—becomes artifice and nature joined in one person. Her transformation, however, is possible only by the work of that central agent, the land—by alpine geography informing mountain manners. Yet in the end, not even alpine geography can sustain the precarious balance between the natural and the social. Tragically, it must collapse—as must Julie herself. Once again, women are sacrificed in Western imagination. These themes are explored in my account of Rousseau and the long century.

Sharon Johnson (Virginia Tech), “Terre as Nature and Homeland: Essentialist Constructions and Subversions of Rape”

In his 1915-16 conference “On Femininity” Freud maps out the destiny of young girls and boys, replicating essentialist views that have existed since Aristotle wherein one’s biology determines one’s socio-sexual development. Girls, “naturally” passive, weak, and inferior will peak at age 30 while boys, active, strong and superior will evolve throughout their lifetime. These essentialist binaries had great currency in the 19th century, for example in Virley’s 1823 and 1844 philosophical and physiological essays on “Woman” and his views on genus (Paliyenko). This paper will analyze how three narratives of rape in France’s canard sanglants (sensationalized news reports, printed only when heinous crimes occurred) from 1880, 1880-82 and 1885 reinforced and also problematized these gendered notions of femininity. In Horrible Crime de Houldizy : Viol et assassinat d’une enfant de 10 ans and Le Criminel de l’Ile d’Oleron, bucolic scenes of nature serve as back drops for sexual violence. Nature, first depicted as a perfect site for boys and girls to play, gather fruit, and traverse to see one’s brother, prove to be particularly

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 dangerous. The canards sanglants employ essentialist gender traits for boys and girls –wherein the girls are weaker, slower runners, more unsuspecting and thus more vulnerable to sexual assault. They become objects of their aggressor’s violence. Yet the narratives’ moralistic endings provide redemption because both criminals are punished and executed. In the third canard sanglant, Le Bal de Strasbourg ou le viol de l’Alsacienne, signed Villmer and recited by Laroche, the setting is the Franco-Prussian war wherein an Alsacian female character and her brother are attacked in their family home by a German soldier. This is one of thirty patriotic tales that the songwriter wrote on the theme of the Franco-Prussian war. In this canard, the inner sanctum of the home cannot protect these two family members; the female character experiences a veritable crime of war: she was raped and her brother killed by the enemy. The rape of the Alsacian symbolically represents the conquering and control of France’s Alsace-Loraine. It represents a personal and collective injury. A typical plot is reversed wherein she, rather than a male, must seek familial and national vengeance for the crimes committed and does so at the Strasbourg Ball at which the German solder attends. An active women as killer is justified when constructed an act of heroism and one of national duty for one’s homeland. Moreover, Villemer creates a vengeance-seeking female who is not masculinized (like the fictitious Paris commune pétroleuses) and who possesses typical masculine traits such as strength, reason, ruse, action and justice. She plays the roles of lawyer, judge and executioner. For France, she acts nobly and with courage; however as Gayle Gullickson has argued in Unruly Women of Paris, “the willingness of women to participate in the taking of life violated bourgeois conceptualizations of woman’s nature and called into question a basic assumption of nineteenth-century Western civilization—that aggression, bellicosity, and courage were masculine, not feminine, attributes.” [. . .] Hence, while Villmer has a woman carry out the very masculine roles of Castilian vengeance and honor, his depictions echo a type of feminine heroism that ruins or sullies the heroine at the same time. Would readers have condemned her murder of the enemy for national retribution? We will see that certain Maupassantian literary conventions are prevalent (« Le Lit 29 » or « Boule de Suife ») wherein irony destabilizes a uniform reading of this story. Problematized gender representations would have been read as possibly incredulous, much like the above caricature of the imaginary battalion of female fighters in Rosambeau’s 1870 lithograph entitled Les Amazones de la Seine where it was unfathomable that women could fight with guns instead of their beguiling charms. Writing with or against essentialist norms of femininity ends in the same tragic demise in France’s natural expanses or private home. While men restored order and civility to the towns where the first two rapes occurred, at the Comédie Française or the café-concert where one would have heard the recitation of Villmer’s Bal de Strasbourg, the public might not have accepted the singular act of avenging war-time rape through murder. As a collective, patriotic narrative of national vengeance perhaps the public would have applauded the story’s end even if national pride was restored by a young, desirable, vengeful sister of France. Would the public wish to herald her as a hero or send her to the gallows as her ultimate fate? In the 1870s and 80s, rape was legally justified in contexts of war.

Jann Matlock (University College London), “This Land is Her Land: Women’s Nature, Geography, and Spatial Politics in Napoleonic Era Portraits” What can we learn about women’s relationship to the world from the background landscapes evoked in post-revolutionary painted portraits? What do such landscapes, even when they seem generic or sketchy, tell us about women’s relationship to space, ownership, and the public sphere? This paper begins at the intersection of four paintings. In the first, Marie-Denise Villers’s 1802 Etude de femme d’après nature, the painting’s subject looms against an arid landscape that recedes into a hilly distance. In the second from 1805, amateur artist Natalie de Noailles is depicted in her hunting

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 costume on her family’s property. In the third, a portrait miniature from the early nineteenth century, Étienne Charles LeGuay offers the mise en abyme a woman who displays the sketch she has made in a landscape similar to the one behind her. Finally, in Jacques-Augustin Pajou’s 1814 Portrait of the Duval Sisters, one sister sketches the natural world as the other leans over her shoulder--and the family home peeps through the trees. On the surface, each of these portraits evokes the limited range of possibilities for women’s public occupation of space in the Napoleonic period. As schools purporting to offer artistic education to girls burgeoned in the two decades post-Thermidor, the revolutionary breakthroughs that have welcomed women into the Salon and even Academy art courses seem to have dissipated. Do these portraits really recast these women’s appearances as only decorative or “agreeable“? Is their artistry just another pastime to keep them busy before they wed, or do women like those in Redouté’s botanical drawing classes have nature to claim beyond propriety? This paper complicates this account of the limited post-revolutionary spaces of women to argue that several remarkable shifts in the Napoleonic era’s conception of geography, cartography, and landscape architecture made it impossible to imagine women’s representational loci as just for show. Reading women’s nature through late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography lessons will raise questions about how women quite literally owned space. A further painting by Pajou will hold important keys to the imaginary--and real--atlases that propelled women into new spaces, new spheres, even new worlds.

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Panel V.C: Disputed Ground: Theater and War (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Susan McCready (University of South Alabama)

Michelle Cheyne (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth), “Maîtres de la Terre dans l’univers théâtral : les mises en scène à grand spectacle des désastres naturels aux marches militaires” Entre 1800 et 1850, les entrepreneurs dramatiques ont recours au grand spectacle sur les théâtres de boulevard à Paris pour mettre en scène la Terre indomptable (éruptions volcaniques, tremblements de terre, déluges) et les terres conquises (batailles sur terre et mer, scènes historiques, entrées triomphales). Cette communication interroge les innovations scéniques et moyens traditionnels exploités pour représenter la terre et éblouir le public. L’analyse suggère que ces œuvres soulignent la diversité caractérisant la planète et l’impératif de la discipliner pour faire règner l’ordre. Cette étude des effets spéciaux cherche à situer les particularités des mises en scène des forces de la nature et forces militaires dans cette première moitié du XIXe siècle (e.g. Pixerécourt, Dennery, Cuvelier) dans un trajectoire plus large des représentations spectaculaires de la terre pour mieux comprendre l’évolution des mises en scène du monde ainsi que la place du metteur en scène comme créateur artistique dans l’histoire théâtrale mise en avant avec force dernièrement dans les travaux de Roxane Martin.

Colin Foss (Austin College), “Setting Horace in Alsace: Corneille and Nationalism during the Franco-Prussian War” On September 4, 1870, the Prussian army captured Napoléon III in Sedan, but even as a new French republic was declared in Paris, enemy troops encircled the capital resulting in a four-month siege. As the art historian Hollis Clayson remarks, this foundational moment in French history was most interesting not for the siege itself, but for the total transformation of everyday life in Paris. In this talk, I will specifically address how Parisian theaters convinced the public that spectacle had a place in war, and that theaters could become sites of public assembly in service to the new French republic. Shrugging off their reputation as Second Empire temples of pleasure, Parisian theaters re-oriented their performances and their physical

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 spaces to the war effort. Transforming into ambulances, theaters like the Odéon or the Comédie-Française cared for hundreds of wounded soldiers, whose cries were sometimes heard during performances. Plays written quickly and that spoke to the present moment (pièces de circonstance) ignited political arguments in the public sphere. One such play, Le Forgeron de Châteaudun by Frantz Beauvallet, specifically addressed the place of Alsace in a post-war French nation. A re-interpretation of Corneille’s Horace, this play asks what it meant to be a French citizen with German roots, to love both one’s country and one’s foreign family, and most importantly, how the war made these issues urgent. In the end, Beauvallet adapts Horace to show how French citizenship is a right that can be earned through devotion to the republic, in contrast to the German “droit du sang” which privileged genealogy over the performance of belonging. Even before Germany annexed the territory after the war, Alsace represented the tragedy of families fighting families and highlighted how republican citizenship transcended regional cultures and traditions.

Susan McCready (University of South Alabama), “Staging the Trenches: Battlefields in/of Great War Theater” Along the Western Front in the First World War the opposing armies dug in, literally, occupying trenches that ran the length of the disputed territory of Eastern France like a scar. Long periods of stalemate were punctuated by bloody offensives; massive losses for minimal gains. The sacrificial ground of the battlefield, the purgatory of the trench, and the hallowed ground of the grave loom large in postwar poetry, cinema, prose fiction, and memoir. And yet French plays about the Great War eschew the literal representation of the battlefield, for the most part, and even the stable, imminently stageable trench is absent from the French theater. This paper will discuss the ground on which French playwrights dealing with the Great War chose to operate, and the various ways in which they evoke the battlefield, the trench and the grave without representing them directly.

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Panel V.D: Unearthing the July Monarchy (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Nick White (University of Cambridge)

Claire White (King’s College London), “George Sand, piocheuse manquée” In the final part of her autobiographical Histoire de ma vie (begun in 1847 and finished in 1854), Sand provided a retrospective take on her own career trajectory, looking back across the divide of mid-century revolution to the early days of the July Monarchy and the publication of her first independently written novel, Indiana (1832). Far from confirming the inevitability of her literary vocation, Sand instead traced out another hypothetical, or fantasmatic, line of work: she would, she claimed, rather have been a digger than a writer. This paper takes as its point of departure Sand’s fleeting fantasy of a life of hard labour with a view to re-examining her reflections on the condition of the manual worker, particularly the ploughman, in her fiction of the 1840s. The point will be to explore, via Rancière’s account of the proletarian writer of the July Monarchy, how Sand interrogates – and occasionally collapses – the divisions between intellectual, aesthetic and manual labour. For Sand’s ‘idealism’, in these works, is rooted in a class-bound fantasy that involves reimagining the worker’s relationship to the category of the aesthetic. But it also, I argue, entails a wider reflection on the legitimacy and ethics of writerly labour: piocher at once designates the specific act of digging and provides a more capacious sign for the generalised category of ‘hard work’. In tracing Sand’s harnessing of this term in her notes and correspondence, often in relation to her own writing, this paper seeks to track the passage between its literal and its figurative uses, and to reconstruct

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 the gender and class politics that resonate in this Sandian metaphor, with its particular connection between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’.

Rebecca Sugden (University of Cambridge), “Terre(ur): Reading the Landscape of Conspiracy in Balzac’s Une Ténébreuse Affaire” From Paris as ‘receptacle de monstruosités’ (Ferragus) sheltering the Dévorants to the vertiginous Breton corniches of the Chouans, the Balzacian text displays a curious and consistent investment in the relationship between landscape and conspiratorial activity. Far more than a mere backdrop to these tales of secrecy, mystification and intrigue, Balzacian topography reveals itself to be possessed of a ‘sombre et mystérieuse poésie’ (Fer.) all of its own. This paper will draw on Carlo Ginzburg’s conjectural paradigm (paradigme cynégétique) to propose a reading of the conspiratorial landscape of Une Ténébreuse affaire and its proliferating plots and counter-plots both royalist and republican. A ‘terre quasi-royale’ built by a wealthy marquis ‘uniquement pour se faire une belle chasse’, the Gondreville estate is a ‘magnifique théâtre’ that provides the stage for a chasse à l’homme far more sinister than such pre-Revolutionary aristocratic pursuits. In the novel’s dialectic of exposure and concealment, the estate and the forest it encompasses prove both friend and foe: if the trees of Nodesme dissemble both the cachette and the buried fortune of the Simeuse family, the soft earth also betrays the hoofprints that lead to the conviction of the noble conspirators and their faithful retainer, Michu. Engaging with Ginzburg’s hypothesis that ‘the actual idea of narration […] may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks’, I will suggest that it is the very literal grounding of plot in all senses of the word that allows for the triumph of Corentin, emissary of ‘le ténébreux génie’ that is Fouché, himself no stranger to conspiratorial activity. A second, complementary strand of my argument will seek to develop the more figurative implications of this question of grounding, relating it to Ginzburg’s suggestion that the venatic lore at the origin of the act of narration is characterised by the ability to reconstruct from apparently insignificant data ‘a complex reality that could not be experienced directly’. Narrative, then, is made possible by the very lack or inaccessibility of its referent, by the indeterminacy born of a failure to anchor. This play of presence and absence, I argue, reveals itself in the novel’s extended structural metonymy of the circle with the absent centre on the level of landscapes both literal and narratological. This is figured most notably in the secret cave in the Nodesme forest but also in Michu’s home which, in a detail of note for the reader sensitised to Ginzburg’s model, is a former pavillon de chasse at ‘le centre du rond-point tracé par […] deux fers à cheval’. Ultimately, then, my paper will suggest that the value of this model for Balzac’s ‘histoire secrète de ce temps’ goes well beyond its dependence on a venatic metaphor literalised to the point of ubiquity in the narrative detail of the Balzacian text. If, in that famous maxim of the French cultural imaginary, ‘la terre, elle, ne ment pas’, what, precisely, is its relationship to the ‘roman improbable de l’Accusation’, a text that buries both Michu and his ‘roman probable’ in yet another kind of plot, that of the grave dug by ‘le couperet de la Loi’?

Edmund Birch (University of Cambridge), “Buried Treasures: Alexandre Dumas père” This paper takes – as a point of departure – the remarks of legitimist critic Alfred Nettement on Dumas's prolific literary output: Nettement playfully imagines that Dumas, over the course of a voyage across the Mediterranean, might have struck on “une bibliothèque enfouie dans les lieux souterrains, à peu près comme son Edmond Dantès découvrit, dans les caves du château de Monte-Christo, ce trésor de plusieurs millions [...]”. From here, I hope to pursue two particular lines of enquiry: the first concerns the question of cosmopolitanism in Dumas's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (and, in particular, the protagonist's memorable assertion that "Je suis cosmopolite"); and the second pertains to the novel's serialisation in the Journal des

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 débats (1844-46) – and the fact that, in this newspaper, the text sat alongside reports of various French colonial exploits in North Africa.

Benoit Leclercq (Boise State University): “Le Ressort pastoral dans Les Mystères de Paris” Alors qu’en 1830 le gouvernement français parait ses ambitions d’une teinte résolument extraterritoriale et algérienne, le Paris romanesque continuait d’attirer les ambitieux et de rallier les Rastignac, Saccard et autres Georges Duroy. A contrario de cet exode, on ne trouve guère qu’une minorité à délaisser la capitale pour une Province presque benoite, avec son immobilisme rural et salvateur. En 1832, Derville, désabusé, sonnait alors chez Balzac le signal du retour à la terre : « Moi, je vais vivre à la campagne avec ma femme, Paris me fait horreur. »25 Cela étant, quelques 45 ans avant la brutalité agraire d’Emile Zola,26 et dans les dernières années de la conquête de l’Algérie, Eugène Sue, écrivain d’abord, député socialiste ensuite, prit le parti dans Les Mystères de Paris de proposer des solutions pastorales et exogènes à la corruption et aux inégalités parisiennes. Nous proposons d’examiner comment Sue oppose au mouvement centripète, parfois délictueux, qui regroupe dans la capitale les convoitises, une communication ténue et subreptice avec une périphérie bucolique, nationale ou étrangère, politique et économique. Dans Les Mystères de Paris, nous montrerons que Sue dessine une politique des corps via une entreprise de dissémination privée et comment le roman feuilleton, orchestrant le mimétisme des aspirations pastorales et tutélaires, a bravé la tendance concentrationnaire observée par Foucault.

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Panel V.E: Animals (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Thangam Ravindranathan (Brown University)

Christopher Robison (Brown University), “Zolian Zoology: ‘L’amour des bêtes’ and (Human-) Animal (-Machine) Ethics” A genuine investment in animal ethics pervades Emile Zola’s literary production at all stages of his career, occupying a central yet often overlooked space in his moral and aesthetic thought. The present paper will analyze the foundations of Zola’s animal ethics as laid out in his most comprehensive statement on the subject, “L’amour des bêtes” (Le Figaro, March 24, 1896), a once enormously successful but now relatively neglected article in which Zola intertwines the final days of his beloved dog Fanfan with a case for animal rights. Situating this article alongside Zola’s extensive engagement with the life sciences of his day (most notably the work of Charles Darwin and, prima facie paradoxically, the arch-vivisectionist Claude Bernard), I will then implement “L’amour des bêtes” as a keystone for understanding Zola’s treatment of non-human animals throughout his body of work. At the core of Zola’s animal ethics lies a meticulously constructed Human-Animal-Machine trichotomy in which his human characters are routinely animalized and mechanized, his animal characters humanized and mechanized, and his mechanical characters (la Lison, the train from La bête humaine, for example) animalized and humanized. This quintessentially naturalist conception of character-type has the upshot of placing all animal life—whether human or non-human—on equal ethical footing, radically mechanizing all organic matter and thereby subverting an entire legacy of Post-Cartesian thought that would posit the putative mechanicity of animals as a point of ethical divergence between human and non- human creatures. Ultimately blurring the three components of his trichotomy into a single, pantheistic unit

25 Sous le titre la Transaction dans la revue l’Artiste 26 Voir La Terre

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 of what he calls “la vie universelle,” Zola’s system then radically reframes the question of animal ethics by asking not who deserves ethical consideration, but how we can avoid as much suffering in this “vie universelle” as possible.

Thalia Field (Brown University), “Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction” The dysfunctional “marriage” of Claude and Fanny Bernard reveal the wider culture disruptions in 19th Century (especially 2nd Empire) France—both through his role as a founder of experimental medicine and her role, avant la lettre, as an early anti-vivisection agitator and activist. That animal bodies were the contested sites of the new laboratory approach to science was something that was not lost to the people of France, already weary of violence in many forms. Before the laboratory was “naturalized” as a place of expertise, its methods and practitioners had to build their institutional barriers. This novel uses primary research to put into play the wide array of characters who began to align themselves with this growing controversy: Anna Kingsford, Charles Darwin, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Frances Cobbe, and many literary and cultural critics. The polyphony of this vast argument – that encompassed not only the human/animal relationship but also the wider questions of materialism and spirituality – reveal this episode of history as a repository of echoes and stories we still hear today. That many of these characters, the women and the animals, have been lost to the official history of science, is one of the main projects of this novel, as is the profound relationship between experimentalism in the arts and the sciences. The presentation would include a reading and discussion of the novel and its archival research basis.

Kari Weil (Wesleyan University), “Domestication and Horsework in Rosa Bonheur” “Do animals work?” ask philosopher of science, Vincianne Despret and sociologist, Jocelyne Porcher in their recent study of farming and breeding practices, published in Yale French Studies (v. 127(2015)). Animals are often thought to do what they do naturally, if not mechanically, rather than by intelligence or knowledge (women have been similarly accused) and only in moments of resistance or refusal is their will is made known or visible. Taking my cue from their study, I want to argue that Rosa Bonheur makes the will and the labor of animals visible on her canvases, both in moments of resistance but also in moments of willed synchronic movement that reveals their capacity for cooperation. Questioning the conditions under which animals can both work and thrive, Bonheur paints what we might call scenes of recognition, where a momentary glance on the part of an animal catches the viewer’s eye and reminds us of the animal’s point of view, indeed that, as Derrida says, that non-human animals have a point of view. Over the past few decades Bonheur’s legacy has been largely that of an eccentric cross-dresser who loved women and painted animals in part, as displacements for a lesbian love that could not be represented. But animals in general, and horses in particular were not mere displacements for humans. Rather they were integral to the artistic mission of this female “animalier,” who joined the SPA, studied with Geoffroy and Isidore Saint-Hilaire and believed that non-human animals, as well as women, had active roles within a Saint-Simonian world order (or her version of that order) in which industry, talent and love were more important than distinctions of blood, sex, and sometimes species.

Alain Lescart (Point Loma University), “Poètes et Félins : Esthétique des premières expositions félines de 1896-1901” Longtemps relégué au domaine de la sorcellerie ou du monastère paresseux, campagnard utile mais supplanté par le chien fidèle, le chat gagne en popularité tout au long du XIXiè siècle et devient le nouveau compagnon citadin rebelle, muse du poète et de la classe politique dominante de la Belle époque.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

De Hugo à Baudelaire, de Champfleury à Manet, puis de Zola à François Coppée, le félidé finit par s’établir aux pieds de butte de Montmartre avec le fameux cabaret chantant Le Chat Noir dirigé par Théophile Steinlein. La première exposition de chats prend place au Jardin d’Acclimatation de Boulogne du 25-27 septembre 1896 et a pour jury une large majorité de poètes et littérateurs du moment. Exposition en concurrence avec les Anglais du Crystal Palace, mais aussi en association avec le jardin zoologique du Jardin des Plantes, l’exposition féline de Boulogne participe à l’exotisme du moment avec un accent plus particulier sur les chats siamois nouvellement importés de Thaïlande grâce à l’entremise des représentants français de Cochinchine (comme Auguste Pavie.) Nous nous proposons d’analyser cette évolution et l’installation définitive de ce félidé qui tient une place si importante dans les familles françaises et qui trouve son origine dans une étonnante association de la science, de l’art et de la littérature.

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Panel V.F: Exhumations (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Jaymes Anne Rohrer (Randolph College)

Corry Cropper (Brigham Young University), “Unearthing Mérimée” The first monument Prosper Mérimée describes in his 1835 Notes de voyage dans le Midi de la France is the oldest church in Nevers, an eleventh-century Romanesque basilica named in honor of Saint-Etienne. Mérimée notes: “Il faut maintenant descendre plusieurs marches pour entrer dans l’église, par suite de l’exhaussement du sol des rue adjacentes” (44). The piling up of earth around and over the monuments Mérimée catalogues becomes a recurring theme in the text: In Narbonne, locals put earth over Roman roads and use ancient friezes to build fortifications around the city; in Autun farmers plow over ancient neighborhoods to plant potatoes and create a pig sty in a Roman pyramid; in Vienne, Roman aqueducts buttress a private garden; in Cluny columns and sculptures from the destroyed abbey are found in buildings all over the city—“là c’est un bas-relief roman, ici une colonne à chapiteau historié; plus loin, des têtes plates, des animaux sculptés, des portions d’archivoltes et de pilastres” (78); and in Orange, Mérimée finds that residents had built homes inside a Roman theater and even carved out closets and expanded their living rooms by excavating the bottom of the theater wall—“C’est miracle que tout ne soit pas tombé sur ces misérables” (113). My title, “Unearthing Mérimée,” has an obvious double meaning. First, I hope to unearth Mérimée, particularly his Notes de voyage dans le Midi de la France and argue that they represent a valuable literary and artistic achievement. But as importantly, the word, “unearthing,” is meant as an adjective to describe Mérimée as one who unearths, who fights against erosion and time and decay, as one who struggles to reveal the past by moving dirt away and, at the same time, to reveal the present by showing the fragile ground upon which it is built. Ultimately, I argue that Mérimée’s entire career can be seen as a multi-faceted attempt at unearthing.

Constance Sherak (Yale University), “Un glorieux débris de l’Empire: Balzac’s Recycled Identities” Balzac’s Comédie humaine is strewn with social fossils of the revolutionary period and the Restoration that are out of step with their time in fashion, ideology, taste, and manners. They emerge on the scene as historical wreckage that no longer hold relevance in the present and as the object of social and narrative ridicule. There are some in Balzac’s pantheon who survive the indignities of caricature

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 because by their very appearance as reappearance, they preserve their relevance and confront the audience of the present as markers of presence and taste. Le Cousin Pons (1847) opens with the title character described as un glorieux débris de l’Empire who literally wears the past on his sleeve while strolling in his outmoded spencer and chapeau mis en arrière. His valeur archéologique as a deformed relic marginalizes him in time. Pons’s only salvation is his vast and erudite art collection that protects him from his cousins and saves him from annihilation in the present. Le Colonel Chabert, in contrast, literally embodies the past by surviving the battle of Eylau after being buried alive. He surfaces as a very living and very palpable presence in Louis-Philippe’s Paris. Balzac takes care to contrast Chabert’s horrifying reemergence from the dirt of the past with the continuity of historical time that is cleansed of historical markers. Chabert is a stowaway on the voyage of historical reality who survives the text, linking the Restoration with the grandeur et misère of the revolutionary period. The entwining of time and space provides access to the past without effacing its value in the present. This paper examines anachronism in Balzac through a selection of works that figure the artist or military hero as a relic of the past. I am interested in how Pons and Chabert and to a certain degree, Pierre Grassou, allegorize the very the collision of past and present in time and space. Pons's salvation from failure in the present lies in the triumph of aesthetics (his art collection) over time’s erosion of social value. And with Chabert, it is the progressive shrinking of space and time that merges the narrative of his reputation with a new social order that no longer recognizes him.

Sarah Schaefer (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), “Who Shall Inherit The Land: Gustave Doré’s Biblical Landscapes” In late 1865, publisher Alfred Mame et fils released a new, extravagant edition of the Bible, replete with a new translation and, most significantly, over two hundred illustrations by Gustave Doré. The comprehensiveness of Doré’s project immediately marked it as a cultural lynchpin, but the characteristic of the two-volume tome that was most lauded among audiences was its presumed archaeological accuracy. The Doré Bible was published on the heels of new investigations into the sites of biblical history, and though Doré never visited these sites himself, his images were widely seen as historically authentic. Merging fragments of contemporaneous discoveries from antiquities with long-established traditions of biblical iconography, the Doré Bible quickly became the hallmark of Bible illustration in France. Nonetheless, Doré’s Bible illustrations reveal the anxieties that accompanied colonial expansion and archaeological discovery. The pervasive interest in uncovering, documenting, and preserving the remnants of ancient civilizations was not just a function, as numerous scholars have suggested, of cultural hegemony or imperial motivations. In a century plagued by repeated political upheaval, comparisons to the great civilizations of the past abounded in visual and literary representation. The rise and fall of civilizations, their moments of clarity and of excess, is a key theme throughout the biblical texts, and one that was eagerly consumed by the first viewers of the Doré Bible. In this paper, I examine Doré’s biblical landscapes and the ways in which they reinforce notions of French responsibility for preserving the biblical past, and the corresponding anxieties that accompanied the nation’s stewardship of biblical culture.

David Powell (Hofstra University), “Exhuming Archeological (and Queer) Sources of la race française: Maurice Sand’s Callirhoé” “Nos ancêtres les Gaules”; “Astérix”; “La France aux Français”. These and other familiar names and phrases have long purported to represent a certain French mythology – une mythologie française

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 certaine, pourrait-on dire. In reality, this mythology has informed and muddled questions of la race française, thus creating a sometimes disturbing discourse of the French race. Beyond claims of a métissage of two races – the Gallo-Romans, supposedly the forebears of the Tiers état, and the Frankish, allegedly the antecedents of the aristocracy – the late 18th-century debate, alive and, alas, thriving still today, returns inevitably to a polygenetic account of the human race. In his 1864 novel Callihroé, Maurice Sand (son of George Sand) explores his perception of a dominant Celtic heritage revealed in digs in the center of France, corroborated by etymological commentary of certain aspects of the French language. Maurice loosely bases his archéofiction on Chariton’s 1st-century CE Greek novel of the same name, a narrative about a heterosexual marriage with a highly queer subtext. The Greek romance seems an odd vehicle for Maurice’s argument for the dominance of Celtic presence in ancient Gaul. However, the queer elements of Chariton’s novel, largely sublimated but still quite present in Maurice’s version, emerge to construct a politically charged roman archéologique with amusing undertones, a subtext that ironically supports the case for a Celtic-based identity. In a sense a send-up of Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Maurice’s novel uses a queer character’s investigation of military maneuvers in North Africa to contrast Celtic archeological and linguistic artefacts found in Berry. The conflation of seemingly disparate elements – archeological digs; the statue of a beautiful woman which seems to have a mysterious, magical, and possibly malefic influence; the presence of an Arabic military encampment that serves to further extol the exotic – come together, albeit somewhat clumsily, in Maurice Sand’s novel as an apology of a dominant Celtic filiation. Using historical theories of Jean-Loup Amselle and Lynn Hunt alongside queer literary theories of Michael Lucey, David M. Robinson, and Lawrence Schehr, I propose to parse Maurice Sand’s narrative for a (perhaps unwittingly) queer subtext in support of a sociological ideology of equality – a sort of queer universalism.

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Lunch: 12:00pm - 1:30pm

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Friday, October 28, 2016 Session VI: 1:30pm - 3:00pm

VI.A: Mallarmé (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Robert St. Clair (Dartmouth College)

Suzanne Braswell (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Rowing through the Reeds: Mallarmé, Judith Gautier, and Fin-de-Siècle Japonisme” Long recognized among art historians as a primary influence on mid- to late-nineteenth century representations of the natural world, Impressionism, and Art Nouveau, discussion of japoniste aesthetics in fin-de-siècle French poetry merits yet further consideration. Recent studies have illuminated the numerous ways in which the discovery by French collectors of Katsushika Hokusai’s images of the “floating world” (ukiyo-e) and Japanese objets-d’art attracted French artists and writers, setting a certain tone and opening new perspectives among writers who found in these works a source of aesthetic renewal in the face of radical changes in perception, stemming from modernity’s shifting rhythms and sights. But as art historians note particularly, by the late nineteenth-century, following especially the Exposition Universelle of 1867, japonisme had lost its initial “exotic” attraction to become a primary element in reframing representations of the natural world among painters as diverse as Manet, Degas, Gaugin, and the Nabi painters, Edouard Vuillard and Paul Sérusier. Japonisme offers, as the art historians Guy Cogeval and Helen Burnham posit, an avenue for reconstructing representations of natural spaces and infusing them with a new kind of balance and movement. A contemporary and habitué of avant-garde artistic circles, most particularly those of the Nabi painters and Siegfried Bing’s Parisian “Maison de l’Art Nouveau,” Mallarmé was certainly interested in this line of aesthetic reframing. How, then, does his poetics reflect japonisme? How, too, does a japoniste infusion enable him to reconstruct contemporaneous Western codes, most notably those of flowers and fans in his poetic works? In this paper, I consider japoniste poetic experimentation in a selection of Mallarmé’s poems, to include “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” “Le Nénuphar blanc,” and his éventails.

Suzanne Singletary (Philadelphia University), “‘Nature’ versus ‘Art’: Claude Monet and Stéphane Mallarmé” Around 1880 a growing dissatisfaction with many of Impressionism’s signature strategies surfaced among its original practitioners, precipitating reassessment of its underlying premises. Considered most problematic were techniques such as the rudimentary layering of paint, achieved with rapid-fire brushwork and applied “on-the-spot,” en plein-air, while in direct sight of the motif, as well as the elevation of the resultant esquisse to the status of “finished” work. Perhaps the quintessential Impressionist, Claude Monet, in his early work epitomized these characteristics. However, during the 1880s the artist rejected not only contemporary metropolitan and suburban subjects but also his former freeze-frame methodology. Instead he pursued a more prolonged painting process, entailing multiple sittings and many moments in time, and focused upon isolated, even rugged rural locales, far removed from the city and any signs of industrialization. This transition culminated around 1890 with series paintings that focus upon a single subject, rendered at varying times of the day, season, and weather condition. In these works, Monet transcended the fleeting moment of the Impressionist “eye” to encode overlapping layers of time and evoke “Nature’s” timeless essence.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

During this period Monet attended Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous mardis, and his relationship with the poet intensified. Mallarmé espoused l’art pour l’art, and resolved the tension between “Nature” and “Art,” mimesis and abstraction, in favor of the latter. Through self-conscious artifice Mallarmé achieved an ideal blend of “science” and “mystery,” intimating the evanescent strains of music through an art of imprecision and suggestion to immerse his reader in an ineffable enveloppe of air and light. In his late series paintings, Monet subsumes the perceptual event, the initial generator of experience, within a nexus of time and memory, suggested by the atmospheric enveloppe that parallels the intangible effet of words in Mallarmé’s poetry. This paper analyzes the ways that Monet benefitted from contact with the poet in the resolution of his artistic “crisis” and in his redefinition of “Nature.”

Margaret Miner (University of Illinois at Chicago), “Down to Earth: Anxious Perversions of Gravity” As has been frequently noted, Guy de Maupassant’s immense œuvre is firmly rooted in the earth of his native Normandy. This regional setting binds together such otherwise diverse texts as the fantastic le Horla, the perversely patriotic Boule de Suif and the lighthearted “Farce Normande.” One could read in this persistent Norman presence Maupassant’s natural attachment to his terre natale, but the geographical connection becomes more significant and more unsettling if one considers the central role of the Norman countryside in the author’s first published conte, “La Main d’écorché,” (1875). This fantastic narrative reveals an anxiety-fraught relationship to a native terre that is also a mère. The young orphan protagonist, Pierre, acquires the flayed and severed hand of a convict while visiting his Norman birthplace. Upon returning to Paris, he installs this grisly curio in his study, and subsequently falls victim to a mysterious attack of strangulation that results in his death, while the severed hand has inexplicably disappeared. Pierre’s body is returned to Normandy for burial, alongside his mother, but his gravesite is already occupied by a convict with a missing hand. This double enterrement, with its proximity to the maternal body, transforms Pierre’s initial departure from Normandy into a criminal act against the mother-land that bore him, and the reburial of this small Norman pierre thus comes to constitute a violent punishment for matricide. This paper will argue that by locating a matricidal fantasy that underpins all of Maupassant’s work in the mère-terre, “La Main d’écorché” comes to serve as the origin narrative of Maupassant’s fiction, revealing what must be dead and buried in order for the author’s corpus to come to life.

Cory Browning (University of Oregon), “Creuser le vers, Creuser la terre: Theorizing Literature, Democracy, and Terror in Mallarmé” This presentation proposes a theoretical exploration of literature, democracy, and terror by way of the analogy creuser le vers, creuser la terre in Mallarmé’s Grands faits divers. That Mallarmé discovered le néant, “en creusant le vers” is well worn terrain. Blanchot excavated the metaphor in his Hegelian, “terrorist” reading of Mallarmé. For him, negation drove Mallarmé’s poetry. Against “la parole brute,” the poet strives, en creusant, to uncover “la parole essentielle,” plowing through the ready-made commonplaces of a society whose exchange economy leaves little space to think. Mallarmé, thus embodies Jean Paulhan’s “la Terreur dans les lettres,” negating in order to uproot “les fleurs” of rhetorical convention. In opposition, both Sartre and Rancière’s readings, this presentation demonstrates, articulate via Mallarmé alternative theoretical stances on the relation between literature, democracy, and terror. In creusant le vers, the only material effect Mallarmé has sur terre according to Sartre is to create a garden of words as polished as precious stones. Against this “terrorisme de la politesse,” Sartre calls for literature

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 to reassert its service to democracy. Rancière, analyzing the analogy between poet and workers who literally creusent la terre in “Conflit,” unearths a Mallarmé champion of “la démocratie littéraire.” Bringing these theorists into dialogue, this presentation analyzes Mallarmé’s comparisons between poetry and anarcho-terrorist explosions as another layer to the analogy creuser le vers, creuser la terre. It demonstrates how the materiality of Mallarmé’s poetics may indeed parallel terrorist attacks that, in their own explosive way, also quite literally creusent la terre. Rather than antagonistic interpretations, it argues that these theories may best be understand along a broad spectrum interlacing literature, democracy, and terror.

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VI.B: Déterrer la Fin-de-Siècle / Unearthing the Woman Writer (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Sharon Larson (Christopher Newport University)

Melanie Hawthorne (Texas A&M University), “Renée Vivien and the Mummified Crocodile” Until the 1890s, the only known works of the poet Sappho consisted of one complete poem quoted in another work, the first 17 verses of another poem (quoted in Longinus's On the Sublime), and about 100 fragments, some as short as a single word or a line. This changed in 1895 when archaeologists dug up a rubbish heap in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhyncus and discovered, among other things, a number of hitherto unknown works by the Lesbian lyricist. Again, many of the poems they unearthed were in fragmented form, including some scraps of papyrus that had been used to mummify a crocodile, but the significance of the finds and the publicity they received spurred a revival of interest in the work of this iconic female poet. This presentation tracks the influence of these discoveries on the coming-to-writing of the poet Renée Vivien (Pauline Mary Tarn, 1877-1909). Vivien was just eighteen years old in 1895, and would not publish her first volume of poetry until 1901, but those brief years of late adolescence and early adulthood set the agenda for her writing career: she would go on to learn ancient Greek herself, to translate both Sappho and other Greek women poets, and to embody one of the first modern "lesbians" (in the historical sense of forming an identity based on female same-sex eroticism that explicitly took the ancients Greeks as a model). Because of Vivien's double cultural heritage—she was born in London to Anglophone parents but lived primarily in Paris and wrote in French—I examine both Anglophone and Francophone influences. I argue that Vivien was aware both of French pseudo-scholarly Saphic revival exemplified by the work of Pierre Louÿs's Chansons de Bilitis (1894), which interestingly preceded the Oxyrhyncus discoveries, and the Anglophone context in which a new generation of educated women read the classics through feminist eyes at institutions such as Bryn Mawr, which Vivien visited in the fall of 1900.

Guri Barstad (Høgskolen i Østfold), “Déterrement et déterrage chez Rachilde” « Qu’a-t-il vu, mon Dieu ? Des choses effrayantes, sans doute, sous la terre, plongé dans l’obscurité, durant des siècles ! » (Rachilde, La Jongleuse, 47). C’est ainsi que s’exprime la jongleuse, Eliante Donalger à propos du plus beau trésor de sa collection, une belle amphore grecque, découverte lors de fouilles en Tunisie. Quelques années plus tard, dans « La terre qui rit » (1915) le ‘déterrement’ révélera la tragédie de la guerre : les laboureurs découvrent « la blanche dentition d’un mort enseveli dans la boue de l’hiver, d’un petit soldat bleu et rouge, gardien immobile de la terre qu’il a défendue » (14-15).

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Dans les œuvres de Rachilde, le motif de la terre semble souvent aller de pair avec une hantise du souterrain : les terres, les propriétés, les manoirs, les maisons de ville ont leurs caves, leurs cavernes qui sont parfois autant de tombeaux, et l’enterrement vivant est toujours possible. Ne perçoit-on pas aussi à travers ces motifs la hantise du mort-vivant ? Dans La Marquise de Sade (1887) la mère de famille, qui se nourrit de sang, se plaint d’avoir vue sur le cimetière ; mais elle-même ne serait-elle pas un vampire en puissance ? Le vampirisme franc (et la guerre) apparaîtra, en 1922, dans Le grand Saigneur où la fiancée ressent vaguement que, en dépit des apparences, son fiancé est un homme déjà mort. Mais chez Rachilde version fin-de-siècle la terre est aussi ‘matériau’ de création. En admirant le jeune homme qu’elle s’est efforcée de métamorphoser, Raoule de Vénérande (Monsieur Vénus 1884) constate avec effroi qu’elle a su imiter le Dieu créateur; référence indirecte au récit de la Genèse où Dieu forme l’homme de la poussière de la terre. Parallèlement avec ces images inquiétantes, les œuvres de Rachilde présente la terre sous une autre forme : des jardins remplis de fleurs, surtout de roses. Mais la beauté apparemment innocente de ces lieux n’est pas univoque. Le jardin peut être relié au souterrain ; c’en est le cas dans La Jongleuse où l’entrée côté jardin mène à un monde mystérieux où trône l’amphore. Dans La Marquise de Sade, la petite Mary pousse son ami, l’aide-jardinier à arracher (déterrer ?) une rose particulièrement précieuse, véritable drame dont la signification ne se limiterait pas à une simple interprétation freudienne ou à un caprice d’enfant. Le but de cette communication sera d’explorer les motifs de la terre, du souterrain, du ‘déterrement’, et du jardin. Quel lien existe-t-il chez Rachilde entre ces motifs et quelle serait leur signification profonde?

Cheryl Morgan (Hamilton College), “Buried and Forgotten, or Where in the World is Marc de Montifaud?” Marc de Montifaud’s (Marie Amélie Chartroule) good name went down quickly in French literary history because of her association with dirt. Whether digging for it in her editorial projects or slinging it at perceived enemies in her fiction, Montifaud enjoyed a moment of notoriety in the early decades of the Third Republic and was branded a cross-dressing pornographer. Later, though, at the turn of the century, after cobbling together a modest existence by writing for La Fronde and La Justice, Montifaud’s health deteriorated and she died in a clinic in the Parisian suburbs. One assumes that she was interred but to this day, the official record remains silent about when (1912?) and where she died and is buried. The problem of locating Montifaud’s grave in and of itself suggests how quickly her contemporaries forgot her, but it also invites questions of cultural and literary forgetfulness that consign bodies of women’s work to the dustbin of their histories. Asking where in the world is Marc de Montifaud, this paper digs deeper into her personal and literary archive, not so much to resurrect the author as to unearth late fictions of the macabre and the decadent. From La Chair qui tue (1890) and Les Grandes Aventurières (1891) to unfinished novels, Montifaud’s last fictions are more concerned with the frissons of the supernatural than those of the flesh. Their exhumation enables us to remember Montifaud not only for her literary dirt, but also for her fictions of possession, both demonic and spiritual.

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VI.C: Antisemitism and Jewish Identity (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Eliane DalMolin (University of Connecticut)

Maurice Samuels (Yale University), “A Dress Rehearsal for Dreyfus” In 1832, the Duchesse de Berry fought a guerrilla war against the July Monarchy in the hope of recapturing the throne for her 12-year-old son. Her dream of another Bourbon restoration was dashed, however, by a

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Jewish convert named Simon Deutz. After becoming the duchess’s confidant and emissary, he betrayed her to the government, leading to her arrest and imprisonment. This paper analyzes the antisemitic affaire that followed, in which Deutz was denounced in virulently racist and xenophobic terms by both the right and the left. In the poem “A l’Homme qui a livré une femme,” Victor Hugo called him “un payen immonde,/Un ‘renégat, l’opprobre et le rebut du monde.” How, I ask, did the duchess and Deutz become lightening rods for a set of anxieties about race, class, and gender that the new forces of modernity had crystallized? And how did the rhetoric surrounding the case help solidify notions about Jews and the nation that would continue to divide France in the decades that followed?

Elisabeth-Christine Muelsch (Angelo State University), “Alsace-the Land of Cockaigne? Preserving Identity During Times of Rising Antisemitism: David Léon Cahun’s La Vie juive (1886)” Until 1870, the vast majority of France’s Jewish population lived in Alsace. Yet Alsace was also one of the regions were strong anti-Jewish sentiments lingered on, despite the fact that French Jews had been emancipated since the late eighteenth century. Many Alsatian Jews therefore decided to leave their villages for Paris, hoping to find more tolerance and greater opportunity in the capital. However, Parisians and the well-established Sephardic communities of Paris often thought of them as poor and unsophisticated, which in turn created in these newcomers a feeling of rejection and a low sense of belonging. While some Jewish authors born in Alsace (e.g., Alexandre Weill, Ma jeunesse, 1870) never forgot the tensions that existed between Christians and Jews in their native home, others now turned Alsace into a mythical place, the land of Cockaigne, where Christians and Jews allegedly lived in a symbiotic relationship (e.g., Daniel Stauben, Scènes de la la vie juive en Alsace, 1860 ; David Leon Cahun, La Vie juive, 1886). This paper will focus on David Léon Cahun’s La Vie juive, part roman rustique, part autobiography, a text that was written after France’s loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Thus, the purpose of Cahun’s narrative is two-fold: preserving Jewish customs and traditions no longer practiced in secular France, and, preserving a French region with its culture and traditions now lost to the enemy. In my analysis, I will argue that Cahun highlighted particular elements of Alsatian, Jewish and French culture (food, education, military) to emphasize not only a symbiotic relationship between Jews and Frenchmen, but also to underscore that certain icons of French culture, (e.g., wine and its cultivation) could indeed only develop because Jewish tribes had once settled in Gaul. Similar reasoning can be found in his very successful and largely secular young adult novels. La Vie juive, however, is a text that also aims at preserving religious traditions, a text, in which the author anchors himself in the Jewish community and in the Jewish faith. La Vie juive, published the same year as Drumont’s anti-Semitic tract La France juive, thus might also serve as a means to preserve identity in an increasingly anti-Semitic France.

Gayle Zachmann (University of Florida), “Alterities, Alternative Spaces, and Heritage Discourse in the Work of Marcel Schwob” Although Marcel Schwob was recognized for his extraordinary erudition, his journalistic work -- its impact on his aesthetic production and the important issues that both modes of writing raise for cultural and literary studies of the period – remains sorely neglected. Born the son of a well-known editor of a republican newspaper, Le Phare de la Loire, Schwob was not only an extraordinary writer, journalist, and scholar, he also exemplified an important figure of the latter nineteenth century: the assimilated Jew. Historically, assimilated Jews in France have not called attention to their Jewishness, and this tendency is particularly prevalent following the 1870 Franco-Prussian conflict and during the early days of the Dreyfus Affair. And indeed, just as the Third Republic was reimagining itself as heir to the Revolution on

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 the rubble of war and the Commune, in flagrant and oft-times burlesque fashion, Marcel Schwob’s literary work would target nightmarish dystopias, obsolete civilizations, alternative spaces and ruins, seeming to flee contemporary debate into the marvelous, the fantastic and the past. And yet, working across genres and leaning on a variety of Marcel Schwob’s texts -- from Coeur double, Vies imaginaires, Voyage à Samoa, Le roi au masque d’or and the Lettres parisiennes -- I will examine how the work of this cultural correspandant cannily and journalistically engages the place of food politics, nationalism, colonialism and secularity, as well the relations between nineteenth-century aesthetics and highly polarized discussions of republican identity, human rights and racism in France at the end of the nineteenth century.

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VI.D: French Local, French Global: or The Earth(iness) of the Early Third Republic (State Suite B) Chair: Nick White (University of Cambridge)

Nick White (University of Cambridge), “Zola’s Peasants into Zola’s Frenchmen: La Terre and La Débâcle” Eugen Weber’s renowned account of Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870- 1914 stresses the lack of congruence between the cartographical limits of France as nation-state and the geo-linguistic dominion of the French language, even into the twentieth century. It is telling, for the purposes of this year’s conference theme that Weber’s hugely influential book on this unsteady process of “modernization” and homogenization was translated into French as La Fin des terroirs. This paper will argue that the way in which Zola conceptualizes his 1892 novel of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune as a pendant to his rural tale of land lost and gained of 1887 allows Zola to chart his own account of the formation of modern France (‘toute une France à refaire’). This twinning of these novels (which, on parallel paths, turn on the capacity, or otherwise, of French people to possess territory) is played out through the figure of Jean Macquart, whose heroism can be understood as a particular amorous relationship to the land he farms on and fights for. Pascal’s reflection on his family history in the last novel of the series stresses this connection, as these two plots (of land as well as narrative) are withheld until the final sentence-long paragraphs of Pascal’s retrospection on the Second Empire. Zola was criticized at the time of the nineteenth novel for focussing on the French experience and not tending to the German one, the very failure of the French army in 1870 to advance beyond its borders in combat allowing Zola, two decades later, to turn his account of the war into an account of the land and language, which is largely a matter of Frenchness, France, and indeed the French language -- in the singular. For in this novel, other languages and dialects are excluded in a popular literature which marries the national politics of the lingua franca (spurred on by Third Republic educational reforms) to the cultural politics of lisibilité (and the widening of Zola’s reading public).

Dorian Bell (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Conquered Lands: Renan, Racial Theory, and the Paradoxes of Positivism” In La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), Renan means to found a colonial right of conquest on the Germanic right of conquest asserted when, for instance, Norman “bandits” unexpectedly brought feudal stability and security to the French lands they claimed. This is one of the reasons that commentators from Hannah Arendt to Benedict Anderson have identified in colonial racism a reconfigured philosophy of aristocratic privilege. But I also read Renan's colonialism as a remedy for the contradictory national results produced by his theory of a Germanic racial superiority common to all Frenchmen. Renan takes a volatile

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 genealogical conceit—the centuries-long dispersal across social strata of French aristocratic blood, with its conflicting metropolitan outcomes of both solidary racial homogeneity and class unrest—and proposes to mitigate the latter consequence by spatializing the former into France’s imperial dominance over colonized subalterns. In short, I argue that Renan's colonial turn is a spatial solution to a temporal problem dogging not only his system, but also the positivism from which he draws.

Andrew Counter (Oxford University), “Lust and the Land: Escalation of a Metaphor from Zola to Richepin” Jean Richepin’s Le Cadet (1892) is somewhere between an homage to and a pastiche of Zola’s La Terre (1887). In every particular, it amplifies and exaggerates the plot of its predecessor: sibling rivalry, fratricide, and a pathological obsession with the land are all to be found in a novel whose final sentence finds the dead body of the protagonist, face down in a field, his “sexe nu” thrust into the earth he had so desperately coveted in life. My paper considers both novels, and public discourse about them, as symptomatic of the ambiguity surrounding rural metaphors in early the Third-Republican imagination: at once the heart of the nation and its unconscious, the countryside seems to promise a much-needed wellspring of Frenchness to a fledgling regime, yet also suggests that what attaches every ‘Frenchman’ to the terroir is merely an implacably self-interested demand (a demand which both Zola and Richepin figure as explicitly libidinal). How, the novels ask, can such a force ever be harnessed, domesticated, or “nationalized”?

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VI.E: Bords de l’eau (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Karen Humphreys (Trinity College)

Nathan Germain (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Water, Earth, and the Infinity of Being: Relational Identities and Immortality in Hugo and Verne” Literary representations of the deep seas often require a healthy dose of imagination, on the part of both author and reader, since neither is likely to have direct experience with such an extreme milieu. Even in a context of rapid acceleration of scientific study of the oceans during the 19th century, writers and scientists alike relied on long-standing cultural tropes regarding the seas to figure the unknown, unseen submarine depths. Long seen alternately as empty, abiotic zones or refuges of the strange or the monstrous, these environments would become the site of influential literary representations which incorporated traditional attitudes about the oceans while offering radically novel interpretations of the sea’s role in life on Earth. In Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) and Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869), the deep seas become living, dynamic places at the very heart of Earth’s biological systems. This talk will examine how these authors used metaphors of fluidity and a relational vision of geography which linked strange marine environments to familiar terrestrial ones to help forge new imaginaries of the world’s deep seas and to expand the possibilities of human identity. Their connecting of apparently distinct geographies takes the reader from a feeling of alterity to one of relation, revealing the material and psychological bonds between human beings and the Earth. In their attempt to render these places more meaningful to their readers, they represented a marine world so teeming with life and constant material exchanges as to fundamentally subvert prevailing notions of mortality, immortality, and human identity on Earth.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Peter Vantine (Saint Michael’s College), “Au bord de la Seine avec les Goncourt” Dans plusieurs romans d’Edmond et Jules de Goncourt (En 18…, Charles Demailly, Renée Mauperin, Manette Salomon) on retrouve de longues et riches descriptions de la Seine que cette intervention propose d’examiner afin d’en dégager leur poétique et leur fonction communes, tout en relevant quelques exceptions piquantes. La plupart ces passages permettent aux frères d’élaborer des tableaux écrits qui interrompent la trame narrative pour se complaire dans des compositions tout en nuances de couleurs, effets de lumières, contrastes de mouvements et orchestrations de sons. Sans être des exemples d’ekphrasis, ils sont parfois sous le signe d’un artiste particulier et explicitement nommé qui leur confère alors une dimension esthétique supplémentaire. La situation géographique de ces scènes varie entre la campagne, la banlieue parisienne, et le centre de Paris, mais ils partagent un ton qui, comme le confluent de deux cours d’eau, mélange la gaîté et la mélancolie. Ainsi la Seine et ses bords fonctionnent souvent chez les Goncourt comme un locus amoenus trompeur ou révélateur où se déroulent de brèves interludes idylliques et amoureuses qui annoncent néanmoins des naufrages à venir.

Philip Knee (Université Laval), “La lande et l’étang : les territoires de l’invisible chez Barbey d’Aurevilly” En plongeant ses lecteurs dans un passé auréolé de mystère, Barbey leur fait entrevoir quelque chose qui a disparu mais n’a pas été tout à fait oublié, une profondeur qui s’est absentée, voire une transcendance qui se dérobe. Il rend simultanément présent un besoin de légende et un impératif de mémoire, la distance du mythe et la restitution des faits. Or, dans certains romans, l’enveloppement de la vie par l’éternel prend la forme d’une territorialisation de ce qui demeure méconnu ou incertain. Parmi ces « terres vagues » de Normandie, on retiendra, dans L’Ensorcelée, la lande de Lessay, lieu inemployé, échappant à toute utilité, où s’incarnent le flou et la permanence du sacré contre l’impératif moderne de transparence et de maîtrise; et dans Un prêtre marié, l’étang du Quesnay, « immonde lagune où veillent les crapauds », dont les couleurs reflétées en certaines âmes leur donnent « quelque chose de surnaturel ». Ces lieux glauques, où l’on n’entend guère que « le mutisme mort des airs chargés », parlent pourtant, car chacun a son médiateur qui habite sur les limites des mondes visible et invisible : Maître Tainnebouy, paysan à l’ancienne manière, attentif aux signes et aux menaces de la lande dans laquelle il chemine avec prudence; et la Malgaigne, obscure prophétesse du destin que le lac réserve à ceux qui ont osé défier Dieu. L’esprit de ces médiateurs n’a pas été gâté par l’exigence de clarté, c’est pourquoi leur familiarité avec les territoires de l’invisible ne les conduit pas à en énoncer les secrets, mais à les faire sentir et craindre par ceux qui s’y aventurent.

Hannah Freed-Thall (Brown University), “Balbec and Beyond: Reading the Beach at the Fin-de- Siècle” This paper makes a case for the beach as a privileged site for thinking “the earth” at the fin-de-siècle. A key space for the production of proto-modernist aesthetic forms, the beach features in particularly interesting ways in the work of Boudin, Manet, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. Geologically, a beach is nothing more than accumulated sediments, available to be moved and sorted by the uprush and backwash of the waves. It’s a space of continuous accretion and erosion, a dynamic and unstable environment. In the western European imagination, the beach is a site of launchings and arrivals, of wreckage and abandonment, and (eventually) of pleasure, and leisure, and the suspension of productivity. Thus in paintings by Boudin and Manet, the beach is “furnished,” and yet the entire pictorial space, including its mass of fashionably-dressed subjects, seems to be disintegrating into the seaside elements. In Flaubert, the seaside is a space of labor, and a generative site for the iterative mode so important to this author. In Zola, the beach is eroticized, a stage for the random encounter. And in Proust, the beach is an important

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

(and undertheorized) space of social encounter and aesthetic production: a generator of metaphor; a queer space, continuous with the Casino that abuts it; and a space productive of a special mode of vision—one that blurs lines and flattens complex social hierarchies into a conglomeration of windswept, sensate bodies. At once a hunting ground and an “amphitheater,” a desolate edge, and an engine of luxury, the beach generates forms of sociability and sensibility that are central to the experimental painting and prose of this period.

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VI.F: Writing Landscape (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Gerald Prince (University of Pennsylvania)

Larry Porter (Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar), “The Metanarrative Functions of Landscape Description and Terroir” Reaching Europe in the Middle Ages, Geomancy was one of the seven forbidden black arts of divination. Practitioners sought to learn the future by observing one of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water); communicating with the spirits of the dead; reading palms; or studying the cleaned and scraped shoulder blades of pigs or cattle. Authors, of course, the deities of their fictional worlds, already know their books’ futures even before we begin to read. Their landscape descriptions, for example, frequently involve foreshadowing, as does Milton’s Garden of Eden, “tending to wild.” But when these descriptions focus on the humble earth (terroir: land that’s used), rather than mountain gloom and glory (landscape: land that’s viewed), it is easy to overlook the varied and expressive ways that authors can indirectly comment on their novels, making the stage of their action speak from beneath the actors’ feet. Framed briefly by the extreme examples of Goethe’s Werther and Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, this talk will trace realistic geo-graphies from Sand’s François le Champi to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer—not in terms of a supposed evolution, but as reflections of their authors’ individual stances: the ethic of inclusivity, bourgeois critique, and memorialization, respectively. The conclusion will analyze the intra-textual unifying device of the authors’ self-citational points de capiton in our mid- century French context, and then the extra-textual pervasiveness of post-nineteenth-century nostalgia for the farm in works as diverse as Maria Chapdelaine, The Good Earth, and Downton Abbey.

Tim Raser (University of Georgia), “The Poetry of terrains vagues in Les Misérables” Terrains vagues elicit strong reactions from the characters of Les Misérables; they force consideration of the passage of time. Time’s passing in turn imposes a figural consciousness on these characters, and their descriptions of the empty lots in the Paris suburbs take on a poetic dimension.

Catherine Talley (Loyola University Chicago), “Modernity & Modernism in the Valois: Nerval’s Regionalism” Nineteenth-century regionalism is often associated with nostalgia: a turn backward, toward a longed-for past; a desire to cross back over the Rubicon of modernity, and particularly urbanization, to another way of life. Gérard de Nerval has often been associated with just this kind of regionalist nostalgia: many of his best-known texts center around the Valois region where both he and the French nation itself spent their infancy. Toward the end of his life, his writing retreated from the global geographies of his travel narratives, restricting itself instead to the Valois and the memories with which he associated it. Many

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 critics have thus read the Valois in Nerval’s work as a highly personal, anti-historical space, if not a downright idealist one. This paper will aim to trouble this understanding of Nerval’s regionalism, arguing instead that the Valois plays a complex role in mediating Nerval’s relationship to modernity and his invention of a unique literary modernism. The paper will propose to expand the “Valois cycle” of Nerval’s writing to include not only the apparently personal stories of Les Filles du feu and Promenades et souvenirs, but also texts more engaged with the cultural politics of the early 1850s, including Les Nuits d’octobre and Les Faux saulniers. By shifting our frame of reference for thinking about Nerval’s Valois, this paper will show how regionalism allows in Nerval’s writing both a critique of idealist nostalgia and experimentation with modern literary forms that might answer the desire awakened by the past.

Patrick Thériault (Université de Toronto), “Les Névroses de M. Rollinat ou le décadentisme terrien” On ne cite guère Maurice Rollinat qu’à titre de passeur ou, plus souvent et moins amèrement, de captateur de l’héritage baudelairien. Or une lecture un tant soit peu attentive de son œuvre, et un tant soit peu critique vis-à-vis des représentations qui se sont cristallisées autour d’elle, suffit pour constater que l’auteur des Névroses (1882) ne suit pas en tous points celui des Fleurs du mal, et qu’il ignore ou transgresse même certains articles de son crédo esthétique. En témoigne, en particulier, la propension qui l’amène à se rapprocher de la nature, à l’évoquer comme une source de consolation, d’inspiration et de passion, ou bien encore, mais c’est sans aversion ni révolte, comme une source de tristesse et de désillusion. Dans cet univers étrange et décadent, et peut-être surtout étrangement décadent, où une vigoureuse « Vénus des champs27 » semble donner le change à la « muse malade » de Baudelaire, les motifs terriens acquièrent une visibilité singulièrement importante. En me concentrant sur Les Névroses, je me propose de caractériser brièvement cet univers poétique sous l’angle où, tout en reproduisant et intensifiant l’atmosphère spleenétique et nerveuse de la modernité, il s’avère ainsi faire place à cette nature que Poe et Baudelaire « ne virent pas28 » … du moins absolument pas sous ses apparences rustiques. Du coup, le réexamen de cette poésie permettra de cerner ce que l’on peut considérer comme le foyer de l’originalité encore largement méconnue de Rollinat et, corrélativement, de nuancer nos conceptions, sans doute trop exclusivement artificialistes, de l’esprit décadent et de la « baudelairité ».

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Break: 3:00pm - 3:30pm (State Suite Hallway, 2nd floor & L’Apogee, 17th floor)

27 Oscar Wilde réfère à cette figure pour caractériser le poème « La vache au taureau » de Rollinat (cité par Régis Miannay, dans la notice introductive à Maurice Rollinat, Œuvres. Les Névroses, t. II, Paris, Minard, « Lettres modernes », 1972, p. 15). 28 Léon Bloy, « Les artistes mystérieux : Maurice Rollinat », article reproduit en annexe de Maurice Rollinat, Œuvres. Les Névroses, ibid., p. 393.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Friday, October 28, 2016 Session VII: 3:30pm - 5:00pm

VII.A: Peasants (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Brittany Prescott (Brown University)

Ben Williams (Connecticut College), “Peasantry and Abstract Thought in Sand’s Mauprat” Sand’s Mauprat (1837) establishes contrasts between vestiges of the “medieval” world and the “enlightened” 18th-century. An economy based on the exchange of food and other commodities exists in opposition to one based on money. According to the narrator, peasants find money (which requires “travail d’esprit”) abstract and intimidating. The novel also features a “paysan instruit” named Patience. A “philosophe rustique” reminiscent of John the Baptist, he lives off of roots, wild fruit, and goat’s milk. In addition to this vegetarian diet’s ideological stakes, it provides a measure of his independence from both aforementioned economies. Later in the novel, the heroine, Edmée, requests that Patience administer her charitable enterprises. Although an ardent proponent of social justice and universal education, Patience confirms the narrator’s description of local peasants’ incapacity for handling money. Patience feels that impoverished peasants instead require material charity specifically suited to their needs. Put in a position to decide between material and monetary aid, Patience maintains them in a material economy. Given the novel’s establishment of money as necessitating abstract thought, this decision begs the question of the peuple’s intellectual potential. Importantly, Mauprat presents a highly stylized version of late Ancien Régime society. As Michèle Hecquet observes, the novel’s lack of realism is confirmed by the absence of the bourgeoisie from the novel. Patience, although an homme du peuple who received only minimal education, is capable of abstract, elevated thought; while living primitively in the wild, he remains preternaturally strong. His love for and common identity with the peuple, along with these exceptional intellectual and physical qualities, seem to justify his paternalism. My paper investigates whether the novel promotes a non-monetary economy as a long-term goal, or if instead universal education eventually will make the peuple capable of the abstract thought required to handle money independently.

Erag Ramizi (New York University), “Perilous Non-Synchronism: Peasants in Huysmans’ En rade” Taken from a larger project on literary representations of peasantries in European literature, this paper examines the overlooked presence of peasant subjects in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1887 novel En rade. While critical attention to this novel has tended to focus on the protagonist Jacques Marles’ oneiric experiences, thus favoring the vivid symbolist half of the text, I argue that Jacques’ series of interactions with rural dwellers, comprising the more prosaic naturalist half of the book, are no less central to the novel’s logic and constitution. In fact, I show that Jacques’ complex dreams and uncanny reveries are a product of the way he perceives the peasants he comes across – as at once bizarre and sinister beings inhabiting an otherworldly dimension, as menacing relics of the past. Huysmans even coins a new verb, se paysanner, in order to describe the way Jacques sees the repulsive and terrifying transformation that his wife undergoes in the countryside as she reverts to the crude ways befitting her peasant origins. By shifting the analytical emphasis to the peasants in the novel, I analyze what the peculiar encounter between two radically different subjects – an urban bourgeois and rural laborers – reveal about the peasantry at a time when this social group, the most numerous not only in France but in Europe as a

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 whole, is undergoing a dramatic change in its living conditions. Appearing the same year as Émile Zola’s La Terre, Huysmans’ text, I contend, provides a much more insightful account of the effects that the developing market relations have on rural life than does the purportedly more objective study carried out in Zola’s monumental novel. Through a host of theoretical categories borrowed from Ernst Bloch (non- synchronism), Jacques Rancière (anachronism) and Johannes Fabian (allochronism), I explore the specificities of peasant temporality – peasants as “residual” social elements formed in the past who are nonetheless integrated in the modern capitalist economy – to assess the position that the peasantry occupies within the framework of the French Third Republic’s modernizing agenda.

Ione Crummy (University of Montana), “The Other Within: Abject Peasant Women in Zola’s La Terre” In La Terre (1887), Emile Zola equates the earth with the female body, “semence” with seed and semen. Man comes from “la mère commune”, draws his “substance” from her, and ultimately returns, as Hourdequin muses: “[la terre] le reprenait tout entier, il retrouvait la virilité .... Est-ce qu’il y avait d’autres femmes qu’elle?” La paysanne is the earth’s lesser sister “dont il faut bien se contenter, quand elle est suffisamment propre,” who le paysan also penetrates and fertilizes. Zola portrays peasant women with the earth’s lush passivity (Lise), her arid harshness (Palmyre, la Grande), or rich and “grisant” (Françoise, la Cognette), wild and uncultivated (La Trouille). Zola likens his farmers’ passion for “cette terre, violemment désirée et possédée,” to their lust for a fertile female who, like the earth, offers herself and ‘belongs’ to the man who can ‘master’ her sexually. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva describes abjection as an operation of the psyche through which subjective identity is constituted by excluding what threatens one’s borders. Since the main threat is the fledgling subject’s dependence upon the maternal body, abjection is fundamentally related to the maternal function, to reproduction. Zola repeatedly links his peasant women to the abject; unclean but necessary like manure, they make reproduction possible—la mère Caca’s superb vegetables produced with ‘cet engrais humain... qui soulève le dégoût”, Françoise in glory atop the manure cart. Hourdequin’s need for La Cognette, “crottée, salie, malpropre,” as basic as food and water. Zola’s juxtaposition of Lise and the cow giving birth portrays female biological function as abject— reduced to a hen laying an egg or a “jeu de pompe”. Zola betrays fear of indifferenciation from the mother in references to Lise’s genitalia as a ‘trou béant” which could swallow her husband. Jean, recognizing his sexual desire for Françoise, “tressaillit … de l’air éperdu d’un ivrogne que la vue d’un trou béant dégrise,” also divulges this fear.

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VII.B: Mother Earth (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Eliza Smith (University of Colorado Boulder)

Ed Kaplan (Brandeis University), “Mother Earth in Michelet’s La Montagne” Gaston Bachelard, the epistemologist and historian of science, wrote books on the imagination of the four elements – air, fire, water, and earth - that opened new ways of reading (and dreaming) texts of poetry and prose. A phenomenology of Jules Michelet as writer was first suggested in Bachelard’s L’eau et les rêves (1942) that analyzes the historian’s revivifying baths of hot mud at Acqui, Italy, in which he claims to have experienced, literally, concretely, identification with Mother Earth as the very source of human creativity. (Later, Bachelard published two books on the imagination of earth, La Terre et les 68otentia de la volonté, La Terre et les 68otentia du repos, both in 1948). ) A more extensive appreciation of

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Michelet’s imagination was significantly advanced by Roland Barthes, in the series published by Le Seuil, Écrivains de toujours, with the volume entitled Michelet par lui-même (1954) – a project he had obsessively reflected upon for twenty years. Barthes’s notoriety was launched with the publication the same year of Le degré 69ote de l’écriture, as Michelet became a prime object of literary study. Michelet’s book on the earth exemplifies the writer’s combination of science, ideology, and mythic imagination. La Montagne (1868) completes his series of naturalist studies beginning with L’Oiseau (1857), L’Insecte (1858), and La Mer (1861) as he developed a theory of evolution at a time when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was reaching general acceptance in France (the translation by the philosopher Mlle Clémence Royer appeared in 1862.)

Charles Stivale (Wayne State University), “Mother Earth, Father Land: Depth, Surface and Utopic Masculinity in Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt” This year’s conference theme, la terre, inspires reflection on George Sand’s thematic use of both earth and land in the sequence of novels, Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt. Arguing, in binary fashion, that in these novels, the earth and its depths are gendered female while the land as territory and its expanse are gendered male, I consider how Consuelo encounters and negotiates the patriarchal land at the family Rudolstadt domain, and then successfully enters, at risk to her life, the mysterious depths of the earth, into the secret grotto and Count Albert’s locus of healing. Their encounter in this site transforms them both, but not enough to prevent Consuelo’s subsequent departure. En route to Vienna, in order to traverse the land, she adopts a masculine disguise, in order eventually to return to the stage, i.e. into her female role as la Porporina. Later, her marriage in extremis to Count Albert results in her reluctant rise to proprietor status, after Albert’s death, and to the title comtesse – all of which she refuses to assume and accept. In the sequel to Consuelo, her role as cantatrice provides a seemingly secure domain on stage (its own kind of protective grotto). And yet the attention both of Frederic of Prussia and of his conniving sister, Amélie, rip la Porporina from this safe haven and, as Consuelo, into imprisonment by Frederic, the ultimate domain for land-based citizens who displease royal wishes. Consuelo’s only salvation lies, on one hand, in the exalted madness of Gottlieb, and on the other hand, in the powerful forces of the Invisibles, i.e. the representatives of the Illuminati who eventually succeed in liberating her. The novel’s final section implicitly concerns the utopian merger of earth to land, and female to male forces, in the secret society to which Consuelo is initiated, through a set of trials located in the depths of the earth. It is here that we see the utopic 69otential of a masculinity coded other than in terms of surface power, but rather with the depths of differently, possibly merged gender possibilities of wisdom and compassion. The final lengthy coda to the novel, the Lettre de Philon, underscores the probably inevitable conclusion that this utopian ideal is inadmissible to land-locked masculine forces. In my presentation, I will necessarily stand on the shoulders of the Sandian critics who have studied aspects of these novels in depth and have elucidated numerous thematics parallel to the ones I will explore.

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VII.C: Roots (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Alexandra Wettlaufer (University of Texas at Austin)

Nigel Harkness (Queen’s University Belfast), “Digging into the Roots: Terre, Terroir, and the Sexual Journey Narrative in Sand’s Pastoral Novels” Widely seen as expressions of Berrichon terroir, Sand’s romans champêtres have become deeply rooted in cultural consciousness as synonymous with the author’s ‘return to order’ after 1848, and as expressions

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 of a sanitized aesthetic entirely suitable for young readers. The episode in Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann when the narrator’s father intervenes to have the grandmother’s initial gift of a volume by Rousseau and Sand’s Indiana replaced by La Mare au Diable, François le Champi, La Petite Fadette and Les Maîtres Sonneurs has become emblematic in this regard. While recent studies have demonstrated the complex and often disruptive sexual politics of these novels, whether it be the intensity of the adoptive mother-son relationship in François le Champi or the alternative modes of masculine and feminine identity explored in La Petite Fadette, Les Maîtres Sonneurs has largely been absent from such investigations. It has instead been analyzed from the perspective of Sand’s musical aesthetic, and within the framework of (musical) Bildung. My paper will examine the functioning of a pastoral grammar of representation founded on binary oppositions, such as nature/culture, innocence/experience, rooting/uprooting, in the context of Raymond Williams’s exposition of the mythologizing tendencies of the pastoral mode within a Marxist framework. The paper’s primary focus will be the operation of ideologies of ‘terroir’ in Les Maitres Sonneurs (and Sand’s pastoral novels more generally) in relation to sexual identity, and it will explore in particular the construction of alternative masculine identities within the novel. My aim will be to offer new readings of Les Maîtres Sonneurs which draw attention to the text’s rootedness in what David Shuttleton calls ‘pastoral’s queer libidinal economies’.

Alexandra Wettlaufer (University of Texas at Austin), “George Sand and Rosa Bonheur: Plowing, the Pastoral, and the Roots of Artistic Revolution” In an 1859 article in L’Artiste, critic Emile Cantrel noted the “très intime parenté entre les deux talents” of George Sand and Rosa Bonheur, identifying the author and the painter not only as “deux paysagistes de l’école de Jean-Jacques,” but also as “deux génies frères.” Nor was Cantrel alone in linking the works of Sand and Bonheur, as each became closely associated with images of the French countryside—Sand in her pastoral novels and Bonheur in her elegiac paintings of the animals, fields, and fauna of la France profonde. Bonheur’s biographer, Anna Klumke noted that Sand was Bonheur’s favorite author and confirmed that Bonheur’s most successful painting, Labourage nivernais (1849) may well have been directly inspired by the opening pages of La Mare au diable (1846), where Sand vividly describes a scene with a plowman as “un beau spectacle, un noble sujet pour un peintre.” Yet the similarities between these two artists go well beyond their shared subject matter: each was known for her travestissement, her involvement with socialist utopian thought, her resistance to the limitations of socially constructed gender roles, and finally, her enormous success in the public sphere as a popular and critically acclaimed artist (in the largest sense of the word). In this paper I will explore the interdisciplinary and intertextual relationship between Sand’s and Bonheur’s work, focusing in particular on the image of plowing the fields as a multivalenced metaphor for the creative endeavor. Sand’s ekphrastic introduction to La Mare au diable, weaving in references to Virgil, Holbein, Durer, Michelangelo, and Goya, crosses the boundaries of words and images, inviting the reader to picture a variety of scenes while also proposing a new kind of art that transcends the dark vision of her predecessors for “la vérité idéale,” inflected with the nobility of labor and collectivity. For Bonheur, equally crossing the boundaries of genre in her evocation of Sand’s novel, the meaning of her pastoral scene is generated in dialogue with her sister artist and “génie frère.” For each the plow, the plowman, and the oxen function at a variety of levels to evoke a different kind of revolution: beating swords into ploughshares, producing sillons nouveaux in “le sein de cette terre” in all of its “fécondité,” and finally, exposing the roots of a new kind of artistic and political identity in the labour and labor of the countryside as represented by the woman artist.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Cheryl Krueger (University of Virginia), “The Earthy Aesthetics of Iris Root” Like the little room in which Proust’s young Marcel enjoys solitary pleasures, Emma Rouaut’s linen cupboard at the family farmhouse smells of orris (iris root). Orris, the rhizome of the iris florentina, was dried and powdered throughout the nineteenth century for use in scenting cosmetic products including toothpaste, toilet waters, sachets, air fresheners, and personal perfumes. Rhizomic in both a botanical and metaphorical sense, the orris root of novels such as Madame Bovary and Education sentimentale was an ever morphing signifier of hygiene and relative wholesomeness. This paper argues that changing attitudes about and uses of iris, reflected in works of fiction as in extra-literary discourse, derive from a tension between earthiness and artifice endemic to the production of both women’s cosmetics and literary aesthetics in the nineteenth century.

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VII.D: France-Amérique (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Andrea Goulet (University of Pennsylvania)

Adam Cutchin (University of Pennsylvania), “Violence and Sylvan Space in H.-É. Chevalier’s La Huronne” Henri-Émile Chevalier spent seven years in exile in Montreal after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état. After returning to France, Chevalier capitalized on his Canadian experience, and his geological and geographical expertise, by publishing his “Drames de l’Amérique du Nord,” a series that includes the novel La Huronne (1862). In the novel, two friends, Alphonse Mougenot and Alfred Robin, set out from Quebec with Yureska, the titular Huron, and traverse the vast and rugged terrain of western Canada in search of Alfred’s fiancée, Victorine, who is imprisoned by her family in a Vancouver convent to prevent their marriage. Clearly influenced by the Romanticism of Chateaubriand and Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Chevalier’s striking, painterly representations of the vast territories of North America— which recall the works of Canadian painters Cornelius Krieghoff and Paul Kane— inspire the characters and the reader alike with awe of their beauty. Depicting solitude and communion, violence and beauty, isolation and transcendence over the course of the characters’ expedition and exploration, Chevalier, a novelist as well as a geographer and geologist, uses sylvan spaces to far greater effect than simple setting or décor. The sylvan expanses of the North America landscape are not, however, a sort of “new Eden” for Chevalier. Following the work of Verena Andermatt Conley in Ecopolitics and Spatial Ecologies, I consider sylvan spaces in La Huronne not in terms of their habitability, but rather in terms of the ecological awareness that lies at the heart of this novel. After briefly demonstrating the influence of Chateaubriand’s Atala and Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans in Chevalier’s La Huronne— in terms of genre, organization, and onomastics—, I shall explore the relationship between the forest and the violence in Chevalier’s novel. In this ecocritical reading of La Huronne, I argue that the violence Chevalier enacts is not a formulaic encounter between the “savage” and the “civilized,” but is rather the violence done to the sublimely beautiful sylvan landscape of North America in this unexpectedly environmentalist novel.

Nicholas Kahn (Brown University), “The Subterranean Self: Reading the Ape-Man in Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre” Animated by nineteenth-century theories of the Hollow Earth, Poe’s novel Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) is, as Toni Morrison postulates in Playing in the Dark (1992), a rich repository of American antebellum anxieties. In Pym, the protagonist travels from Nantucket to the island Tsalal in the Antarctic. After a violent encounter with the black natives of the Earth’s underside, Pym drifts toward the South

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Pole, where a giant, white humanoid destroys the characters and the narrative. Given the extent to which this novel’s model for projecting cultural preoccupations onto the Earth was absorbed into foreign literary imaginations (Poe Abroad, 1999), Morrison’s reappraisal of Pym’s significance provides a novel lens through which to read the vast world of Poe-influenced fiction. This paper will read a moment in Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864), which is deeply influenced by Baudelaire’s 1858 translation of Pym. At the novel’s climax, its heroes encounter a giant humanoid near Earth’s core. After discussing from afar whether it is a human-like ape or an ape-like human, they flee without further investigation. I will argue that Verne’s novel appropriates Poe’s model of imaginative inquiry, but with an importantly different attitude. Whereas Pym stages an inquiry into white man’s place in a world inhabited by the savage other, Verne’s version of the encounter is unconcerned with the race of the other, looking rather into the identity of the self. The heroes’ attitude with respect to the Earth they penetrate and the life they find inside it is one seeking self-discovery rather than domination. Verne’s novel identifies the self as the unknown, rejecting dominant mid-Second Empire attitudes such as expanding colonial activity in Africa and East Asia, and post-Lacmarckian calls from scientific writers such as Morel and Gobineau for measures to classify and segregate races of man.

Nicolas Gauthier (University of Waterloo), “Terre sérialisée, fantasmée, instrumentalisée : la Californie dans Les Mystères du nouveau Paris de Fortuné de Boisgobey” Réactualisant le célèbre roman d’Eugène Sue avec ses Mystères du nouveau Paris (1876), Fortuné du Boisgobey (1821-1891), prolifique feuilletoniste à succès souvent associé au récit policier, organise son portrait de la capitale autour de deux protagonistes qui (re)découvrent Paris en arrivant de la Californie (où l’intrigue retournera aussi sous forme d’analepse). Ce faisant, Boisgobey situe la terre californienne, point de repère des héros, au confluent de plusieurs lignes de force de son œuvre. Il en présente une image s’éloignant de la « réalité » pour s’inscrire dans une perspective sérielle marquée par ce qu’en a dit le roman de « l’Ouest américain » – pensons à J.F. Cooper (1789-1851), plus tard à Gustave Aimard (1818- 1883). Cette Californie est également fantasmée au travers de différents scénarios narratifs (le « sauvage » découvrant la civilisation française, le jeune homme revenant à Paris après avoir fait fortune dans une contrée lointaine) et elle est instrumentalisée pour mettre en relief certaines caractéristiques de la société parisienne. Notre communication cherchera à dégager la dynamique complexe qui se développe entre Paris et l’Ouest américain qui constituait quelques années auparavant un point cardinal pour l’imaginaire français mais qui, lorsqu’écrit Boisgobey, était plutôt délaissé au profit d’autres régions, notamment en Afrique. Comme l’a montré Raymond Williams dans The Country and the City (1973), on aurait tort de ne voir dans cet environnement naturel qu’un simple contraire de la ville. Avec la Californie, Les Mystères du nouveau Paris cristallisent à propos de la « terre » un imaginaire protéiforme : terre d’asile et terre nourricière d’une part, terre meurtrière, méconnue et, en fait, terra incognita d’autre part.

Courtney Sullivan (Washburn University), “The Courtesan Novelist Influence on the Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans” With names such as Violetta and Dahlia, whose bouquets of namesake flowers earned these “belles courtisanes” as much notoriety as their signature diamonds and silk dresses, the reader cannot miss the references to La Dame aux camélias (1848) and La traviata (1853) in Sidonie de la Houssaye’s characterizations of her Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orleans (1895). A handful of scholars have also noted Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola’s sway over de la Houssaye, a Creole grandmother turned writer from rural Louisiana. Obvious influences aside, they have also cast doubt on the existence of the manuscript that the narrator, in the opening pages of the first volume, claims her grandmother wrote about the quarteronnes and that served as the principal source of her works. Who else could have influenced

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 this Francophone writer whose alter ego, “la petite fermière campagnarde,” began chronicling this “histoire vraie des quarteronnes les plus célèbres de la Nouvelle-Orléans” in her late sixties? If her depiction of plaçage remains uniquely tied to Louisiana, its fertile land cultivated by slaves and its mores bolstered by a system of unjust racial laws that prohibited women with any black blood from marrying a white man, de la Houssaye also mines the imaginative and contestatory novels of Parisian courtesans she must have read before she began penning her tetralogy in 1884. The denouncements by her quarteronnes of those who cruelly shun them as social pariahs, their pursuit of vengeance against the men who wrong them and their love of reading, art, and theater all mirror similar complaints and passions of the French courtesan protagonists who preceded them. Although certainly influenced by the unique legends surrounding her homeland’s quarteronnes, this paper asserts that Céleste de Chabrillan’s La Sapho and Valtesse de la Bigne’s Isola (1876) also shaped de la Houssaye’s portrait of the demi-monde in New Orleans.

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VII.E: Fonds de cuisine (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Susan Hiner (Vassar College)

Michael Garval (North Carolina State University), “The Mythical, Magical Marmiton” The post-revolutionary rise of the celebrity chef mystified and fascinated from the outset. What might be the origins of this novel public figure, springing seemingly ex nihilo from millenia of domestic obscurity and ignominy? Abundant musing and mythmaking sought to answer such questions. By the latter nineteenth century there emerged an extensive mythology of the marmiton, the impish kitchen apprentice, with particular emphasis on the lowly scullion's magical transformation into a great chef. Part of a larger project on the advent of the celebrity chef in post-revolutionary France, my paper examines this broad-based fixation on the figure of the marmiton, across illustrated menus, postcards, prints, popular theater, biographical accounts, or fictional narratives like Max Jacob's emblematic Histoire du roi Kaboul Ier et du marmiton Gauwain (1904). I contend moreover that the mythology of the marmiton, drawing upon long-standing lore about culinary sorcery, contributes significantly to imagining the celebrity chef's extraordinary new place in the public eye. In conclusion, I look at revealing vestiges of this mythology today, notably on food television, with aspiring culinarians, like latter-day marmitons, transmuted into "top chefs."

Marni Kessler (University of Kansas), “Ingredients: Manet’s Fish (Still Life) of 1864” In Fish (Still Life), Édouard Manet represents ingredients for a humble bouillabaisse. Oysters are massed at the left, a red mullet and bloated carp fill the center, and an eel, a lemon, and a knife punctuate the foreground. A copper pot hovers behind, its lid partially loosened to foretell the moment when all will be combined, simmered in stock, transformed from this state to the next. But for now, the carp has not been gutted and its slick grid of scales is intact. The lemon is uncut and only three oysters have been shucked, their gelatinous centers distinguished from their coarse, implacable outer shells. Open and closed, interior and exterior, alive and dead are all somehow appropriate to describe the contents of Manet’s picture. Indeed, in a painting about the promise of nourishment and conviviality, he seems also to explore their antithesis as he teases the cusp between intact and not, alive and dead. The carp’s mouth is poignantly ajar and its tail is suspended, as if fixed in that bleak moment when it pointlessly thrashed about to free itself from the hook that caught it. Brine sullies the cloth beneath the oysters. The sharp stare of the mullet is piercing. The eel is troublingly animated as it nuzzles the knobby

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 shell of a shucked oyster. The closed oysters are alive, their hearts still thrumming a steady beat. Bodily and visceral, the elements of the painting are barely held in check. Even the lemon—its mottled rind an impastoed whir of rich yellow—seems to have been immobilized by the obliquely angled knife. In my paper, I will analyze Manet’s adjoining of things both whole and about to be eviscerated, things at the still point of living in his evocative representation of the ingredients for a simple meal.

Thomas Parker (Vassar College), “The Lousy Story of National Flavor: Winey American Pests in France” Terroir and place-based eating are today a part of France’s national identity, but few people are aware of the extent to which France’s celebrated metric of earthly influence was shaped by a pernicious American louse. Tracing the roots of terroir back to the nineteenth century and investigating its origins leads to more than a whiff of the American impact that shaped the way wines taste, and are tasted, in France today. France’s vinous future seemed rosy in 1855 at the Exposition Universelle when Napoleon III launched Bordeaux's new classification system, designed to market wines to foreign visitors. Disaster struck a scant decade later when, instead of French wine being shaped to attract foreign visitors, foreign visitors began to shape French wines. Uninvited emissaries, aphids no bigger than pinheads, inadvertently came aboard as stowaways on vines in a boat bound for France, surviving a voyage their brethren had been unable to withstand through the celerity of new-found steamship technology. Once arrived, the American vines with their unknown aphid infestations were planted in the soils of southern France, instigating the scourge of phylloxera that would decimate nearly all of the France’s vines in the decades to come. For years, the cause of the die-off remained a mystery as the aphids remained invisible, attacking the vine’s root system and leaving before the dead vine was uprooted and inspected. Authorities eventually discovered the cause and set upon studying the louse’s origin for the solution. How was it that American vines remained impervious to the phylloxera while European stock quickly succumbed? Ultimately, it was discovered that grafting more resistant American rootstock to French vines thwarted phylloxera. For this reason, even today, French vines produce wine that passes through American roots on its way to the glass. All of this amounted to a potential assault to French culinary pride. Did American rootstock somehow make French wine less French? The quick authoritative response to the prickly question reassuringly assigned the wine’s identity and flavors not to the fruit of the vine, but to the soil below. This paper tells the story of phylloxera and analyzes the anxiety that played out in the media and popular culture, helping to cement notions of regionalism and nationalism while encouraging the French to identify the wines through their origin and downplay the importance of the plant itself. Tracing terroir forward from the nineteenth century, I identify the evolution of the debate and conclude by commenting on a small group of new winemakers who use non-grafted French vines called “franc de pied” to restore total French identity to both the plant and the people. Tasting included!

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VII.F: La Boue et la Crotte (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Benjamin Fancy (Brown University)

Pauline de Tholozany (Clemson University), “De crotte et de cuir: Flaubert and Balzac on 19th- Century Missteps” The 19th century novel has lavishly described falls in a variety of contexts, many of which involving mud and dirt; graphic arts – caricature in particular – also dwelt on the subject of falling passers-

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 by and sartorial accidents. La gadoue is indeed a great equalizer. It taints every attempt at transcendence, dragging it back into the mundane and the terre à terre: Rodolphe and Emma start their love affair as he copiously steps into horse dungs, while their amorous conversation is interrupted by an eloquent speech on the virtues of “fumier”… Unavoidable and contingent, yet often socially determined, the faux pas and subsequent step into muck question any attempt at transcendence. Be it love, genius, or elegance, la gadoue turns the highest aspirations into ridicule. From the young Rastignac whose missteps result in muddy boots to Grandville’s caricatures of bourgeois falling into the legendary Parisian mud, the fall has drawn the attention of writers and artists alike. While the novel tends to reflect upon the fall’s social or psychological implications, caricature and graphic arts insist instead on its arbitrariness. Both inevitable and yet socially determined, the fall and its consequences can be at the same time perfectly accidental and yet almost certainly predictable. This paper will look at various 19th-century narrative scenarios involving mud, from its universal trivializing power to its socially determined functions. The question is central to the period, because the social instability triggered by political upheavals and revolutions brought writers and artists to reflect upon arbitrariness and contingency. The few solutions to the problem involve claiming one’s fall as proof of one’s self-confidence, exhibiting one’s muddy shoes as an act of social defiance, or perhaps even telling oneself the reassuring but certainly dubious truth that “moi, je ne tombe pas” (Baudelaire).

Heidi Brevik-Zender (University of California, Riverside), “Ourlets Earthbound: Baudelaire’s Éternel and Emma Bovary’s Dirty Skirt” If the majestic passerby in Baudelaire’s “A une passante” strides by with the ourlet of her black mourning attire conspicuously raised above the earth, and Octave Mouret makes a gallant show of lifting the dress hem of the virtuous Mme Hédouin at the close of Zola’s Pot-Bouille, the literature of France in the 19th century is elsewhere rife with trailing, dirty skirts. Bel-Ami’s Mme Walter, on the brink of her first adulterous encounter with Georges Duroy, is recognized by the train of her dress dragging on the floor of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité. In Nana Zola’s courtesan reappears after turning a quick trick with her flounces “tremp[ées] dans une mare” and besmirched with “quelque pourriture.” And then there is Emma Bovary, whose clothes are famously soiled by the terrain through which she passes en route to her extramarital affairs, terrain memorably described by the author as “la crotte des rendez-vous.” This paper focuses on Flaubert’s stylish heroine and studies what I call the “fashion trace” – literary depictions of, in this case, earthly traces such as mud and grass – that are left on her clothing. The discussion will focus on materiality, a seeming antithesis to Baudelaire’s concept of l’éternel due to the degradable nature of clothing. Paradoxically, we will see that for realist writers like Flaubert, a sense of authorial permanency is available in the materiality of fashion and, moreover, is conditioned by the ephemerality inherent to apparently transitory marks, such as fashion traces.

Kathryn Haklin (Johns Hopkins University), “Sables mouvants: Quicksand as Enclosure in Les Misérables” It could seem counterintuitive that substances originating from the Earth figure prominently within the decidedly urban landscape of Les Misérables. From the combative waters that drown the anonymous man in the chapter “L’onde et l’ombre”, to the glutinous mud of the Parisian sewers, organic materials adopt metaphorical properties and permit entry into the realm of the metaphysical. This paper will examine the specificity of quicksand and its function as an enclosure in Les Misérables. Featured in the chapter “Pour le sable […] ”, the unfixed and perfidious qualities of quicksand suggest that enclosures in Hugo often consist of malleable, fluid substances. The diversity of natural materials – le sable, la fange, la boue, la

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 bourbe, etc. – results in an increasingly deceptive environment in which these substances reinforce the novel’s obscurity. What is more, the image of sinking into quicksand leads not only to a more nuanced understanding of Hugolian space, but also to considerations of prose. If spaces are able to shift, then, to what extent can one speak of a stylistic mutability of Hugo’s writing? ‘Slipping’ and ‘engulfment’ function equally within the textual fabric of the novel as much as they operate thematically. As a consequence, the ‘sables mouvants’ represent more than unstable ground since they effectively symbolize the novel’s spatial tensions: an ambivalence that dramatizes the anxiety of confinement, paradoxically, through movement.

Morgane Cadieu (Yale University), “Les transfuges crottés” La boue est le signe d’une mobilité sociale urbaine ; les vêtements sont crottés puisque leurs propriétaires cherchent à parvenir dans un milieu élevé sans pouvoir se payer une voiture. Les transfuges compliquent le motif de la terre qui n’est plus la trace d’un enracinement mais le signe d’une dispersion. Le personnage du parvenu trouve un nouvel essor dans la littérature contemporaine sous l’influence des récits du 19ème siècle. Dans Histoire de la violence d’Edouard Louis paru cette année, le narrateur est un avatar de Rastignac : « […] je traverse la place de la République, chaotique, les chaussures couvertes de boue et les petites éclaboussures grisâtres, des gouttelettes sur le bas de mon pantalon, laissant penser qu’une pluie sale tombait non pas du ciel mais du sol, Nietzsche et Simon sous le bras. » Le corps d’Edouard – déclassé par le haut – fait cohabiter les livres et la salissure. J’analyserai la réécriture du Père Goriot dans ce roman du 21ème siècle en me focalisant sur le traitement de la boue en lien avec l’émancipation. Mais Louis ne réécrit-il que Balzac ? Dans « De la boue balzacienne », Alex Lascar recense toutes les occurrences de la boue comme « trait propre de l’œuvre balzacienne ». Il précise : « Ici la boue est strictement envisagée comme matière. Ne sont donc pas prises en compte les images langagières, comparaisons et métaphores où elle apparaît ». J’étudierai donc l’« océan de boue » balzacien en insistant sur les nuances entre matière et métaphore, puis comparerai l’exemple paradigmatique de Rastignac à d’autres représentations sociales de la terre : les « toiles boueuses » de Laurent dans Thérèse Raquin, l’hérédité prolétaire comme « boue familiale » dans Le Journal d’une femme de chambre de Mirbeau, ou encore, dans L’Enfant de Vallès, les pieds, les lèvres et les livres crottés, mais aussi le latin et le grec comme de la « boue à avaler ».

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Plenary session Biltmore Hotel, Garden Room, 2nd floor 5:30pm - 6:30pm

Kolleen Guy (University of Texas at San Antonio)

Climate Change: How Studying the French Past Might Save the Planet

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Breakfast: 7:30am - 8:30am (State Suite Hallway, 2nd floor & L’Apogee, 17th floor)

Session VIII: 8:30am - 10:00am

VIII.A: La poésie à terre: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and the Contestation of Nineteenth- Century Poetry (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Joseph Acquisto (University of Vermont)

Catherine Witt (Reed College), “Toppling Statues: Baudelaire and Bataille on the Status of Poetry” Belatedly included in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, the poem “Le Masque” perhaps best encapsulates the dichotomous and often paradoxical postulations that underlie Baudelaire’s practice and theory of poetry as an art tending simultaneously towards transcendence and immanence, the ideal and the material, form and formlessness, mysticism and worldliness. While the subtitle of “Le Masque”, “statue allégorique dans le goût de la Renaissance,” calls attention to the historical circumstances surrounding its composition, namely Baudelaire’s shocking encounter with a statue by Ernest Christophe entitled La Comédie humaine in the artist’s studio circa 1858, and while, furthermore, it makes clear the ekphrasis played out in the poem, the subtitle also underscores the fundamentally paradoxical status of the poetic rendition of the statue as the transposition and re-composition or re-shaping in time and space of a material work of art, a statue, that stands for the idea of shapelessness. Its impossible form is that of a beautiful female figure whose hand peels off its face as its head swoons away. The poem climaxes at its mid-point in the shocking and highly suggestive assertion that the defacement of beauty enacted by the statue is blasphemous: “O blasphème de l’art ! ô surprise fatale ! / La femme au corps divin, promettant le bonheur, / Par le haut se termine en monstre bicéphale ! ” Statues feature prominently in Baudelaire’s poetic oeuvre as allegorical figurations of “La Beauté” or “L’Idéal” that operate restrictedly within certain idea poetry – a petrified or monumental idea of poetry. “Le Masque” is the only poem in which the figure of the allegorical statue serves to textually work through the paradoxical status of Baudelaire’s poetry. Georges Bataille touches upon this paradox when, in one of the essays on Baudelaire from La littérature et le Mal (1957), he refers to the figure in “Le Masque” as “la statue de l’impossible” (OC IX, 202). A close reading of “Le Masque” is a way to begin thinking about how Baudelaire’s late (or post-trial) poetry brings down to earth, and, more radically still, brings to ground poetry as a monumental notion.

Joseph Acquisto (University of Vermont), “‘Je dois enterrer mon imagination’ : Rimbaud et Bataille sur l’impossibilité de renoncer à la poésie” Une saison en enfer est souvent considéré sous forme autobiographique, l’histoire d’un échec ou d’une renonciation à la transcendance et un retour à la terre et à ses soucis matériels. Cependant cet échec n’est pas à comprendre, comme le narrateur semble parfois nous encourager à faire, comme le résultat d’un effort ridicule, « l’histoire d’une de mes folies ». Comprendre tout à fait le projet poétique tel qu’il s’annonce dans Une saison, c’est voir que ce projet ne se prête pas si facilement à la renonciation. L’imagination, même rendue sur le sol, ne supporte plus, après le projet poétique entrepris par Rimbaud, d’être en-terré, de demeurer enseveli dans la matière telle qu’elle se révèle au-delà de l’alchimie qui l’aurait transfigurée. Ceci est rendu visible à la fin d’Une saison dans la renonciation incomplète qui laisse place à une sorte de moment messianique—Noël sur la terre—dont l’impossibilité est, elle aussi, inscrite

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 dans le projet poétique. Même si le narrateur semble vouloir évacuer ce qu’on pourrait appeler « le ciel » par opposition à « la terre », le texte semble nous appeler à confondre volontairement l’opposition traditionnelle entre le ciel et la terre, sans pour autant nous guider vers un moyen de réimaginer cette opposition. Bref, doit-on prendre le désir de la part du narrateur d’ « enterrer [s]on imagination » au pied de la lettre, et si oui, comment arriverait-il à le faire ? Les écrits de Georges Bataille sur le non-savoir et sur l’impossibilité de se réduire au silence, développés dans ses textes des années 1940 destinés à paraître sous le titre collectif de Somme athélogique, peuvent nous avancer vers une conception de la poétique telle qu’elle s’articule dans Une saison. La pensée de Bataille introduit surtout une dimension épistémologique à la question du projet poétique de Rimbaud. Pour Bataille, la communication poétique implique la fuite de la conscience et un sacrifice dont les mots sont eux-mêmes victimes. Il n’est pourtant pas moins vrai qu’après avoir traversé le moment de création poétique, ni le moi ni le poème n’a disparu ; ils sont pourtant définitivement altérés par cet acte de création qui anéantit chez le poète la possibilité de se réduire au silence et qui réoriente en même temps le rapport de la poésie au savoir et au non-savoir. Bataille et Rimbaud nous offre les moyens de naviguer sur le terrain inconnu où enterrer l’imagination s’avère aussi nécessaire qu’impossible.

Elisabeth Bloomfield (University of Colorado, Boulder), “Ecologie générale et dépense poétique : Bataille lecteur de Rimbaud” Qu'est-ce-qu'une écologie dépensière? A quoi ressemble une terre régie par le chaos et l'excès? Et comment lier les formes culturelles de la dépense (poésie, sacrifice) à cette nature excédante qui est à la base du matérialisme de Bataille? La part maudite que Bataille écrit en 1948 pose déjà ces questions et propose de voir toutes choses, cosmiques et culturelles, à partir d'une énergie dont la circulation incessante défait sans cesse la limite des êtres, la raison, le langage. L'approche "générale" de Bataille - comme le biocentrisme Nietzschéen avant elle - propose donc une version de la terre où les débordements de l'énergie physique excèdent individus et systèmes. Elle identifie cette énergie transgressive dans la culture autant que dans la nature et décrit des phénomènes tels que le sacrifice ou la poésie comme "imitations de l'excès universel". Pour Bataille ainsi, la poésie est le miroir dionysiaque de la circulation énergétique. Son "sacrifice des mots" communique l'extase du monde phénoménal. Mais cette tendance naturelle à l'excès, qui la rend si apte à l'expression de la dépense, la rend aussi équivoque et dangereuse. Parce que la poésie est si naturellement proche de l'inexplicable, elle donne souvent l'illusion de le nommer. Et c'est pour pallier à ce danger que Bataille oppose à la poésie "naturelle" - celle des surréalistes par exemple, le renoncement rimbaldien à la poésie. Rimbaud est, pour Bataille, celui qui désoeuvre la poésie pour en accomplir l'impossibilité naturelle. Il la dénature pour la dépenser. Mais ce geste est lui aussi problématique puisqu'il promet une négation totale dont l'absoluité est bien loin de cette nature finie, excédante et inappropriable qui sert de modèle au non-savoir poétique. A partir des textes que Bataille consacre à la poésie en général et à Rimbaud en particulier, nous réfléchirons à l'analyse que fait l'auteur de l'équivoque poétique moderne. Qu'est-ce pour Bataille qu'un désoeuvrement poétique authentique si son excès de langage s'approprie nécessairement l'excès naturel qu'il imite? La vraie poésie requiert-elle le texte ou son sacrifice?

Claire Lyu (University of Virginia), “The Elision of Reading: Blanchot on Mallarmé” I wish to explore an aspect of Blanchot's theorization of literature that has not garnered much critical attention: the radical way in which reading distinguishes itself from writing. In L'Espace littéraire we read: "A Kafka, l'angoisse... et... la certitude que 'La Métamorphose est... radicalement manquée'. Mais au lecteur de Kafka l'angoisse qui devient aisance et bonheur... et... chaque lambeau de texte, le ravissement de la plénitude, la certitude de l'achèvement." For Blanchot reading and writing diverge

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 considerably: if writing is marked by the ordeal of loss and dying; reading, on the contrary, is "la légèreté d'un Oui libre et heureux." Such dichotomy is surprising given Blanchot's affinities for the ambiguity of the neutral rather than clear binary oppositions. Curiously, this strikingly distinct status of reading seems to have gone unnoticed in criticisms on Blanchot. Indeed most discussions on Blanchot center on writing: Nancy, for example, writes that in Blanchot "the phenomenon of dying is... not only indissociable from literature or writing but consubstantial with them" ("Blanchot's Resurrection"). In saying "literature or writing," Nancy slides from literature to writing as if the two are interchangeable. Reading becomes elided. In my paper I propose to address this elision of reading in Blanchotian criticism first by exploring how reading differs from writing in Blanchot; and second by examining how this plays itself out in Blanchot's two treatments of Un coup de dés in L'Espace littéraire and Le Livre à venir. My sense is that critical thinking gravitates toward writing since writing, as bearing the weight of death, relates ultimately to what is universal. Reading, however, as the lightness of joy, relates to what is ephemeral and experiential. The elision of reading may index the degree to which thinking proceeds through abstract universality at the expense of embodied fragility. The hypothesis I would like to explore through Blanchot and Mallarmé is how a literary text, through the double experience of reading and writing, may manifest itself to us not solely through universal concepts which impose themselves at all times but also through earthly and fragile affect which proposes itself, if at all, only for a moment.

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VIII.B: City and Country (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Sharon Johnson (Virginia Tech)

Janice Best (Acadia University), “Les Parisiens en province” Dans cette communication, j’analyserai deux pièces qui mettent en scène la confrontation entre un groupe de parisiens et un groupe de campagnards. L’action de la première pièce, Les représentants en vacances, une comédie-vaudeville de Clairville egvju Cordier (Gymnase-Dramatique, 15 septembre 1849) a lieu lors d’une prorogation de la Chambre des députés. À cause des vacances, sept cent cinquante maris sont lâchés par la France. Trois amis de collège, le comte de Blossac, un monarchiste, Dumoulin, un représentant de gauche, et Morisset, un modéré, se réconcilient dans la malle poste qui les emmène à la campagne. Ils jurent de ne plus parler de politique pendant leurs vacances. Mais une délégation d’électeurs arrive, réclamant le droit au travail, le partage des biens, ou encore la restauration de la monarchie. Devant le mécontentement de leurs électeurs, les représentants n’ont d’autre choix que de retourner à Paris afin de trouver le calme. La deuxième pièce, Un Socialiste en province de Dubruel (Gymnase-Dramatique, 5 juillet 1849), met en scène un jeune étudiant en droit, Gabriel Baudruche, qui rentre d’un séjour à Paris. Clémentine, sa jeune cousine, attend impatiemment son retour. Lorsque Gabriel arrive, cependant, il annonce qu’il n’est pas venu pour revoir sa famille, mais en revanche « tout exprès pour socialiser l’arrondissement ». Son premier acte est de faire libérer un groupe de prisonniers, sous prétexte qu’en volant, ils n’ont fait que « protester contre le pouvoir inique qui gêne la liberté des citoyens ». Les prisonniers libérés saccagent tout. Devant ce déchaînement de violence, Gabriel est guéri de sa maladie « socialiste » et décide d’épouser sa cousine. Ces deux pièces soulignent la façon dont les idées politiques de la capitale ont envahi les provinces après la révolution de février 1848. Je ferai ressortir les valeurs qui sont inhérentes à chaque espace et à chaque groupe et je tenterai de déterminer si les idées de la capitale finissent par pénétrer de façon permanente l’espace de la campagne, ou si cette infiltration n’a d’autre résultat que le retour au statut quo.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Tim Farrant (Pembroke College), “Provinces and Provence, State and Nation from Napoleon to Daudet” This paper presents nineteenth-century French history, and literature less as an apostolic succession of authors and works as a recurrent configuration of edge and centre, from the founding corse, Bonaparte, and opposing capitals or états, to the catalytic fission of Paris and the provinces, country and commune, in 1870-71. It proposes a brief conspectus of some key sites, geographical and textual, before exploring in greater detail tensions between Paris and the provinces, Provence as state and Provence as province, the commune and the country in the work of Daudet in 1870-71. In the progress from Restoration aristocratic histories of the terroirs as nation (Guizot, Barante) via other proto-Romantic asseverations of authenticity contra modernity (Balzac’s Contes drolatiques), what strikes is how most writers do not consciously own a provincial identity. From the late Restoration to the end of Empire the pattern is of silent disavowal of the provincial, whether by Gautier, Mérimée, Janin, Hugo, Nodier, or Mérimée. If Sand is the great exception, her Légendes rustiques of 1858 can perhaps be seen as the trailblazers for a provincial theme in literature heralded by La Villemarqué’s Barzhah Breiz, consecrated by Erckmann- Chatrian’s Contes vosgiens, and concentrated in Zola’s Contes à Ninon and Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin and Contes du lundi. These two collections form a nébuleux around the commune. The paper will investigate how they embody different visions of Provence and province, state and nation. Yet the conception of authenticity and difference enshrined in the Lettres de mon moulin, is less the opposite of the vacuous modernity represented by Paris than its first cut. Daudet’s tales represent a mise en abyme of the role of the writer, but also of the uncertain and perhaps futile undertaking of writing the nation - an enterprise perhaps as ultimately hopeless as Maître Cornille’s secret itself.

Sharon Larson (Christopher Newport University), “Gender Expression and the ‘Natural’ World in Lemonnier’s Quand j’étais homme : Cahiers d’une femme” Dubbed the “Zola of Belgium” by his literary contemporaries, Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913) conformed to Naturalist depictions of sexual difference and frequently demonized femininity in fin-de-siècle novels such as Le Possédé (1890) and L’Homme en amour (1897). However, Lemonnier broke from this Naturalist tradition in 1907 when he published Quand j’étais homme: cahiers d’une femme. Though one of his lesser known novels today, it received enormous attention at the time of publication and was hailed by the literary journal Le Thyrse as “un des plus beaux et des plus utiles romans féministes qui soient”.29 This exceptional work documents with great compassion the emotional, physical and economic hardships of teenage orphan Andrée Piègre and her struggles to support herself financially in the French capital. Fed up with the continual threat of sexual violence, gender discrimination and hostile work conditions, Andrée decides to take advantage of her natural androgyny and assumes a male identity through cross-dressing. While passing as a man allows her to navigate the Parisian boulevards with newly enjoyed autonomy and self-assurance, the real freedom that she experiences takes place not in the artificial landscape of the city but rather in the natural scenery of the countryside. Indeed, Andrée’s intermittent excursions to the countryside trigger an existential, if not spiritual, awareness about her gender identity and how she negotiates her place in both the city and natural world. At the heart of Lemonnier’s city/countryside dichotomy lies a progressive interrogation of the ostensible “natural” order of sexual difference. Specifically, Andrée’s transcendent ruminations about the earth and its natural landscapes mirrors Lemonnier’s own dismantling of normative notions of gender expression.

29 “Quand j’étais Homme, par Camille Lemonnier.” Le Thyrse. Vol. 9. 1er juin 1907- 1er mai 1908. 88-90.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

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VIII.C: Burial (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: E. Nicole Meyer (Augusta University)

Sayeeda Mamoon (Edgewood College), “Burying the Undead: Inhumations and Exhumations in Gautier’s Tales of the Supernatural” Gautier’s first vampire narrative “La morte amoureuse” appears in 1836, exactly twenty years after Polidori completed The Vampyre. In his conte fantastique, Gautier replaces the male figure of the diabolic predator found in Polidori’s narrative and Gothic fiction of the period with an alluring feminine vampire, who preys on a newly ordained priest. Similarly, in “Omphale,” written two years previously, Gautier awards the sexually assertive role of the nocturnal stalker to the eponymous character of the short story. In subsequent fantastic tales such as “La pipe d’opium” from 1838 and the 1852 vampire narrative “Arria Marcella,” Gautier revisits the theme of female bloodsuckers who haunt young men. In these tales of the supernatural, the phantom “woman” assumes an ambivalent role where she figures simultaneously as the aggressor and the aggressed due to her sexual agency, her opposition to established religion, and her insatiable thirst for chaste new blood. More significantly, the threatening feminine undead of Gautier’s short stories refuse to remain inhumed, and resurface from the grave in defiance of death. Emblems of trespass and liminality, the deceased in these narratives rise from the tomb, and blur the boundaries between the world of the living and the hereafter. The unearthing of the spectral subjectivities in Gautier’s ghost stories brings to light, to use words from Freud’s essay on the uncanny, what “ought to have remained secret and hidden,” and constitutes a transgression not only to the laws of nature, but also to patriarchal rule and the precepts of the Church. In this paper, I propose to examine the burials and excavations associated with the undead in “La morte amoureuse,” “Omphale,” “La pipe d’opium,” and “Arria Marcella.” I will investigate the rites, rituals, means, and circumstances by which the bodies of the living dead are entombed, preserved, dug- up, and reinterred in these Fantastic accounts. Furthermore, within the framework of the selected narratives, special attention will be devoted to studying the roles played by patriarchy, male-bonding, and religion in laying to rest the exhumed heroines of Gautier’s supernatural tales.

Briana Lewis (Allegheny College), “Sa tombe ressembla à son lit: Victor Hugo and Women Interred” From traditional patriarchal discourses on women to post-modern ecofeminist theory, thinkers have continually rearticulated perceived connections between the feminine and the earth. While Victor Hugo is far from progressive in his portrayals of women in his novels, critics have noted that he nonetheless offers a concept of womanhood, particularly young womanhood and young female sexuality, that is distinct from that of his contemporaries, informed by his complex personal experiences, including the death of his daughter shortly after her marriage. This paper proposes to explore Hugo’s evolving concept of young womanhood particularly as it is portrayed when their bodies are returned to the earth through their burials. Hugo makes this connection most strongly in the final lines of Part 1 of Les Misérables, describing the prostitute Fantine’s burial, where he declares, “Elle fut jetée à la fosse publique. Sa tombe ressembla à son lit.”30 From the starting point of this connection between the young woman’s sexuality and her final resting place, we will consider other young women’s burials: the final chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris, entitled “Mariage de Quasimodo,” depicts the innocent but eroticized Esmeralda’s body committed to the

30 Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Paris: Pléiade, 1951. p. 314.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 cavern beneath Montfaucon, her skeleton embraced by Quasimodo’s,31 whereas the dénouement of L’Homme qui rit does not describe the final resting place of the earthly remains of its virginal Déa, instead leaving the reader to assume burial not in the earth, but at sea.32 Through an examination of these burials and others, this presentation will offer a window into the relationships Hugo creates among the young woman’s body, her sexuality, her mortality, and the earth to which her body returns.

Warren Johnson (Arkansas State University), “Getting Down and Dirty: Burial and Materiality in Maupassant’s Tales” In the travelogue essay Sur l’eau, Maupassant describes his dream of living “comme une brute” in some exotic locale, the body abstracted from thought. Elsewhere in the same text he calls his love of the earth and all that inhabit it unlike that of other men, but rather “un amour bestial et profond.” Maupassant’s valorization of the corporeal is intricately connected to his representations of death and burial. The enterrement marks the moment when the body becomes one with the earth once again, when the somatic escapes the torments of the reflective mind, but death also marks the moment when the body begins to decay. The confinement of the grave can be seen as parallel to the recurrent motif in his tales of entrapment underground or in an enclosed space, a motif also closely associated with suffering and death, a confinement that accentuates the materiality of the body and the indissolubility of body and mind, despite his dreams of transcending the latter. Entrapment in turn is also linked to two primordial telluric elements, water and fire, that can either reinforce that material imprisonment or provide a purifying escape from it. Through a restricted corpus in which burial is explicitly evoked, including “La tombe,” “Le tic,” “Le bûcher,” “La morte,” and “La main,” as well as other texts in which the entrapment motif is key, such as “La mère Sauvage” and “Le horla,” I will show that this intersection between the terrestrial and the corporeal illustrates how in Maupassant the ideal of pure materiality is a sort of asymptote that converges toward a state of being without feeling and without suffering but is never able to reach it.

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VIII.D: Bouvard et Pécuchet II : L’Agriculture (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Éric Le Calvez (Georgia State University)

Éric Le Calvez (Georgia State University), “Flaubert à la ferme” Au second chapitre de Bouvard et Pécuchet, les deux bonshommes vont voir leur ferme, située à un kilomètre de distance de chez eux. La visite est plus que décevante : tous les bâtiments nécessitent des réparations tandis que le fermier, « Maître Gouy », déprécie les cultures, si bien que « ce dénigrement de sa terre atténua le plaisir que Bouvard sentait à marcher dessus ». Les deux bonshommes commencent à toucher à la terre en faisant du jardinage, et comme ils croient s’y entendre, « l’ambition les prit de cultiver leur ferme ». Ils ne s’y mettent pas tout de suite cependant ; ils vont d’abord visiter la ferme du comte de Faverges au cours d’une longue scène de trois pages qui sert d’introduction à l’agriculture dans le récit. Cette visite, fort stimulante pour les personnages, n’est pas purement fictionnelle car elle est documentée. En effet le 8 octobre 1874, Flaubert écrit à son ami Edmond Laporte : « il faut à toute force que j’aille voir la ferme de Lisors » (Correspondance, t. IV, 874), qui est une « ferme modèle » (ibid., 877), et il pense ne devoir pas y passer « plus de 2 ou 3 heures » (ibid.). Il se rend donc avec Laporte à Lisors (dans l’Eure) visiter la ferme le 17 octobre et prend, comme à son habitude lors de voyages de repérage, des notes dans son carnet (peu nombreuses cette fois ; voir le Carnet 18 bis), qui l’aident à fixer quelques détails qui

31 Hugo, Victor. Notre-Dame de Paris. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. p. 700. 32 Hugo, Victor, L’Homme qui rit. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. p. 767.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 seront transposés dans la fiction. On s’attachera ici à voir quels détails retiennent l’attention de Flaubert et comment il les utilise lors de la rédaction d’une scène décisive, car « tout ce qu’ils avaient vu les enchantait. Leur décision fut prise » : commencer l’agriculture.

Jeffrey Thomas (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “L’Episode du jardin dans le deuxième chapitre de Bouvard et Pécuchet” Lors d’un voyage documentaire en Normandie, Gustave Flaubert écrit le 24 juin 1874, à sa nièce Caroline : « Je placerai Bouvard et Pécuchet entre la vallée de l’Orne et la vallée d’Auge, sur un plateau stupide, entre Caen et Falaise. Mais il faudra que je retourne dans cette région quand j’en serai à leurs courses archéologiques et géologiques, et il y a de quoi s’amuser » (Correspondance, t. IV, 816). L’exploitation agricole de Chavignolles se dresse sur ce « plateau stupide » où les deux copistes entreprennent l’acquisition des savoirs, en particulier, l’entretien et la création du jardin qui entoure leur demeure. L’héritage de Bouvard permet aux hommes de s’éloigner de Paris pour que leurs rêves se réalisent à profiter de la tranquillité à la campagne, « en manches de chemise […] maniant de la terre, dépotant des tulipes ». Le premier jour de leur visite, et parmi toute autre chose à la ferme, « Le plus pressé, c’était le jardin », où ils commenceront des travaux de réorganisation pour satisfaire leurs goûts. Suite à l’échec de l’arboriculture, Bouvard et Pécuchet retournent à la reconstruction de leur jardin pour se soulager d’avoir été « trop ambitieux » par rapport à leurs projets agricoles, en s’appuyant sur l’ouvrage de Pierre Boitard, Nouveau manuel complet de l’architecte de jardins de 1852. Nous verrons comment la création de ce jardin de divers genres opposera les deux hommes à la communauté de Chavignolles, à tel point que l’acquisition des savoirs vise plutôt l’éloignement des autres, au lieu de la compréhension scientifique du monde. Cette communication, entre autres, pointera aussi le rôle que joue l’aspect référentiel de l’ouvrage de Boitard, dont Flaubert s’est servi de manière quasi explicite.

Stéphanie Dord-Crouslé (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université de Lyon), “Le Sottisier agricole de Bouvard et Pécuchet” Le chapitre de l’agriculture est le premier à avoir exigé de Flaubert l’acquisition et le traitement d’une masse documentaire démesurée, nécessaire à la fois à la rédaction des aventures des deux personnages (qui constituent le « premier volume » de Bouvard et Pécuchet) et à la collecte des matériaux destinés à un « second volume », une « encyclopédie critique en farce » restée à l’état de chantier en raison de la mort subite de l’écrivain. Pourtant, quelques mois avant son décès, Flaubert avait annoncé que ce volume était « aux trois quarts fait ». On peut présumer que les matériaux agricoles figuraient en bonne place dans cette partie achevée car plusieurs dossiers comportent des pages entières de citations issues des recherches menées par l’écrivain sur l’agriculture et classées dans différentes catégories, en particulier de savoureux exemples de « style agricole ». Cependant, une analyse plus poussée révèle que l’organisation actuelle des matériaux n’est peut-être pas le fruit d’une décision aussi définitivement arrêtée que l’ancienneté des pages portant sur l’agriculture pourrait le laisser penser. D’autres hypothèses relatives à la sélection et à la disposition des citations peuvent et doivent être examinées. L’utilisation de « l’agenceur », un outil informatique permettant de produire des « seconds volumes possibles » (http://www.dossiers-flaubert.fr/), permet aujourd’hui de tracer les contours de ces diverses configurations mouvantes. On tentera de voir si celles qui concernent les matériaux issus du domaine agricole sont ou non plus fermement établies que celles portant sur d’autres champs encyclopédiques moins longuement travaillés par Flaubert.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

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VIII.E: Around the World (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Nicholas Kahn (Brown University)

Stéphane Pillet (Universidad de Puerto Rico), “‘Ainsi va le monde’ : Quand la Nature régule l’économie mondiale et l’équilibre géopolitique dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne” Comment peut-on croire que grâce à ses explosions, éruptions volcaniques, tremblements de terre, ouragans et autres, la nature apporte le bien-être et le développement économique ? Comment peut-on argumenter que les catastrophes naturelles puissent être salvatrices ? C’est pourtant le but de cette communication. Dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne, les désastres interviennent dès lors que le désordre risque de prendre le dessus. Si une trop grande quantité de diamants inondent les marchés ou que de l’or tombe du ciel, il en résulte de graves crises financières. Heureusement, des explosions naturelles éliminent leurs néfastes surplus. De même, toutes ses machines sont autant de technologies de rupture pouvant potentiellement devenir de formidables engins de guerre. Une nation qui s’en accaparerait aurait une incontestable supériorité sur les autres en cas de guerre et romprait dès lors l’équilibre géopolitique. Ces innovations comme Le Nautilus et L’Albatros représentent donc moins des destructions créatives pour reprendre le terme de Joseph Schumpeter que de possibles créations de destruction. Elles doivent disparaitre et ce sont toujours les forces de la Nature qui ont la charge de les anéantir. Comme le déclare Jules Verne à travers Robur, « Ce sont des évolutions, non des révolutions qu'il convient de faire. » Cela revient à favoriser les innovations de continuité qui procurent des améliorations dans l’industrie, l’exploitation minière, et le commerce. Dans ses romans, les économies sont en pleine expansion, les industries ont des besoins accrus en ressources énergétiques. La Nature en fournit amplement et vient ainsi en aide au développement industriel. Elle intervient également dans les échanges commerciaux. Dans le commerce, une livraison rapide et sûre des produits est essentielle ; ce qui n’est pas le cas dans le désert. Ce problème logistique est résolu par la Nature elle-même dans L’Invasion de la mer. En provoquant un tremblement de terre, elle crée une mer intérieure dans le Sahara ayant pour heureuse conséquence d’accélérer le transport des marchandises. La Nature est donc une force de régulation qui par ses désastres assure l’ordre, le maintien, et le développement contrôlé de l’économie mondiale. Cette progression ordonnée dans un monde stable bénéficie également aux établissements boursiers qui font eux aussi tourner le monde et assurèrent pendant un temps les principaux revenus de Jules Verne.

Anna Igou (Winthrop University), “Exploring Terroir in Jules Verne” While the rich agricultural diversity of L’Hexagone was established centuries ago, it is not until the industrial revolution – and specifically, the advent of mechanized transportation – that it comes to exist as an object of general consciousness, “public property.” I would propose that the modern concept of terroir – decidedly French, if in name alone – is anticipated in one of the most international perspectives of European literature: Verne’s Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours ignites the Western imagination, not only through the adventures of its protagonists, but the regional products and traditions they encounter en route: elephants fed a concoction that renders them aggressive; a dish of lapin du pays suspected to be cat; even the beauty of women is described as a product of place (“ses petits pieds bombés […] brillent de l’éclat des plus belles perles de Ceylan”). If the products in question are certainly more exotic, not to mention fantastical, than cheese or wine, this text demonstrates, precisely, how any conception of terroir involves a certain degree of artifice—a series of choices in the presentation of objects and sensations that

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 incites and responds to the desires of the public. Finally, the distinctive vagabondage of Verne’s imagination has a unique resonance with the present: “La locomotive, dirigée par le bras d’un mécanicien anglais et chauffée de houille anglaise, lançait sa fumée sur les plantations de caféiers, de muscadiers, de girofliers, de poivriers rouges. La vapeur se contournait en spirales autour des groupes de palmiers, entre lesquels apparaissaient de pittoresques bungalows.” With the collapsing of space (le tour du monde) and time (quatre-vingt jours), the boundaries between terroirs in the global community become increasingly undefined, forcing us to situate our tastes as we go…

James Head (Brown University), “La Terre and Postcards From Other Planets: Changing Perspectives on Home Planet Earth” The Earth is a dynamic planet. The only thing constant is change! Mountains rise, only to be eroded down and swept into the sea. Plate tectonic processes renew the ocean floor at very rapid rates, and destroy older rocks, thrusting them back into the Earth’s interior. Together these processes destroy the record of the first half of the history of our own Home Planet, Earth. What did these missing chapters in Earth history hold? How are we to learn of our own formative years, so that we can successfully understand where we have come from, and thus where we are going? Fifty years of Solar System exploration have provided us with many answers to these questions. We look to the Moon to understand Earth’s cataclysmic childhood, to Mercury to understand our interior, to Mars to explore the evolution of our early atmosphere, to Venus to analyze an un-Earthly Earth-like planet, and to the asteroids and comets to view the very building blocks of planets. Furthermore, we explore distant and remote environments on Earth (Antarctica, the bottom of the ocean floor, and the insides of active volcanoes) to gain perspective on the planets and the Earth itself. Together, these stunning views revealed on “Postcards From Other Planets” are providing significant insight into our Home Planet Earth and its immediate and long-term future, in a manner similar to the sweeping changes in the 19th century of France and the evolving world of that time.

Xavier Fontaine (Princeton University), “Plasticité géographique dans Le Tour du monde” Dans la foulée des progrès scientifiques et techniques de la Révolution industrielle, le développement des moyens de transport suscite une appréhension de plus en plus généralisée et disparate d’un monde désormais à portée de main. La France n’échappe pas à la règle : les récits de voyage sont légion, demandés par un lectorat de plus en plus avide d’histoires nouvelles, de contrées lointaines et d’exotisme. Mais cette fascination pour le dépaysement est loin d’être unilatérale. Parallèlement, elle donne lieu, en miroir, à des opérations de particularisation de ce qui est géographiquement plus proche et familier pour le valoriser sous le prisme du pittoresque. Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840-1842), vaste entreprise encyclopédique menée sous la houlette de Léon Curmer, constitue à cet égard l’amorce emblématique d’une dynamique qui ne cessera de s’intensifier et ce, singulièrement sous la forme de périodiques. Ainsi la revue Le Tour du monde, publiée dès 1857 et dont le titre évoque une mainmise sur l’ensemble de la surface du globe, compile-t-elle au fur et à mesure de ses livraisons hebdomadaires des récits d’expéditions menées en des régions éloignées entre lesquels pourra très bien se glisser, de manière significative, le récit d’un voyage dans une partie de la France hexagonale. À une époque où l’Europe des nations est en train de se construire, une telle perspective générant une contiguïté – voire une perméabilité – entre le proche et le lointain, l’exotique et l’ordinaire amènera inéluctablement Le Tour du monde à servir de support insolite à l’expression de spécificités nationales. Paru en 1874 et rédigé par le père des lettres belges Charles De Coster, le long récit de voyage intitulé « La Zélande (Néerlande) » en offre une illustration particulièrement frappante, multipliant les angles d’approche obliques de cette province néerlandaise jouxtant la Belgique.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

En vertu de ses liens viscéraux avec les Pays-Bas dont il ne s’est alors que récemment affranchi, le jeune État Belgique se voit indirectement différencié d’avec la grande voisine France. En même temps, dans un mouvement contraire, l’auteur cherche à exacerber les contrastes au sein même de territoires qui n’en formaient qu’un seul quelques décennies plus tôt. Ensuite, bien au-delà de disparités de part et d’autre de la frontière Belgique - Pays-Bas, c’est l’ensemble de la province de Zélande qui fait l’objet d’une particularisation pour le moins ébouriffante. De Coster déploie en effet une kyrielle de moyens – quitte à user de fumisteries – pour « exotiser » la Zélande au maximum : confusion de cette province avec la Nouvelle-Zélande (!), mise en scène d’une expédition navale et pédestre de type ethnographique, typologie excessive des idiosyncrasies insulaires locales, fluctuation de l’intégrité territoriale, exploitation du registre du fantastique… En somme, toute une série de procédés montrant que Le Tour du monde ne consiste pas tant en la patiente exploration in situ des points fixes d’un planisphère qu’en la reconfiguration dynamique et fantasmée d’un monde composé de curiosités.

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VIII.F: Proustian Landscapes (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: François Proulx (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Kirstin Ringelberg (Elon University), “The Court of Lilacs, The Studio of Roses, The Garden of Réveillon: Madeleine Lemaire’s Empire of Flowers” Marcel Proust, under the pen name “Dominique,” described in the pages of Le Figaro the studio of artist Madeleine Lemaire as “La Cour aux lilas et l’atelier des roses.” Already renowned for her paintings of flowers, Lemaire had also by this time illustrated Proust’s Les Plaisirs et les Jours (1896) as well as having welcomed Proust and the composer Reynaldo Hahn to her château in the Marne, called Réveillon, on multiple occasions. In the gardens of the château, Proust reportedly interrupted a perambulatory conversation with Hahn to admire some roses; Hahn circled the castle two more times before Proust was ready to rejoin him. Lemaire, dubbed “L’Impératrice des Roses” by Robert de Montesquiou (whose own Prières de Tous of 1902 was bedecked with her illustrations—the dedication to her read “Ce Rosaire qui lui est dû pour tant de Roses”) created environments both physical and psychic whose chief symbolic form was floral. Today, this emphasis on flowers seems saccharine, and the association of Lemaire with it is generally used as a way to dismiss her work and her historical importance. In addition to revealing the anti-feminine drift of scholarship more broadly, this dismissal ignores the value placed on Lemaire’s botanical abilities at the time—represented most clearly by her appointment as a Professor of design at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle. This paper will explore the heterotopic possibilities of Lemaire’s painted, printed, and actual gardens as spaces of non-normative identification and engagement, rather than as spaces of superficial feminine (and effeminate) vapidity.

Priya Wadhera (Adelphi University), “Des repas noirs: Dark Tablescapes from Huysmans to Proust and Perec” Almost one hundred years separate the “black meals” consumed in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884) and Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (1978). On the surface, these monochrome meals have little in common. While the feast of Des Esseintes is explicitly called “un repas de deuil,” Madame Moreau’s sumptuous meals are hardly an occasion for mourning. They are playful and part of a series, with others ranging in hue from yellow to pink. These “repas colorés” are a metaphor for Perec’s literary

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 constraints. For a meal to consist only in black (or yellow or pink) foods and be not just pleasing to the eye but to the palate as well is no easy feat. And this gesture mirrors Perec’s own writing practices. Like other members of the OuLiPo, he believed that literary constraints could, however paradoxically, liberate the author. The resulting texts are often ludic in nature. And yet, upon closer examination, these meals – and not just the black one – gesture towards death. I would like to explore this through the lens of another great gourmand, Marcel Proust. While there are no monochrome meals in the Recherche, the narrator and his entourage find themselves quite often “à table.” While many take Proust’s discussion of food to be a metaphor for the writing process as in Perec, I would like to explore the presence of death in Proust’s meals, from Françoise’s chicken to Albertine’s desserts. The inherent irony in the presence of death in all of these “tablescapes” is that food is first and foremost a means of sustenance and nourishment and thus, essential to survival. This alarming co-presence of food and death is what I propose to examine in these three instances, in order to better savor what is at stake in these authors’ works.

François Proulx (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “Proust’s Ludic Landscapes” Marcel Proust’s drawings have lately been the object of renewed critical attention. Studies generally follow the most extensive edition of these drawings to date in dividing the corpus in two principal categories: the scribbles found throughout Proust’s manuscripts, outlining strange, dreamlike figures or symbols; and the more structured drawings addressed to Reynaldo Hahn. Among the latter, the “medieval” drawings – usually traced by Proust from images of artworks he found in Émile Mâle’s L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (1899), and repurposed through whimsical or tender captions – have been the most frequently examined, since their appropriation of medieval allegory offers a rich terrain for reflections on Proustian themes and practices like pastiche, profanation, and codes of queer complicity. I propose to examine instead a set of drawings to Hahn that have received little notice, because they do not belong to the prominent “medieval” series, and because their publication history, shaped by dispersion and censorship, has made it difficult to consider them as a set. Compared with the rich and irreverent allegories of Proust’s medieval tracings, these drawings can seem rather naïve, even uninteresting. They are two-dimensional landscapes, summarily composed using simple lines and clunky shapes, the kinds of basic icons typically drawn by children: the sun, the sea, a few trees, some boats, a house, a church. While they do not appear to adapt a primary image (through tracing or pastiche), I will show that they make visible a set of interwoven literary, musical and biographical references, including texts by Verlaine, Renan, and Baudelaire. I will ask whether the marine landscapes of Elstir, a key to the development of the narrator’s aesthetic theory in the Recherche, and usually linked to Whistler, Monet, or other painters, might have more textual sources, playfully translated to the visual in these rarely seen drawings.

Darci Gardner (Appalachian State University), “Post-Naturalist Landscapes, Perceptual Distortions, and Self-Deceit in the Recherche” In 1870, Monet shattered Alberti’s window, the naturalist perspective that had dominated painting since the Fifteenth Century, and post-Impressionists spent the next thirty years exploring alternative ways to represent nature. Monet and his successors sought to assert “the eye of the artist,” and this affirmation of personal subjectivity destabilized the notion of space for generations to follow. Proust took a keen interest in these developments, which he used to broach hermeneutic questions in À la recherche du temps perdu. From the shifting position of Albertine’s beauty spot to the misleading loops of Gilberte’s handwriting, perceptual errors in the Recherche function as figurative placeholders for broader problems of interpretation. In Proust’s work as in post-naturalist painting, these distortions are the product of an individual observer’s increasingly subjective viewpoint.

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This paper examines descriptions of landscapes in the Recherche to demonstrate how the spatial experimentation of post-naturalist painters such as Monet, Seurat, and Vuillard frames Proust’s treatment of narrative unreliability and self-deceit. From the apparent movement of the Martinville steeples as the narrator approaches them to the way that la petite bande progresses along the embankment, descriptions of landscapes and of people moving through them reveal the impediments to reliably perceiving a natural world that artists had just spent decades redefining. Indeed, a significant component of the protagonist’s— and in some ways the reader’s—apprenticeship over the course of the novel is learning how to interpret these precarious spaces and the distortions that they generate.

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Break: 10:00am - 10:30am (State Suite Hallway, 2nd floor & L’Apogee, 17th floor)

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Saturday, October 29, 2016 Session IX: 10:30am - 12:00pm

IX.A: Mapping Rimbaud (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Joseph Acquisto (University of Vermont)

Seth Whidden (Oxford University), “Tracking Rimbaud’s African autre(s)” Arthur Rimbaud famously turned his back on Europe and writing simultaneously; according to Paul Verlaine, in Africa he sought “non pas la fortune, ni même la chance, mais le Désennui, dans des voyages néanmoins occupés en des industries riches d’aspect et de ton (dents d’éléphants, poudre d’or) […].” And yet, in his new environs he continued to write, and constantly. After a clean break from literature, what role do we accord the act of writing that stubbornly persisted, and what kind of writing can that even be? To what extent can Rimbaud’s writing while in Africa be thought of not as an uninteresting coda to his fascinating literary production, but rather as a non-European writing that reflects a decidedly non- European space? The present study suggests a way to start filling the void in critical studies of Rimbaud’s African period by approaching his texts through a combination of intersection of topography and biography. Not only is the post-poetic mode of writing important to understand his time in Africa, but— since he was hinting at it all along—it also sheds new light on the end of his poetic productivity. With respect to both landscape and literary voice, his African writings are a far cry from the lyric subject that traipsed through the rural Ardennes and through Paris, London, and Brussels; but read a different way, they can tell us much about the ongoing tension between subject, sensations, milieu, and the means to express it all.

Nichole Gleisner (Southern Connecticut State University), “How Rimbaud’s Radical Landscapes influenced French Poets of World War I” I would like to propose a conference paper that examines the crucial influence of Rimbaud’s poetry for French trench poetry during World War I. As Nils Clausson has argued, poets writing from the trenches first seek to avail themselves of pre-existing literary models with which they may then seek to record their impressions of the horrors of war. Clausson believes that English soldier-poets encountered a distinct lack of poetic models when they arrived on the front lines and thus needed to reformulate Romantic lyric into the trench lyric. French poets of the First World War had more readily available and appropriate literary models to draw from, specifically Rimbaud’s iconic poem from October 1870, “Le Dormeur du Val.” Here, Rimbaud transforms the landscape into a living, breathing entity, thick with verbs, dizzying with sound, hallucinatingly real with personified description. This poem sets a precedent that Rimbaud will continue to enact in his later poems, in which the earth is not mere landscape but a fully real, sensorily-insistent presence that demands the poet’s attention. Thanks to these essential articulations by Rimbaud, certain French poets of the Great War, writing from the all-too-real muck of the trenches, ably reject the Romantic pastoral genre and, following Rimbaud’s lead, experiment with proto-Surrealist landscapes where the land once again exerts a powerfully active presence in poems such as Apollinaire’s “Océan de terre” and René Dalize’s Ballade du pauvre Macchabé mal enterré (first published in 1919). Furthermore, Rimbaud’s flippant performativity will also serve as heady example, as when he writes in “Guerre” from Illuminations: “Je songe à une Guerre, de droit ou de force, de logique bien imprévue. C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale.” Apollinaire seizes this same spirit, and he is able

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 to embrace a certain artistic performativity in the trenches, as he writes in a letter from 1915 : ““Les tranchées d’ici sont de véritables œuvres d’art…”

Neal Allar (Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows), “Rimbaud’s Poésie-Monde: Exploded Cartographies in ‘Le Bateau ivre’” Hallucinatory, synesthetic, delirious, “Le Bateau ivre” has generally been read as a poem of otherworldly escape, a wild jaunt through dreamscapes and hidden intertexts: “un amalgame de lectures et de rêves d’évasion,” in the words of André Guyaux. And yet, even Rimbaud’s most dreamlike poetry remains fundamentally grounded in a thinking of “le monde.” As Yves Bonnefoy puts it, Rimbaud’s poetry, “quelle que soit l’abstraction de ses rêveries, reste au contact de la réalité, reste « au monde ».” My paper explores the possibility for “Le Bateau ivre” to serve as an early example of what I call poésie-monde (part of a broader project to make the case for poetry’s inclusion in the new category of littérature-monde). “Le Bateau ivre,” with its haphazard perambulations defying spatial logic, challenges conventional cartography. The poem suggests an alternative mapping of the world, constellating distant landscapes and breaking continents into such fragmentary units as “Péninsules démarrées” and “archipels sidéraux.” In this context, Rimbaud’s transgressions of perceptual limits and conventional prosody do not signal an out- of-this-world journey through psychedelic ideation; instead, Rimbaud provides a vision of the material world beyond the confines of humanistic rationalism. Poetry itself is immanent to this world. Not a static representation of the world, the Rimbaldian poem rather energizes the world’s becoming, hence the creative force of Rimbaud’s numerous appositive phrases and enchained prepositions. “Le Bateau ivre” thus envisions a radical fusion of word and world—a poésie-monde requiring a more chaotic cartography.

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IX.B: Pioneering Photography: Gender, Sexuality, Technology (Renaissance Salon) Chair: Alexandra Wettlaufer (University of Texas at Austin)

Raisa Rexer (Yeshiva University), “Objet du délit, objet d’art: The Nude Photographic Model in 19th-Century France” In 1857, faced with a growing tide of nude photographic imagery, the French government changed its approach to fighting illegal obscenity. From that point forward, the models in the images were to be charged alongside those who produced and profited from them. As he handed down the first of the harsher sentences, the Imperial prosecutor argued that “ces femmes allant s’offrir d’elles-mêmes aux photographes, leur portant les moyens de commettre le délit, on aurait dû leur faire porter leur part de culpabilité... M. le substitut requiert donc la peine de la prison contre les modèles en proportionnant cette peine au plus ou moins de gravité des faits imputés à chacune d’elles, gravité appréciable par la vue des poses reproduites sur les épreuves que le Tribunal a sous les yeux. ” The model’s body was the means of the crime and the objet du délit; a mere glance at its photographed reproduction affirmed her own guilt and the gravity of the crime. For this criminal body, she would have to pay with bodily imprisonment. In an industry defined by the ways that it defied conventional artistic and social classifications, the model was in many ways the most vexed figure of all. She exposed her body openly for the camera, and yet her situation and motivation remained a mystery. Despite its exposure, her body confused the contemporary boundaries marking out the appropriate nature and space of female sexuality as much as it confused the boundaries of obscenity and art. As a consequence, the Imperial Prosecutor was not alone in his obsession with the body of the photographic model during the Second Empire. As I will argue in this paper, the police, the legal system, and contemporary periodical sources all focused on the model—and

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 more particularly, the model's body—as they struggled to comprehend, to control, and to explain the new and ever-more-popular genre of pornographic photography. The model’s body became the battleground for a complex matrix of anxieties about the sexual, social and artistic ramifications of nude photographic imagery. In it alone came to inhere the very meaning of an image, whether that image was to be cast into the gutter as pornography or held up as a work of art.

Anne Linton (San Francisco State University), “Bioethics and Photography: Unearthing Nadar’s Hermaphrodite Series” In 1861, the famed portraitist and former medical school dropout Félix Nadar secured a copyright for a series of nine photographs of a “cas d’hermaphrodisme,” now housed at the Bibliothèque nationale. Known for his innovative and daring subject matter both high and low (from the first aerial shots from a hot air balloon to documenting the dark, damp sewers and catacombs of Paris), Nadar was rapidly gaining a reputation as a dauntless pioneer of new photographic techniques and subject matter. Even so, his copyright application provides a special caveat that the series never appear on display, further restricting its dissemination to “un usage purement scientifique.” The photographs were never published, even in a medical journal, and the series stands as Nadar’s only known medical photo shoot. In spite of recently renewed critical interest, mystery surrounds both the identity of the patient and the source of Nadar’s commission. This paper investigates the relationship between Nadar’s series and medical and literary narratives of intersex, then known as “hermaphrodism.” As the first known photographs of hermaphrodism, they tell an intimate and deeply personal story about doctor-patient relationships in nineteenth-century France while raising important ethical questions about the emerging photographic genre of medical photography. According to Walter Benjamin, “photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being.” Nadar’s series negotiates an uneasy relationship between art and science through a sometimes jarring combination of sculptural and medical poses and accoutrements. But its most interesting legacy is arguably its refusal to articulate what Michel Foucault would later call the “true sex” of the subject, long heralded as the defining and singular preoccupation of nineteenth- century medical and legal accounts of hermaphrodism.

Rachel Mesch (Yeshiva University), “Excavating the Self: Jane Dieulafoy and Transgender Photography” This talk will consider the role of photography in understanding Jane Dieulafoy, the explorer turned writer who became famous in the 1880s when she and her husband Marcel excavated the ancient palace in the Persian city of Susa. The couple unearthed magnificent friezes that can be viewed in the Louvre to this day. Before traveling to Persia, Dieulafoy purchased a camera and learned how to use it; she would be the main photographer in their travels, and many of her images of ruins, landscapes, and natives were reproduced in the dispatches that were regularly published in the bi-monthly travel journal Le Tour du Monde. While she rarely made herself the object of focus in these publications, in the couple’s private album, there are a few haunting self-portraits cast against the desolate Persian landscape. In these portraits, Dieulafoy is pictured in men’s clothing, which she had adopted for her travels. Unlike other nineteenth-century women explorers, however, Dieulafoy never returned to women’s clothing upon returning to Europe. Once resettled in Paris, she only appeared in well-tailored, elegant men’s suits, sometimes accompanied by a hat and cane. This paper argues that the Persian self-portraits provide a crucial window into understanding Dieulafoy’s transition to the masculine persona that she assumed for the rest of her adult life, demonstrating the importance of her archaeological work to her own process of self-discovery. It is quite

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 likely that had she lived today, Dieulafoy would have recognized herself in the broad rubric of transgender. In the nineteenth century, however, the complex relationships between biological sex, gender expression, and sexual preference had yet to be fully theorized or named, nor of course were the many overlapping possibilities within the category of transgender that might have been ways to understand her: non-binary, gender fluid, genderqueer, or pangender among others. Dieulafoy’s photographic legacy thus offers a visual supplement for a life narrative that had no vocabulary. Viewing Dieulafoy through the lens of transgender follows Jack (formerly Judith) Halberstam’s notion of “perverse presentism”—which “avoids the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time, but [...] can apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past (Female Masculinity, Duke UP, 52-53).” Examining Dieulafoy’s images alongside the representational practices of contemporary trans memoir, we will consider how the mechanism that she had brought to record the vestiges of an ancient civilization allowed her to see herself more clearly—which was no less awesome of a feat.

Meredith Lehman (University of Texas at Austin), “Geneviève-Elizabeth Francart-Disdéri and Architectural Photography” This paper examines a selection of photographs of Brest taken by Geneviève-Elizabeth Francart-Disdéri to question the marginalized status of women photographers in nineteenth-century France. Largely remembered as the wife and business partner of André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, famous for his carte-de- visite patent that made portrait photography a mass-produced phenomenon, Disdéri’s contributions have been overshadowed by her husband’s success and the gender politics of early photographic practices. Both self-taught photographers, the couple opened a portrait studio in Brest in 1848 where she is said to have hand painted the images with gold accents. In the absence of her husband who had left for Paris, Disdéri took over the business, becoming its principal photographer. She later owned and operated her own studio in the French capital from 1872 until her death in 1878, demonstrating her pivotal and successful place in the professional and commercial world of portrait photography. However, it is her pictures of Brest’s landscape and its monuments that Disdéri published in Brest et ses environs (1856), including, for example, views of the Abbaye Saint-Mathieu and the Plougastel- Daulous cemetery, that reveal an artistic exploration of composition and framing essential to the photographic image. Drawing upon Micheline Nilsen’s study of architecture and photography, I argue that these views of her surroundings defy the constructed borders of gender and genre in nineteenth- century France and offer a crucial lens for understanding in what ways Disdéri’s engagement with the then nascent medium challenged both accepted forms of feminine artistic production and architectural photography’s status as a documentary endeavor. Though her death certificate would read “sans profession,” ultimately, I show that Disdéri’s photographic interaction with her milieu forces us to rethink the creative role of women in the history of photography.

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IX.C: Surf & Turf (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: Kathleen Hart (Vassar College)

Ryan Swankie (University of Texas at Austin), “An Embrace of Arms and Flippers: Avant-garde Ecology in Les Chants de Maldoror” In 1885, Joris-Karl Huysmans described a scene from Les Chants de Maldoror as “le baisage de la requine par l'homme est stupéfiant.” Maldoror’s zoophilia is stupefying because of the violent, predatory nature of the animals involved. In this paper, I explore why Isidore Ducasse, the self-titled

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Comte de Lautréamont, would write about having sex with a shark. And lice?! I argue that in these scenes of transgressive sexuality, staged in the depths of the sea and the land, Ducasse depicts bestiality as an aesthetic for modernist critique. His prose poems offer the interspecies eroticized body as an enduring figure of social, and ecological, revolt. In Ecocriticism, Greg Garrard states: “the boundary between human and animal is arbitrary and, moreover, irrelevant, since we share with animals a capacity for suffering that only the 'hand of tyranny' could ignore.” I suggest that the capacity to inflict suffering, sexually attracts Maldoror to the female shark “la requine” and the louse “le pou.” Through the lens of ecocriticism, animal studies, and theory of the avant-garde, I examine the narrator's sexual love for the animal, and his sadistic hatred of the human, to understand Ducasse's boundary breaking prose-poetic. In these scenes, the poet's pen sinks society to a level of impouvoir, while showing the reader how to overcome alienation with aesthetic activism. Throughout Les Chants de Maldoror, Ducasse creates avant-garde ecosystems where poet, animal, and environment join in a violent force to attack traditional modes of expression and destabilize power structures.

Maura Coughlin (Bryant University), “Kicking a Pig: Living Closely with Animals” Taking as a starting point Jean-François Millet’s controversial painting Woman Pasturing her Cow (1855) and Paul Gauguin’s enigmatic Woman in the Hay with Pigs: in the Full Heat of the Day (1888) this paper offers an ecocritical approach to 19th-century visual culture that dwells on the entangled lives of French peasants and the animals that inhabited their everyday lives and landscapes. Arguing against the divisive logic of what has been a long-prevailing condemnation of “primitivism” in art history of this period, this reading of rural animal imagery emphasizes the inseparability of human “culture” from the “natural” world, granting agential power to the entwinement of human/animal relationships. Following Donna Haraway, who, in When Species Meet (2008), foregrounds the relationships and interactions of domesticated creatures and their humans, this paper explores the ubiquity images that articulate these relationships. Paintings by Millet and Gauguin, for instance, place goats on the beach, tie women to grazing beasts, put semi-nude women in the hay with pigs and have humans attending to newly born animals. What structures of empathy, humor and affection can be read in these images? What were the meeting points of peasant and farm animal life? In order to re-invigorate a discussion of the representation of rural life in France and to move beyond the limiting dialogue of primitivism, my argument brings together classic texts from the 1970s on realism and the materiality of “la terre” by John Berger, Linda Nochlin and Robert L. Herbert and fuses their readings to recent eco-materialist approached and primary research in local resources and museums in Normandy and Brittany.

Jean-François Richer (University of Calgary), “Ronrons, roulades et aboiements : le bruyant bestiaire de Balzac” Quelle formidable sonothèque du 19e siècle que La Comédie humaine de Balzac ! S’il faut la lire, il faut également l’entendre : pas un paysage qui ne bruisse, ne siffle ou ne frémisse ; pas un bâtiment, chez Balzac, qui ne fasse craquer ses planchers, claquer ses portes ou résonner ses couloirs ; pas une rue qui ne fassent résonner ses pavés, sonner ses cloches et vibrer les chevaux de ses omnibus. L’homme, la femme et leurs luttes — entre eux et le monde, entre le moi et la Loi — braillent, crient et détonnent acoustiquement dans presque toutes les pages, tendant ainsi aux oreilles du lecteur une trame sonore où retentit le politique, l’économique, le philosophique, le scientifique, le militaire, l’urbanité, la spiritualité et la ruralité profonde de la France postrévolutionnaire. Rien ne vit chez Balzac sans faire de son. Pas de

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 bruit, pas de vie. Balzac, oui, était doué d’une « sensibilité étonnante à l’écologie sonore », pour emprunter sa formule à Jean-François Augoyard. Notre communication voudrait soumettre à l’attention des membres de la Nineteenth-Century French Studies une des partitions structurelles les plus riches et les plus opératoires parmi toutes celles qui composent la toile acoustique feuilletée et complexe qui vibre au cœur du roman balzacien : les bruits d’animaux. La ville de Balzac, capitale ou de province, aboie, miaule, piaffe, ronronne, chante, hurle et bourdonne. Le chat, le chien, le cheval, l’abeille, le hanneton, le singe et le rossignol — pour ne nommer que ceux-là — donnent leurs cris et leurs bruits aux drames des marquises déçues, aux déboires des amoureux déchus et aux langueurs suicidaires des financiers en faillite. Le grand ténor qui défaille « brait comme un âne » ; l’amoureuse éconduite veut « ce que soupire le rossignol » ; l’employé « miaule comme un chat amoureux » tandis que des clercs rient à gorge déployée comme autant de « chevaux bien endentés ». Chez Balzac — et nous voudrions le faire entendre — la douleur de l’homme appelle les timbres de l’animal.

Charles Rice-Davis (Augustana College), “‘Chair indolente’: Grazing Life, Baudelaire and Agamben” The placid, implacable cow is an ironic, awkward and strangely fascinating fixture of the literary landscape in the 19th century. In the discourse on nostalgia and homesickness, for example, the cow-call melodies of the ranz des vaches, which Chateaubriand argued imitated the animal’s plaintive mooing, were thought to provoke a sudden longing to return to one’s (usually Alpine) homeland. Early Romantics like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Senancour and Heinrich Heine return to this legend as a trope of an ancient and bygone relationship to nature lost to most of their contemporaries. This trope of the contemplative ruminant prompted moments of excess—Lamartine’s naïve Geneviève describes spending her days in a cow stall “Où il fait si chaud, qui sent si bon [!!], et où on est distrait par le ruminement paisible des bêtes.” Hugo, in one of his less brilliant moments, addresses Nature- as-cow in “La Vache”: “Nous sommes là, savants, poëtes, pêle-mêle, /Pendus de toutes parts à ta forte mamelle !” Even a young Baudelaire, in 1837-1838, describes an expierence “Loin des derniers gazons foulés par les troupeaux,” in which one hears “des échos plus morts que la cloche lointaine / D’une vache qui paît aux penchants des vallons.” Baudelaire, as part of a broader trend, begins to develop a more critical understanding of the cow, in which cattle also represent a certain temptation (as in Nietzsche) of either modernized or atavistic modes of living—unthinking, memoryless, enslaved to bodily need. Poems like “Femmes damnées (comme un bétail pensif),” “La Charogne” and “Le Serpent qui danse" complicate the literary portrait of animal life at the time when the figure of bovine feminity shifts from Geneviève to Emma Bovary. Finally, I consider this reevaluation in the context of the categories of life discussed by Agamben via Aristotle, specifically, the latter’s concept of “grazing life” (boskēmatōn bios) as life without thought, language, or time.

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IX.D: Gardens (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Kaitlyn Quaranta (Brown University)

Laure Katsaros (Amherst College), “A Nineteenth-Century Ecotopia: The Pleasure Gardens at the Familistère in Guise” In 2012, the famed landscape architect Michel Desvigne redesigned the pleasure gardens of the massive “Familistère” in Guise (Northern France), creating a maze-like structure of hedges made of wild flowers and tall grasses, with the Oise river in the background. Desvigne’s new garden is so close to the northern

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 façade of the building that it seems to grow out of it, as if to emphasize the continuity between the built environment and the landscaped grounds. This garden offers beauty, tranquility, and rest, but serves no other immediate purpose; it is neither an orchard, nor a field. This could be viewed as a betrayal of the utilitarian ideals of the founder of the Familistère, the industrialist Jean-Baptiste Godin (1817-1888), a disciple of Charles Fourier. Godin partly modeled his “Familistère” on Fourier’s architectural invention, the “Phalanstère,” a palatial building in which all imaginable human activities, from field labor to child care, entertainment, and education, were to be performed collectively, under one roof. Charles Fourier (1772-1837) imagined the “Phalanstère” as an Edenic rural community, set in the countryside, preferably by a stream. The “Phalanstère” has often been characterized as a rural utopia, far removed from the realities of modernization and urbanization in early nineteenth-century France. The interior design of the building also incorporated many references to nature, with gardens, hothouses, bouquets of flowers in the hallways, and a centrally located winter garden. Fourier, who abhorred “wild” nature, with its mountains and deserts, delighted instead in the pruned and polished products of agriculture. As he sought to bring together labor and aesthetic delight, Fourier pioneered a kind of “market garden” which combined pleasure and profit. In this presentation, I will be showing how Fourier’s Edenic agricultural utopia blends together a radically new, forward-thinking organization of labor with the nostalgic ideal of a Garden of Eden. In other words, I will explore the ways in which a garden may be imagined both as a site of leisure and as an ideally productive workplace.

Rachel Corkle (Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY), “George Sand’s Politics of Plants” In 1863 George Sand began her Mémoires de Jean Paille, a novel about a fils de Jean-Jacques. The young Jean Paille lives on the estate where his father is a gardener; he is training to be a gardener, and gardening is the subject of his one conversation with Rousseau, his unbeknownst-to-him grandfather. Jean Paille’s lesson from Rousseau is that he must be a student of la terre rather than a sculptor of la terre, a botanist more than a landscaper. Sand is herself an amateur botanist, and it is the botanist—collector and student of flora—more than the gardener, who takes center stage in Sand’s body of work. There are many Sandian gardens, but few Sandian gardeners. This paper considers the gardener’s absence in Sand’s work. I argue that this absence can be explained by the intersection of Sand’s growing interest in botany with her commitment to second wave socialism. For Sand la terre is an object of study that teaches the astute student the laws of nature. Sand’s interest in botany goes hand in hand with her rejecting “unnatural” systems of privilege. The decorative garden, maintained by domestics who manicure land that they do not own, is doubly representative of nature disfigured. The politics of the decorative garden help explain why Sand, an author committed to representing both the worker and the land, rarely represents the gardener who works the land. While much has been made of Sand’s descriptive style in writing la terre, in particular her Berry, the pastoral has often eclipsed the political. In studying the Sandian botanist (of her Nouvelles Lettres d’un voyageur) and gardener (of Le Diable aux champs and Jean Paille), this paper seeks to move beyond the poetics of the roman champêtre to understand more broadly the socialist politics of her ecocriticism.

Donna Canada-Smith (Trinity College Dublin), “Parc des Buttes-Chaumont: Duality of the rus in urbe” Inaugurated in 1867 in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was designed as an urban retreat for the working classes of the 19th and 20th arrondissements. Its style, derivative of the anglo-chinois gardens made popular in late eighteenth-century French society, combined the idea of nature with scientific and technological advancements of the period in order to showcase

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France’s wealth and innovation. Historian Luisa Limido claims that ‘[u]n jeu de miroirs s’établit ainsi entre ville et jardin: on contemple le jardin de l’extérieur et en même temps on contemple la ville des buttes panoramiques du jardin’.33 This paper will analyze the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont first as rus in urbe, and secondly, as a site of escape. This site-specific study will explore the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont within the framework of Parisian garden history, and in light of the social interactions promoted by the site. By adopting such an approach, this paper will seek to establish the ways in which the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont promoted an ‘escape’ through nature, and the problematics of this endeavour. Finally, this paper will argue that the design for the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont prevents the possibility of escaping the urban framework, and that instead, the park serves as a signifier of late nineteenth-century Parisian society.

Kristan M. Hanson (University of Kansas), “Going Green: Jules-Émile Saintin’s La Bouquetière” In Jules-Émile Saintin’s La Bouquetière of 1875, a pretty young bouquetière (bouquet-maker) holds an arrangement of vibrantly hued, freshly cut blossoms. Standing at the entrance of a modern shop, this bouquetière portrays a popular nineteenth-century social type and cultural figure, whose vocation was synonymous with Paris. Saintin gave visual form to this flower seller’s significance as a source of civic pride and urban identity by framing her with a new kind of brilliant red pelargonium: “Gloire de Paris.” The sanguine blooms of this specially cultivated plant, originally imported from South Africa, served a decorative and nationalistic function when grown in the public gardens of the Bois de Boulogne in the late 1860s and an ornamental and commemorative one when worn by women at the Grand Prix de Paris in 1875. Saintin no doubt aligned the bouquetière with this pelargonium to mine the contemporary associations that both of these pictorial elements had with French soil. In my paper, I want to explore how Saintin engaged with the expansion of France’s horticultural industry by locating his painting in two contexts: the greening of Paris that sparked a fervor for domestic gardening and floral arranging, and the sudden popularity of depictions of female flower sellers and plants in visual culture. Using an interpretive lens that combines social-history, feminism, and psycho-cultural analysis, I also want to examine how Saintin’s depiction of the bouquetière and pelargoniums responded to a desire for images that pictured the re-formation of the city after the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. By supplanting representations of female mourners with the bouquetière, bloodshed and destruction with pelargoniums and other flowers, Saintin’s painting assured viewers who attended the Salon of 1875 or purchased Goupil & Cie’s reproductions of it that the revitalization of the city was now in full bloom.

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IX.E: Flaubert’s Places (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Anthony Zielonka (Assumption College)

Marina van Zuylen (Bard College), “Terre à terre: Flaubert's Love-Hate Relationship with Mediocrity” Berated for boring his readers with overly ambitious and lyrical subjects, Flaubert heeded the advice of his friends du Camp and Bouilhet: "Prends un sujet terre à terre, un de ces incidents dont la vie bourgeoise est pleine." He ended up taking this advice so seriously that he turned the questions of the terre à terre into an enduring reflection on mediocrity—in art and in life. The prosaic, the average, and the middling

33 Luisa Limido, L’Art des jardins sous le Second Empire: Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps (1824-1873) (Seyssel: Editions Champ Vallon, 2002), 131.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 become veritable sub-plots in the construction of his novels. But like the vexed question of bêtise, the terre-à-terre continues to puzzle Flaubert's readers. How can you mock Charles for not wanting enough, while deriding Emma for wanting too much? Do we have to choose between Charles' conversation ("plate comme un trottoir") and Emma's flights of metaphorical transcendence? It is one thing to "[b]ien écrire le mediocre" [to Colet, 12 septembre 1853], but to turn every figure de style, every life decision, into an indictment about mediocrity has made Flaubert the object of unexpected criticism. Rancière sees in this homogeneity a world where « tout parle également, aucune chose ne parle plus qu’une autre.» Can we reframe the terre à terre, the unimaginative, the mediocre, and give it a new voice?

Christophe Ippolito (Georgia Institute of Technology), “La Bretagne comme prétexte : l’histoire contre la géographie dans Par les champs et par les grèves” Bouvard et Pécuchet ont failli vivre en Bretagne. Leur vif intérêt pour le celticisme de la Normandie et le culte ithyphallique leur fait planifier un voyage en Bretagne, en commençant par Rennes. Le texte flaubertien dans Par les Champs et par les grèves finit par là, et n’en dit pas grand-chose. Mais comme Bouvard et Pécuchet, Par les Champs est un texte irrévérencieux, sur la religion comme sur la région, un texte qui a peu en commun avec les autres voyages en Bretagne de l’époque (de Janin à Mérimée, de Hugo à Stendhal). Ainsi, on montrera comment Flaubert déroute critiques et historiens en démontant le lieu commun de l’ivrognerie bretonne, transféré sur le personnage de M. Genès, mais aussi sur l’ivresse de l’extase contemplative avec Maxime du chapitre de Belle-Île. Nulle part Flaubert ne montre un véritable intérêt pour les Bretons ou la bretonnité, tout au plus une attirance antimoderne pour leur « barbarité » de primitifs. Ce n’est pas la « géographie » qui l’intéresse ici, mais l’histoire. On montrera comment Flaubert écrit l’histoire, ou plutôt, dans la continuité de la première Éducation sentimentale, et dans la lignée de Michelet et de Quinet, comment il prend l’histoire comme point de départ à l’écriture d’un récit, comme résurrection d’images de la vie du passé. Ce qu’on analyse comme des rêveries historiques dans Par les Champs est en fait la mise en texte d’un réservoir de lectures documentaires et autres qu’il s’agit d’animer, comme Foucault l’avait vu à propos de La Tentation de saint Antoine. On étudiera notamment le processus de reconstruction du passé lointain dans les passages sur Amboise, Clisson, ou Saint-Malo.

Kasia Stempniak (Duke University), “L’île de la toilette: Fashion and Space in Flaubert’s Le Château des cœurs and L’Education sentimentale” In L’Education sentimentale, Frédéric Moreau describes elements of the Parisian landscape as sartorial objects, from “des nuages roses, en forme d’écharpe” to the banks of the Seine that unfurl like ribbons. The metonymic rendering of the city as fabric and accessory is even more explicit in Le Château des cœurs, a ten-act féerie Flaubert composed in the early 1860s with Louis Bouilhet and Charles d’Osmoy. In the play’s fifth act, the young protagonist Jeanne stands in a dilapidated Parisian apartment only to find it transformed into “l’île de la toilette”—a bucolic countryside with hills made of fabric, trees covered in fans, and mushrooms covered with dresses. Clothed by the natural landscape, Jeanne is publicly shamed for her démodé style by the Roi Couturin. Privileging “factice” over the natural, Couturin transforms the countryside into a Parisian department store filled with dresses, workers, and even talking mannequins. The play’s constantly transforming spaces, from fantastical countryside to monarchical fairy- tale court to Parisian department store, highlight the destabilizing place of fashion in 19th-century Paris. With the rise of the department store, the increase in textile factories, the proliferation of fashion magazines, and the emergence of the couturier/artist, the fashion system infiltrated a number of new spaces in the 1860s. On the one hand, Le Château des cœurs depicts fashion as an industrialized and tyrannical force divorced from any aesthetics of Beauty, a view Flaubert expressed as early as 1854 when he claimed,

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“L’industrialisme a développé le laid dans des proportions gigantesques.”34 I argue that while Le Château des cœurs builds on Flaubert’s critique of fashion by emphasizing its industrialized aspects, it also develops fashion as a locus of figurative signification. Framing this simultaneous condemnation and aestheticization of clothing in spatial terms, Le Château des cœurs prefigures Flaubert’s poetics of fashion in L’Education sentimentale.

Mary Orr (University of St Andrews), “Scorched Earth? World Empires in Question in Salammbô” Many fine critical interpretations of Flaubert’s Salammbô have re-examined its distorting Carthaginian mirrors for Second Empire France. This paper, however, arises from my increasing dissatisfaction with them, particularly their cynical smugness regarding the novel’s famous ending: ‘Ainsi mourut la fille d’Hamilcar pour avoir touché au manteau de Tanit.’ Might our superiority regarding its preposterousness be precisely Flaubert’s target? How, then, could a literal reading of the ending better reveal the follies of human civilization as the touching of ‘Tanit’s cloak’? To reset our civilising frames of reference to address these questions, the paper first reads back from the ending for scenes of extreme realism. The two most obvious are examined briefly, the ‘défilé de la Hache’ as mirror for the earlier siege of Carthage in ‘Moloch’. Because literally representing the policy of ‘scorched earth’, these harrowing scenes of ‘un-civilisation’ determine, I suggest, the novel’s larger tactics. Not only does it put human hubris openly in full view, it also declares its consequences. If suddenly the wanton excesses of the opening ‘festin’ take on a more grim foreshadowing of these and the final scene of inevitable human (self-)destruction, they also return our focus to the first taboo killing we witness, of the sacred fish. By unpacking for the first time its connections to the ‘manteau de Tanit’, the remainder of the paper also offers a first geo-logical re-reading of Salammbô. The ultimate warning Flaubert proposes is that over-weaning human disregard for nature’s productions – especially water and drought -- marks out what Cuvier called a ‘Révolution du Globe’ producing mass species extinctions. We most recently call it the epoch of the Anthropocene and the destruction of the environment.

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IX.F: La Terre sans les hommes ? (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Jacques Neefs (Johns Hopkins University)

Florence Vatan (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Terres inhospitalières et poétique de la désolation” Dans « La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier », Julien, après son parricide, quitte la communauté des hommes et trouve refuge à proximité d’un fleuve d’où s’étendent « à perte de vue des plaines stériles ayant sur leur surface de pâles étangs, çà et là ». « Chacun sa chimère » évoque des hommes marchant courbés « sous un grand ciel gris, dans une grande plaine poudreuse ». Le narrateur d’Aurélia croit voir des « figures arides » de rochers s’élancer « comme des squelettes » ainsi que des « arbres frappés de mort et de stérilité ». A l’aide d’exemples empruntés à Flaubert, Baudelaire et Nerval, cette communication explore les représentations oniriques, métaphoriques et allégoriques de contrées hostiles et désertées. Il s’agit de mettre à nu les traits saillants de la poétique de la désolation dont elles sont l’expression – poétique fondée sur un imaginaire marécageux ou minéral –, et d’en situer les enjeux au regard de l’esthétique du sublime et par rapport à la célébration euphorique ou nostalgique d’une terre mère

34 Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance. Ed. Jean Bruneau. Paris: Pléiade, 1973, II, 518.

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 nourricière. Cette étude envisage également dans quelle mesure les espaces vides ou abandonnés – source de méditation mélancolique ou d’angoisse métaphysique – articulent paradoxalement un désir de communauté.

Virginie Duzer (Pomona College), “Fixer le désert” Comment fixer, dire, donner à voir, raconter et montrer l’immense vertige que l’on nomme désert ? Si « l’homme isolé dans ce morceau du monde fait exclusivement de lignes, de lumières et d’ombres est comme au centre d’une horloge immense […] » (Masqueray), et se trouve donc au cœur d’un espace aux tracés éminemment picturaux, le peintre y est en réalité confronté au vide d’un paysage fuyant et sans accroche de regard : « peu de variété, peu d’accidents, peu de nouveautés, sinon le soleil qui se lève sur le désert et va se coucher derrière les collines, toujours calme, dévorant, sans rayon […] (Fromentin). Aussi le désert s’avère-t-il presque irreprésentable – sinon en ces rares instances exceptionnelles que seraient les caravanes passant au loin, les oasis devinées en mirages, les tristes carcasses de chameaux. Car c’est certainement au premier plan de cette toile de Guillaumet qu’est dû son succès au Salon de 1868, et qui explique l’enthousiasme d’un Théophile Gautier touché : « Jamais l'infini du désert n'a été peint d'une façon plus simple, plus grandiose et plus émouvante. » Prenant pour point de départ les descriptions paradoxales d’un Emile Masqueray qui transforme le paysage en océan - puisque, selon lui, dans le Sahara « ce n’est pas la terre qui compte » -, considérant également certaines toiles et certains récits de voyages d’Eugène Fromentin et de Gustave Guillaumet, nous nous proposons donc de révéler les différentes manières dont il fut coutume, dans les années 1850- 1890, de représenter le désert et son infinie solitude.

Jacques Neefs (Johns Hopkins University), Respondent

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Lunch: 12:00pm - 1:30pm

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Saturday, October 29, 2016 Session X: 1:30pm - 3:00pm

X.B: Autour d’Emmeline Raymond: Fashion, Propriety, and Ideology (State Suite A) Chair: Heidi Brevik-Zender (University of California, Riverside)

Susan Hiner (Vassar College), “Domesticating Fashion with Emmeline Raymond” Directrice of La Mode Illustrée, Emmeline Raymond retired (and died) in 1902, leaving behind thousands of fashion chronicles and a voluminous one-sided correspondence that both documented in minute detail and exercised control over the rapidly changing fashions of an increasingly modern Paris, as well as the preoccupations and values of nineteenth-century French bourgeois society. Through a careful mediation of fashion by way of a discourse of economy, homemaking, and charity, Raymond transformed fashion, and its most potent marketing instrument, the fashion magazine, into an indispensable engine of morality. The journal’s title indicates as much: fashion, long figured as a capricious courtesan, would be redeemed by family values. Countering the excesses of Napoléon III’s glittering imperial court, Raymond proposes restraint and simplicity in dress; in the midst of the vertiginous upheavals of Haussmann’s renovations to Paris, Raymond’s column preaches steady consistency, reforming fashion’s requisite inconstancy and elitism as an inclusive practicality. Along with beautiful hand-colored plates, dress patterns come with each issue, thus ensuring access to the latest Paris fashions for the most provincial of subscribers. Blurring the lines between fashion advice and savoir-vivre, Raymond transforms fashion writing into ethical messaging over a forty-year period, reaching vast audiences and bringing up a generation of readers. By hitching her family-focused ideology to one of the most powerful popular cultural phenomena, she thus remakes fashion as a moral imperative, expanding fashion’s empire and proselytizing bourgeois taste. This paper will explore Raymond’s fashion column in its first two decades, considering in particular the relation between word and image: that is, Raymond’s advice on the page alongside visual materials illustrating fashion as well as household items and advertisements. How does Emmeline Raymond reconcile the frivolity of fashion—on full display in the color plates—with the moral imperative of combatting idleness? The answer lies in the visual rhetoric of the journal itself: fashion would be domesticated.

Masha Belenky (George Washington University), “Beyond La Mode Illustrée: The Fictions of Emmeline Raymond” An influential fashion writer and an arbiter of bourgeois taste for generations of female readers, Emmeline Raymond is best known as the editor of La Mode Illustrée: Journal de la famille, one of the most popular fashion magazines in the second half of the nineteenth century. But Raymond’s contemporaries knew her not only for her fashion writing, but also as the author of conduct manuals, manuals on homemaking, cook books, advice books, sewing manuals, and, last but not least, didactic novels for young ladies. An astonishingly prolific writer, Raymond produced works in a wide variety of genres, with titles such as La civilité non puerile mais honnête (1885), La bonne menagerie (1887) Leçons de couture, crochet, tricot, frivolité (1868), Le nouveau livre de cuisine (1886). In addition to authoring several original novels, she also translated works by a popular contemporary Austrian writer Eugenie Marlitt, whose novels, featuring young female protagonists, disseminated ideas about modern bourgeois femininity very similar to Raymond’s own.

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Despite this staggering variety of genres, what emerges from Raymond’s oeuvre is a remarkable conceptual consistency: just as her fashion chronicles promoted a domestic ideology, so her novels, translations, and other writings all fostered bourgeois propriety and codes of proper conduct for young women. This paper will explore some of Raymond’s novels (such as A quelque chose malheur est bon (1866) and Autobiographie d’une inconnue (1868), both published as part of “Bibliothèque de mères de famille” series, edited by Raymond herself), as well as some of her conduct manuals, in order to examine different modes through which she constructed and disseminated a bourgeois ideology of womanhood.

Justine de Young (Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY), “Addressing the Modern Amazone: The Equestrienne in French Fashion Discourse” While the elegant horsewoman in Victorian England has been perceptively investigated by Janet Arnold and Alison Matthews David, the amazone as an icon of modern French fashionability and femininity and character of urban life has gone thus far largely unexamined. Women had appeared as equestriennes in art and life before the nineteenth century, but virtually exclusively in royal or aristocratic circles. Under the Second Empire, however, for the first time, riding became a fashionable, bourgeois, even urban activity in Paris; women could rent horses in the new Bois de Boulogne for a morning or an afternoon ride. In the 1860s and 70s, the amazone began to figure repeatedly in modern-life paintings at the annual Paris Salon. Parallel to its rise in popularity with the bourgeoisie, riding and riding dress began to feature regularly in the illustrated press and fashion and tailoring magazines. This paper proposes to examine the discourse and imagery surrounding this new urban actor in contemporary French fashion and illustrated magazines, headed by editors like Emmeline Raymond who sought to advise readers about proper comportment and dress. Riding in the city functioned as an act of fashionable display and recreation rather than in its country role as a means of hunting or of transportation. The amazone, though fashionable, remained a potentially transgressive figure as her riding dress, inspired by masculine style suiting, was created by a male tailor. She represented also an empowered and mobile woman, navigating public parks independently. This paper will examine the divergent depictions and discussions of the amazone in the tailoring, fashion and illustrated press for what they can tell us about this new figure of urban life and about attitudes of the time surrounding women and the new urban spaces of Paris.

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X.C: Hitting Rock Bottom: Earth, Time and Death (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Lise Schreier (Fordham University)

Lise Schreier (Fordham University), “Au fond du trou : La terre et le temps dans l’imaginaire populaire parisien des années 1840” En 1833, l’ingénieur Louis-Georges Mulot entreprend de faire forer le premier puits artésien de Paris face aux abattoirs de Grenelle. Sept ans et 548 mètres plus tard, l’eau surgit, à la joie de l’instigateur des travaux comme à celle des caricaturistes, chansonniers et vaudevillistes. Que l’événement inspire ces artistes n’a rien d’étonnant : il a de quoi décontenancer. Pourquoi en effet creuser un trou si gigantesque pour aller chercher de l’eau alors que la Seine est à deux pas? Pourquoi dépenser tant d’argent pour une eau qui s’avère verdâtre et boueuse? Pourquoi chercher une solution à un problème, quel qu’il soit, au fond d’un trou ? Aucune plaisanterie n’est épargnée à Mulot, dont le nom même semble l’avoir destiné à creuser la terre. Mais cet énorme chantier, qui occupe longtemps l’imagination des Parisiens, ne suscite pas seulement la satire et le rire. Il donne aussi lieu à des rêveries mélancoliques et morbides, y compris chez

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 les vaudevillistes, généralement peu portés à l’instrospection. Qu’y a-t-il donc au fond du trou ? Et pourquoi ce que l’on imagine y trouver provoque-t-il une rupture générique remarquable chez les humoristes qui cessent un instant de faire rire pour faire face à leur mortalité ? L’histoire de cette terre que l’on creuse au cœur de Paris nous permettra de raffiner notre compréhension des rapports qui se tissent alors entre le comique populaire et une époque qui a d’autant plus besoin de plaisanter que son avenir est effrayant.

Mary Hunter (McGill University), “Waiting for Hugo: Time, Death and Representation at a Celebrity Funeral” When Victor Hugo died at his home on May 22, 1885, twelve artists were quickly summoned to depict the writer on his deathbed. A physician injected zinc chloride into Hugo’s veins to slow his bodily decomposition, while artists, armed with pencils, paints, pastels, cameras and plaster molding, attempted to capture Hugo’s likeness and aura before his body was placed in a casket to begin its journey to the Arc de Triomphe, where it lay in state before the funeral procession carried it through the streets of Paris to the Panthéon. Over two million people lined up to see Hugo’s casket, adorned with flowers, flag and portraits, and waited to watch his funeral procession pass through the city in a pauper’s hearse. Hugo had asked for a pauper’s funeral – a simple affair with a cheap casket placed in a hole dug in the ground – but this ceremony was its opposite. As M. Floquet, President of the Chamber of Deputies, exclaimed in his speech at Hugo’s state funeral, “This is not a funeral, but an apotheosis… This immortal giant would have been ill at ease in the solitude and obscurity of subterranean crypts. We have elevated him…” By examining images produced at the time of Hugo’s death, particularly those that address or embody the waiting times endured by the public to see his funeral and the waiting required by artists to create his death portraits, this paper will explore the relationship between death and time in visual representations of funerary practices, from elevated entombments to earth-bound holes in the ground.

Sylvie Boisjoli (McGill University), “Portals to Prehistoric Time: Caves, Holes and the Excavation of the Distant Past” At the 1888 Salon in Paris, French painter Léon Maxime Faivre exhibited a painting entitled Deux mères, which depicts a dramatic scene set in prehistoric time of a mother protecting her two small children from a bear. The mother, ax in hand, looks back toward the animal that pursues them. The bear, the second of the deux mères, is pictured in the background emerging from a narrow gap between two vast rock walls. Faivre gave viewers the impression of being immersed in a cavernous space by painting the mother and her children fleeing through a dark cave. Representations of caves and holes in the ground, I argue, evoked the so-called primitive nature of France’s earliest human inhabitants. Caves were common sites of excavation for archaeologists such as Édouard Lartet, who dug into the layers of the earth to uncover traces of prehistory. By analyzing Deux mères in relation to the rudimentary tools, instruments, and human remains found by archaeologists in the holes they dug in the ground, this paper explores how artists used the scant material fragments found during these excavations to form more complete visions of the past. This paper also questions why and how artists frequently visualized and theorized caves as spaces for the formation of family bonds – bonds that they believed were at the origin of France’s national and social identity. Faivre, for example, linked France’s ancestral lineage to the representation of a fit, white mother who saves her children from animal violence. I thus explore how caves and holes were understood as signifiers of prehistoric time, particularly at this historical moment when archaeology was increasingly being used as a scientific method that could (re)construct distant histories.

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X.D: Gastronomy (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: France Lemoine (Scripps College)

Bertrand Marquer (Université de Strasbourg), “Physiologie du terroir à la fin du XIXe siècle : ‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es’” L’objectif de cette communication est d’explorer les usages littéraires de la cuisine de terroir dans le dernier tiers du XIXe siècle, en les reliant à l’essor du discours gastronomique. Julia Csergo35 a en effet montré qu’à partir de Grimod de la Reynière (Almanach du gourmand), les guides de voyage incluaient une rubrique « gastronomie », voire proposaient, comme Cadet de Gassicourt (Cours gastronomiques ou les dîners de Manant-Ville, 1809) une carte de France où étaient indiquées les principales spécialités régionales, initiant ainsi un phénomène de « patrimonialisation » (Csergo) de la cuisine de terroir. Ce phénomène culmine à la fin du siècle : à une époque où la question de la falsification et de la fraude alimentaires est prégnante, la cuisine régionale tendrait même à « prolong[er] la conception romantique du local comme conservatoire de la sensibilité du passé », et renverrait à « la nostalgie d’un "autrefois" d’avant la révolution industrielle et l’urbanisation »36. La littérature de la fin du XIXe siècle reprend ou détourne cette conception de la cuisine régionale, en adoptant parfois ce que l’on pourrait nommer un lyrisme physiologique, hérité du fameux aphorisme de Brillat-Savarin : « Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es »37. Nous essaierons de le montrer à travers l’étude de quatre textes symptomatiques de ce rapport identitaire et symbolique à la cuisine du terroir : - Le Moulin du Frau et Jacquou le Croquant (Eugène Le Roy), où la cuisine des paysans du Périgord permet de dire l’identité républicaine, et de formuler la pensée politique de l’auteur ; - Le Vieux (Maupassant) et En rade (Huysmans), œuvres dans lesquelles la gastronomie du terroir devient le support d’un regard ironique, voire satirique.

Daniel Sipe (University of Missouri), “Grimod de la Reynière, du guide gastronomique à la géographie du désir” En 1803 Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière sort l’Almanach des gourmands, ou calendrier nutritif, un guide gastronomique destiné aux bourgeois. Grimod est conscient de l’innovation que représente cet « essai d’un nouveau genre. » Parmi les nouveautés que contient le guide se trouve un « Itinéraire nutritif. » Cette « indication raisonnée » propose d’entrainer le lecteur à travers le labyrinthe d’un Paris consommateur dans le but de lui divulguer les établissements où l’on vend la meilleure chère Dans le cadre d’un projet se portant sur les humanités numériques, nous avons retracé l’itinéraire de Grimod sur un plan historique de Paris. Ce qui en est ressorti est aussi surprenant qu’utile pour la compréhension des vastes transformations que subissent la capitale et ses habitants à l’aube du XIXe siècle. Comme l’on pourrait s’y attendre, Grimod décrit une ville comestible composée d’une série de points d’intérêt ; là se trouve un boulanger particulièrement habile, ici une épicerie fine qui propose de succulentes dindes farcies. Toutefois ce n’est pas tant dans la succession des établissements qui

35 Julia Csergo, « La gastronomie dans les guides de voyage : de la richesse industrielle au patrimoine culturel, France XIXe- e début XX siècle », In Situ [En ligne], 15 | 2011. 36 Julia Csergo, « L’émergence des cuisines régionales » Histoire de l’alimentation (J.-L. Flandrin et M. Montanari éds), Fayard, 1996, p 831. 37 Il s’agit du quatrième aphorisme de Physiologie du goût (1825), régulièrement repris, en particulier dans les écrits gastronomiques

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 s’enchaînent mais dans le chemin même que propose le gourmand pour les relier que se trouve l’intérêt de son projet. Un coup d’œil suffit pour comprendre que ces établissements forment des constellations autour des lieux hautement symboliques. Lors de cette intervention, nous proposons de retracer l’itinéraire du gourmand à travers ces endroits clés pour voir comment ce parcours invite à contempler les liens multiples que chacun de ces sites de mémoire entretient avec les pratiques alimentaires. Quand on l’examine de près, l’itinéraire du gourmand se construit autour d’une logique narrative selon laquelle la bonne chère n’est qu’un prétexte pour étudier une bourgeoisie encore incertaine de son ascendance.

Edwige Crucifix (Brown University), “Designing the Homme de goût: Wine and Terroir in 19th- Century Gastronomical Literature” Coined in 1801 by Joseph Berchoux, the word “gastronomie” inaugurates the century’s radical shift in the art and science of eating and drinking. An aesthetic codification of consumption practices, it asserts the social, economic and cultural status of the emerging bourgeois elite. Gastronomical literature outlines the ideal consumer: the homme de goût, whose distinction relies both on a natural and educated sense of taste. This social ideal is also a national one: not only is the homme de goût a bourgeois, he is French. This nationalist accent translates into gastronomy’s obsession with regional products from the terroir, most notably, wine. The definition of terroir soon becomes a scientific endeavor: in 1804, Louis Cadet de Gassicourt publishes the first gastronomical map of France, a definitive attempt to locate the treasures of a blessed land. For wine producers, this scientific project is part of a survival strategy, especially after the phylloxera outbreak in the 1860s threatens the integrity of French vignobles. Fueled by patriotism, the science of terroir cannot be severed from economical and political preoccupations. Terroir becomes the ultimate distinction marker, attested by the gastronomes’ obsession with wine hierarchies. Exploring the connections between the scientific elaboration of terroir and the gastronomical discourse on wine outlines the nationalist undertones of the ideal homme de goût as it appears in the gastronomical treatises of 19th century French gastronomes Grimod de la Reynière, Alexandre Dumas and Horace Raisson. Through this figure, wine indeed becomes a symbol of Frenchness, still, as Barthes puts it, “felt by the French nation to be a possession which is its very own, just like its three hundred and sixty types of cheese and its culture”.

Max Shrem (Chadwick School), “Lady Gastronomy and Her Doxology of Terroir” The 19th-century forefathers of French gastronomy, Grimod de La Reynière and Brillat-Savarin, depict spiritual transcendence as a complete embrace of, unity with, and regression into nature. Their writings conceive of an image of the feast anchored in religious naturalism, one that is reflective of an earthly cult, a liturgy of the body, and a glorification of the senses. They situate the gastronomic field within an ethos of the “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” a joyful hymn which according to Roman Catholic ritual is sung on the holiest of feast days. This comes across most clearly in their projection of a feminine deity onto a romanticized culinary landscape. Despite their overarching differences, Grimod and Brillat-Savarin shared a view of gastronomy centered on a feminine archetype, which reflects J.J. Bachofen’s study on matriarchal religion and Erich Neumann’s psychology of the uroboros. In light of Maurice Agulhon’s extensive scholarship on the iconography of Marianne in 19th-century France, it would be a serious oversight not to delve further into the gastronomic veneration of the mother figure, and her embodiment of the Republic. In fact, what specifically evokes the litany of the “Gloria in excelsis Deo” is Grimod’s comparison of the gastronomic table to a vestal virgin, the much neglected iconography of Brillat- Savarin’s Gastérea (the gastronomic goddess), and their relationship to the cultural symbolism of

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Marianne. Just as the cult of Marianne helped give rise to the cult of the nation, Brillat-Savarin’s “tenth muse” is depicted giving birth to the gastronomic field. As Agulhon reveals through the idolatry of Marianne, the secularization of the nation is imbued with a new idea of worship and sacrifice. In this paper, I explore the emergence of a nationalist discourse of terroir by examining the correlation between Gastérea and the semantics of seduction in Grimod’s Almanach des Gourmands.

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X.E: Nations under Siege (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Dennis M. Hogan (Brown University)

Sima Godfrey (University of British Columbia), “Into the Trenches” The Crimean war, the only 19th- century war won by the French – alongside British and Turkish allies -- is widely considered the first modern war, with its strategic use of railways, telegraphs and battleships and its notorious trenches – tactical precursors of the Great War. From 1854-1855, during the great Siege of Sebastopol, French soldiers lived, fought and died in these pits of cold, mud and deadly infection which gave rise -- half a century before the Great War -- to early narratives of trench warfare: “la guerre de tranchées.” In this paper, we consider some of these narratives as represented in the letters and memoirs of French soldiers and in a memorable text by Victor Hugo. The French military trenches of the mid- 1850s echoed other trenches throughout France, most notably the “tranchées” related to demolition in Paris, where Baron Haussmann led Napoleon III’s battle for urban modernization, public hygiene, and precaution against popular insurrection. It is not without enthusiasm that in 1855 Théophile Gautier noted in Paris démoli: “De profondes tranchées, dont plusieurs sont déjà de magnifiques rues, sillonnent la ville en tout sens, … La physionomie de Paris est changée de fond en comble. La ville s’aère, s’assainit : plus de quartiers lépreux, plus de masures humides où la misère s’accouple avec l’épidémie.” Whereas the trenches in Crimea were ripe breeding grounds for epidemics, the trenches that aerated Paris were ultimately designed to prevent them. Along with the “tranchées militaires” and the “tranchées de l’urbanisation” Napoleon III was also responsible for a third kind of modern trench in France, “des tranchées archéologiques.” A fervid amateur of Gallo-Roman history, the Emperor ordered major archeological excavations to determine, among other sites of memory, the precise location of the Siege of Alesia in 52 B.C., one of Julius Caesar’s greatest military achievements. This paper considers the overlap of these three kinds of trenches as part of the legacy of the Second Empire.

Brian Martin (Williams College), “Terre & Tranchées : L’Armée de terre, de Sedan à Verdun” As the central figure in Zola’s La Terre (1887) and La Débâcle (1892), Jean Macquart is synonymous with the terrestrial work of both the farm laborer and foot soldier in nineteenth-century France. After his initial career in the armies of Napoleon III from 1852-59, Jean toils the earth in the fields of Beauce, before returning to military service during the Franco-Prussian War, when he is wounded at the Battle of Sedan in 1870. Having cultivated wheat fields, Jean now returns to battlefields. As the leader of a small platoon, Corporal Macquart cares for his comrades Maurice, Pache, Loubet, Chouteau, and Lapoule, amid the privations of campaign and the carnage of combat. La Débâcle thus prefigures the trench novels of the First World War, when a new generation of French soldiers faced the violence of warfare on the same soil. On the centenary of the Battle of Verdun (1916-2016), I want to reexamine Henri Barbusse’s Goncourt-winning trench novel Le Feu (1916). Echoing Zola, Barbusse describes with even greater graphic horror the muddy fields and mass graves of the First World War, when trench warfare and mechanized slaughter blurred the lines between men and earth. Barbusse describes the soiled corpses of

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 his comrades Lamuse, Barque, Biquet, and Eudore, whose rotting bodies are indistinguishable from the mud: “Ce sont nos compagnons [qui] se décomposent là, tout près de nous…[N]ous vivons face à face avec ces morts.” During this conference on “La Terre” and this centennial anniversary of the Battle of Verdun, these texts invite us to reconsider the role of the Armée de terre during the late nineteenth century, and those buried in the terre and tranchées of France.

Lowry Martin (University of Texas at El Paso), “Imagining Jihad in the 19th Century: Emile Driant’s L’Invasion noire and the Islamic threat to French Sovereignty” Émile Driant, writing under the pseudonym of Capitaine Danrit was a well-read novelist whose works often sounded a xenophobic alarm that warned of future wars. His novels were best-selling expressions of certain French political strains that fed a simmering French nationalism and promoted French colonial aspirations and that were often considered “romans de jeunesse”. However, few of his works are more prescient and historically relevant than his first novel, L’invasion noire, written in 1895, in which he warns of an Islamic invasion of France that brings Muslim hordes to the very gates of Paris and poses an existential Islamic threat to France. While French anti-Semitism rooted in the Dreyfus Affair haunts the Belle Époque, much less studied is the concurrent Islamaphobia that was fomenting within the Hexagon. My paper examines not only how Driant anticipated future warfare—from its brutal mechanization to chemical warfare—but how he envisioned a cultural war that would pit French Republican values against authoritarian theocratic ideologies. This paper illustrates how Driant’s first novel creates a link between late nineteenth century conservatism and the dormant germ of Islamaphobia that eerily resonates with our own historical moment.

Richard Shryock (Virginia Tech), “The Nation under Attack: The ‘Gray Zone’ and the Response of the Symbolists to the Anarchist Attacks in the 1890s” The recent terrorist attacks in Paris were of course not the first time the city was rocked by such violence. In fact, the series of anarchists attacks in the mid- 1890s culminated in the assassination of the French President. At this same time, the writers of the Symbolist movement largely expressed support for the anarchists. The significance of their move toward anarchism has produced a wide range of interpretations. Some critics dismiss it as merely a faddish attraction to a high-profile series of events while others read the Symbolists as engaging alongside anarchists in a battle to overthrow the government. This paper examines the response of the Symbolists in light of the notion of the “gray zone.” This concept is adapted from the February 2015 issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State’s official online publication, published shortly after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks. One of the goals of the violence for them is to push people to decide where they stand. While the motivations of the ISIS-inspired terrorists and the anarchists are significantly different, the violence perpetrated in the streets of a city can have similar effects on the decision-making processes of those trying to understand the situation at the time. Prior to the attacks, many of the Symbolists’ positions with regard to revolutionary politics could be described as in the gray zone. Existing studies of their published responses to anarchism have not been directly correlated to specific events. Doing so, provides a more nuanced account of their positions. In addition, some unpublished archival resources show a much greater involvement on the part of several than has been heretofore established. This approach allows the peeling away of the romanticized image of the anarchists and helps us to understand more clearly how a group of literary writers grappled with the violent events unfolding before them.

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X.F: Better Homes and Gardens? (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Jennifer Forrest (Texas State University)

Julia Przybos (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY), “Du jardinage décadent” Au bout d’une réflexion sur la « paresseuse nature », le héros d’A Rebours conclut que « par les temps qui courent, les horticulteurs sont les seuls et les vrais artistes ». A partir d’éléments fournis par la nature, « l’homme élève, modèle, peint, sculpte à sa guise des variétés de plantes » proprement stupéfiantes. Admiratif mais prudent, Des Esseintes choisit d’exercer ses talents à arranger un intérieur savamment composé. Cette sagesse fait défaut aux ducs, princes et rois décadents qui n’hésitent pas à concurrencer ou à modifier le monde extérieur. S’inspirant de Louis II de Bavière, quelques écrivains imaginent des personnages vénérant Wagner et aménageant retraites, parcs et jardins. Catulle Mendès décrit, dans Le Roi vierge (1881), la retraite de Frédérick de Thuringe « où rien de ce qui est la nature ne doit chanter ni verdir, où rien ne doit exister de ce qui est la vie ». Dans Le Crépuscule des dieux (1884), Elémir Bourges relate les fantaisies successives de Charles d’Este : « un portique romain dans le parc, lequel devint une futaie de cèdres, qui se changea vite en une pièce d’eau, puis qui fut remis en forêt ». L’activité frénétique du duc « bourgesien » offre un saisissant contraste avec l’art du duc huysmansien qui a soin d’étudier matériaux, étoffes et couleurs avant de fixer le décor de sa Thébaide. Si Des Esseintes est un décorateur d’intérieur de génie, Charles d’Este et ses semblables sont des décorateurs d’extérieur ratés.

Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State University), “La Serre et le potager: Gardening as Status Symbol at the Fin de Siècle” From Zola’s La Curée to Huysmans’s À rebours, hothouses play an influential role in decadent fiction as a symbolic locus for the artificial, the exotic, and the erotic. Attached to the home, they are nonetheless unheimlich, eerily prolonging the survival of fragile non-native species that threaten to undermine the traditional French home life symbolized by the family vegetable garden, le potager. This illustrated presentation seeks to expose one of the roots of the decadent fascination with hothouses by briefly examining the architectural vogue for urban serres before studying their prevalence in the fin-de- siècle bourgeois life. Illustrated newspaper and magazine interviews with prominent writers of the 1880s and 1890s (among them Alphonse and Julia Daudet, Alexandre Dumas fils, Victorien Sardou, François Coppée, and Robert de Montesquiou) reveal discussion and photographic reproductions of potagers and serres as strategic means to furthering humble yet arriviste self-images. Formerly considered the province of the uncouth manual laborers documented by Zola in La Terre, in the fin de siècle gardening became a status symbol of bourgeois home-making too fruitful for decadent writers to resist.

Marc Smeets (Radboud University), “Être at home au XIXe siècle” Le mot anglais “home” s’implante, dès le début du XIXe siècle, dans la langue et littérature françaises pour désigner une certaine fascination pour la vie intime, pour le chez soi, et qui serait, à en croire d’aucuns, absente dans l’Hexagone. C’est que le home, c’est aussi, et d’abord, l’enfermement, le repli sur soi, mouvement qui semble mal s’accorder à l’esprit français, mondain s’il en est selon Gustave Lanson (1917). Il ne s’agira pas ici de digresser sur ce qui constitue exactement l’esprit français (gaulois et analytique sont les deux autres sésames de Lanson) mais plutôt d’esquisser le parcours serpentant de la notion de home qui marque de son empreinte la littérature du XIXe siècle et où entre autres De Staël, De Jouy, Karr et Daudet servent de guide. Pourquoi ce mot anglais ? Est-ce « par une anglomanie mal informée » comme le disait Proust ? Ou y a-t-il d’autres raisons qui puissent expliquer le recours à

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 l’anglais pour qualifier un besoin, bien français nous semble-t-il, de jouissances casanières au XIXe siècle ?

Jennifer Forrest (Texas State University), “A Big House or the Big Top? A Clown Lands Up(side- Down) in Jean Richepin’s Monsieur Destrémeaux” "Monsieur Destrémeaux," the second novella in Jean Richepin's Quatre petits romans (1882), recounts the tale of madame B..., who in her youth was engaged to marry M. Destrémeaux, a wealthy man from a neighboring estate. Neither handsome nor tall, her fiancé possessed the signature qualities of the gentleman landowner: refinement, education, and tact. In those pastimes associated with the landed classes, notably hunting and horses, M. Destrémeaux demonstrated surprising strength and agility, attributes that appealed particularly to madame B's... father, a former Empire colonel. A reversal of fortune, to which was later added the revelation that the source of his wealth was his career as an acrobatic clown, brings an end to the engagement and results in the selling of his splendid country home. In a letter to the family, he refers to himself as the victim of "la fatalité," a word that madame B... understands as simple bad luck. It becomes clear, however, that for both M. Destrémeaux and madame B...'s father, the word evokes the volatility related to the contingent nature of the life of the acrobat. The circus and its performers represented the opposite of the sturdy, enduring home. "[S]ubjugat[ed] to the patterns of chance," as notes Marcus Verhagen, they were perceived as reflecting the instability of the modern capitalist economy, and of having a "disrupting effect ... on class society." M. B...'s violent reaction upon learning M. Destrémeaux's professional identity reveals the existential incompatibility of the acrobatic clown, even a prodigiously wealthy one, with land ownership and the firm social standing related to it. As a clown, M. Destrémeaux's "air natal," to quote Starobinski, was to exist in a state of "gratuité."

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Break: 3:00pm - 3:30pm (State Suite Hallway, 2nd floor & L’Apogee, 17th floor)

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Saturday, October 29, 2016 Session XI: 3:30pm - 5:00pm

XI.A: Art and Text (Salon 6, 18th floor) Chair: Cyrielle Faivre (Providence College)

Catherine Masson (Wellesley College), “George Sand et Jean-François Millet, peintres de la moisson” Dans un article intitulé, « Mise en scène de l’idéalisme sandien dans François le champi et Claudie : manipulation du réel et des spectateurs38 », en m’appuyant sur les travaux des historiens, anthropologues et sociologues qui se sont penchés récemment sur les représentations du Berry dans les œuvres de Sand, j’ai montré comment George Sand s’était fait ethno-dramaturge pour mettre en scène les paysans de ses deux « rurodrames ». En me basant sur la notion d’« absorbement » de Michael Fried39 et les écrits de Marian Hobson sur le regard du spectateur et l’illusion au théâtre40, j’ai démontré que Sand metteur-en-scène manipule non seulement le réel mais aussi les spectateurs pour qu’ils adhèrent à son idéalisme. Les travaux de Michael Fried sur le spectateur du tableau et les peintres m’ont incitée à regarder de nombreuses toiles du 19e siècle représentant le monde paysan. On pense entre autres à Courbet, à Millet, et à Rosa Bonheur. Pour le colloque sur La Terre, dans la mesure où je me limiterai au thème de la moisson, je comparerai la peinture de ce moment de travail et de fête proposée par Sand, dans les didascalies de sa pièce Claudie, à la peinture de ceux-ci par Jean-François Millet. J’analyserai en particulier la peinture des femmes par les deux artistes et soulignerai les images christiques et le sentiment religieux qui se dégagent des œuvres de ces deux artistes attachés, l’une au Berry et l’autre à la Normandie. Ce rapprochement de deux œuvres ancrées dans la réalité permettra de réfléchir à leur conception de l’art ; à la fois mystère, quête de la vie et du beau41.

Cary Hollinshead-Strick (American University of Paris), “French China: The Apotheosis of Regional Dirt in the Legend of Bernard de Palissy” When David Séchard sets out to invent plant-fiber paper in Illusions perdues, his goal is to make something as fine as papier de chine. He is free to work on this thanks to his supportive marriage with Ève, which he contrasts with that of Bernard de Palissy, otherwise a model inventor. For Théophile Gautier, Palissy’s tireless efforts towards perfection were an apt inspiration for his own Émaux et camées, and he included pieces of Palissy’s pottery in a variety of his fictional antiques stores and dinner parties. Palissy (1510-1590) was best known as a ceramist, though he was also a natural historian, engineer, and writer. He owed much of his popularity in the nineteenth century to the story of how he used the floorboards of his house to fire the kiln in which he was perfecting glazes. This tale of the comforts of ordinary life sacrificed for the advancement of art appealed to the Romantics, and Palissy’s “rustiques

38 Actes du Colloque International George Sand, Louvain-la-Neuve, juin 2013, Écrire l’idéal : la recherche de George Sand, publication automne 2016. 39 Michael Fried, La place du spectateur. Esthétique et origine de la peinture moderne, traduction de Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Behavior in the Age of Diderot (University of Chicago Press, 1988) par Claire Brunet, Paris, Gallimard, nrf essais, 1990. 40 Marian Hobson, The object of Art, The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982. 41 Bertrand Tillier, « George Sand et les peintres de son temps: un rendez-vous manqué ? », Les Amis de George Sand, Nelle Série, No 26, 2004, p. 32.

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 figulines,” plates embellished with sculptures of reptiles and plants he had collected in Saintonge and modeled from life, appealed to a growing interest in regional specificities. Regions became interesting as their traditions came under threat. Though Balzac and Gautier admired Chinese paper and porcelain, it was not Palissy’s chinoiserie pieces that fascinated them, but rather the naturalistic ones with transparent glazes. For Gautier, Chinese porcelain serves as a foil for Palissy’s figulines. In a similar privileging of the local, Balzac’s David, aspiring to reproduce the delicacy and strength of Chinese paper, uses nettles that grow by the side of the road in his hometown. Balzac and Gautier located solutions to technical problems of creation in French plants and French dirt. Such choices were both material and literary: Balzac’s Chardons are simultaneously nettles and protagonists, while Gautier’s Émaux are glazes and verse.

Stéphanie Boulard (Georgia Institute of Technology), “Victor Hugo hors frontières” L’artiste est inventeur de lieux, de temps, d’espace. Il explore de nouveaux territoires, il ouvre à des espaces jusqu’alors impossibles ou impensables. « Savoir regarder une image, écrit Georges Didi- Huberman, ce serait, en quelque sorte, se rendre capable de discerner là où elle brûle, là où son éventuelle beauté réserve la place d’un « signe secret », d’une crise non apaisée, d’un symptôme. Là où la cendre n’a pas refroidi. » Qu’est-ce qui brûle d’apparaître encore au présent dans les dessins, les images de Victor Hugo ? Quel genre d’intensité surgit de ses dessins qui nous demande de repenser avec eux des notions aussi familières que celles d’imagination, de ressemblance ou d’incarnation ? Pour l’artiste contemporain Arnulf Rainer, il est clair que l’œuvre peinte de Hugo a fait événement. Il choisit d’en re-explorer la complexité, d’en retravailler les paysages, de les renouveler, les transformer en faisant ce qu’il appelle des übermalungen. Il construit ainsi, à sa manière, dans son œuvre, le récit de son rapport à l’œuvre hugolienne – celle-ci y laisse une trace vive, et on peut en voir l’empreinte perceptive à l’œuvre. Dans quelle dynamique de l’empreinte, par laquelle le territoire de l’œuvre se trouve à la fois déplacé et renversé, c’est-à-dire tactilement connu et mis sens dessus dessous, s’inscrit l’œuvre hugolienne ? En quoi la technique de l’übermalungen – ou la surpeinture – développée par Arnulf Rainer, qui suppose le contact direct avec l’œuvre hugolienne pour exister, transforme-t-elle les conditions fondamentales de la référence à l’œuvre ? Peut-on parler de renouvellement de l’œuvre hugolienne ? de transformation ? Ou, de façon plus radicale, d’occupation, de destruction, de révolution artistique ? À ces questions cette communication tentera de répondre en montrant le travail de l’empreinte en acte.

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XI.B: Terriennes: Sacrifices of Earth-bound Women (State Suite A, 2nd floor) Chair: Susie Hennessy (Missouri Western State University)

Mary Jane Cowles (Kenyon College), “Barbette versus the Gorgon: Balzac’s and Hugo’s Terrible Bretonnes” At the beginning of Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize (1874), a detachment of Republican soldiers hears a rustling as they march through the woods, bayonets at the ready. There they discover a peasant mother nursing her child, hidden among the branches of a thicket. The mother, Michelle Fléchard, with breasts exposed, finding refuge in branches and hollow trees, appears a living expression of chthonian forces. In response to the sergeant’s question: “Es-tu des bleus? Es-tu des blancs? Avec qui es-tu?” she can only reply: “Je suis avec mes enfants.” When her children are later taken from her by the leader of the counter- revolutionary Chouans, Michelle searches for them with a force both sub- and super-human, seemingly

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 linked to the mythic powers of the rebellious Breton peasant, hiding in woodland and underground lairs. Ultimately, it is Michelle’s Gorgon-like cry that induces the Chouan leader to risk his life by returning to save the children from his burning château. Although the paysanne Barbette in Balzac’s Les Chouans (1829) is a relatively minor character, like Michelle she is responsible for a major turn in the plot that precipitates the denouement. Fooled by Republican soldiers dressed as Chouans, Barbette unwittingly reveals the location of the leader of the Breton rebellion, an act for which her husband is brutally beheaded by his fellow Chouans. While, like Michelle, she allows her child to be adopted by Republican forces to replace a dead father, her motivation for doing so emerges not from mythic and elemental forces, but rather from a gritty determination and a desire for revenge. By exploring the responses of these two peasant women to revolutionary violence, we can better understand Balzac’s and Hugo’s interpretation of the Revolution as well as their esthetics.

Annie Smart (Saint Louis University), “‘Vers une écocritique française’: Harmony and Scientific Motherhood in Saint-Pierre and Mme Gustave Robert” This paper examines two works through an ecocritical lens: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Harmonies de la nature (1815) and Mme Gustave Robert’s Nouvelles petites études de la nature (1824). My study takes the view that the French environmental tradition – unlike the Anglo-American model of romantic ecology – builds on Enlightenment scientific methodologies. I focus on one case, a woman author of an early “natural science textbook” for children. I first examine Harmonies, since, as the subtitle of Mme Gustave Robert’s book states, Nouvelles études was “tirées des oeuvres de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.” In Harmonies Bernardin proposes a theory of understanding the natural world that embraces both scientific method and an emotional attachment. Bernardin posits that by thus harmonizing heart and mind, humans become virtuous citizens. Bernardin’s insight drives how Mme Gustave Robert frames the relationship between humans and the natural world. The mother-educator in Nouvelles petites études offers a model of scientific motherhood. Through daily walks and study in the “cabinet d’histoire naturelle,” she forms both the heart and mind of her charges (2 daughters, 1 son). On the one hand she teaches that the book of nature reveals the presence of the divine creator; but on the other she teaches her children how to observe and classify the natural world, and fearlessly guides them through the intricacies of Linneaen plant sexual reproduction. I argue that early 19th-century French women writers who popularized the study of natural science deserve further study. Although today we may not agree with the mother-educator’s presentation of science, Mme Gustave Robert created a compelling model of scientific motherhood, a model that bridges the gap between Enlightenment science and romantic ecology. I close with a reflection on how this continuity with the Enlightenment might differentiate French ecocriticism from the Anglo-American paradigm.

Lisa Algazi-Marcus (Hood College), “Enfant de nourrice, enfant de sacrifice” « Celle qui nourrit l’enfant d’une autre au lieu du sien est une mauvaise mère : comment sera-t-elle une bonne nourrice ? »42 -- Rousseau Doctors and moralists in France advocated maternal breast-feeding throughout the nineteenth century, citing the high mortality rate of infants (known as les petits Paris) sent out to wet-nurses in order to convince French mothers to nurse their own children. Implicitly, these pleas were addressed to urban women of a certain socio-economic class who could afford to hire a nourrice in the first place. Most moralists paid little attention to the plight of the wet-nurses’ children.

42 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile ou l’éducation (Paris, Garnier, 1964), 18.

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Doctor Monot wrote that two thirds of the women who gave birth in his canton in the Nièvre region between 1858 and 1864 departed for Paris as soon as they could walk, typically leaving their infants in the care of relatives who had no milk to feed them. According to Monot, for the wet-nurses’ newborns, “le départ de la mère pour Paris est souvent l’arrêt de mort de l’enfant.”43 In his novel Fécondité, Emile Zola used a common expression of the time which indicates the casual attitude toward the fate of these children: “enfant de nourrice, enfant de sacrifice.”44 In this paper, I will examine the idea of sacrifice in literary representations of wet-nursing in the nineteenth century and the ways in which the children of poor rural women were routinely sacrificed so their mothers could sell their milk for les petits Paris.

Susie Hennessy (Missouri Western State University), “Female Sacrifice and Violence in La Terre” Fertility and death dominate La Terre, Zola’s novel about farming and farmers. The reader is frequently reminded of the futility of human labor in the face of the earth’s vast indifference; this notion of human impotence undergirds the naturalist doctrine and is arguably more prevalent in this novel than any other novel of Les Rougon-Macquart. Farmers toil relentlessly and often to no avail. Their powerlessness against nature is reinforced by hail storms, drought, and disease. Yet with the farmer’s passion for the earth, no sacrifice is too great. Investing in new machinery, attempting modern farming techniques, and simply committing to a lifelong struggle are examples of the sacrifices farmers make. Not all sacrifices conform to this model, however. The death of two female characters, Palmyre and Françoise, suggests sacrifice of a more disturbing kind. One dies while laboring in the field; the other is accidentally killed by a scythe. Their literal sacrifice recalls that of others who die in Zola’s oeuvre. Naomi Schor’s analysis of the founding myth in La Fortune des Rougon proposes that ritual sacrifice occurs in response to chaos. In Zola’s first novel of Les Rougon-Macquart, Silvère’s assassination in the former cemetery inaugurates a cycle of sacrifice and prefigures more narratives in which a scapegoat will be required. By digging through the textual graveyard in La Fortune des Rougon, Schor points to the necessity of death for two reasons: to restore order in society and to perpetuate the earth’s fecundity. This paper examines the death of Palmyre and Françoise from the dual perspectives of ritual sacrifice and the human-earth relationship.

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XI.C: Calculating the Land (Renaissance Salon, 17th floor) Chair: Susanna Lee (Georgetown University)

Jonathan Strauss (Miami University), “Gaming, Numbers, and National Identity in Balzac and Quetelet” Balzac imagined himself an historian, able in the mounting volumes of the Comédie humaine to draw together not merely an analytical portrait of French society but, in a stronger sense, to provide the aesthetic model for creating it as a unified whole. The nation, in this sense, was his artistic object. The means for achieving that end posed, however, a problem, since it lay beyond the scope of mere narrative. Certain figures consequently acquired, under his pen, an exceptional importance as paradigms for France. Among these is perhaps one of the most fleeting of the whole Comédie humaine – a hat check attendant in a gaming house at the beginning of La Peau de chagrin. Why, Balzac wonders, does he want your hat? “Est-ce enfin pour prendre la mesure de votre crâne,” he writes, “et dresser une statistique instructive sur la capacité cérébrale des joueurs?”

43 Monot, Dr. Charles, De l’industrie des nourrices et de la mortalité des petits enfants. (Paris, 1867), 33. 44 Zola, Emile. Fécondité. (La Bibliothèque électronique du Québec, Volume 109 : version 1.01), 423.

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Reading Balzac in dialogue with his contemporaries Pierre-Simon Laplace and Adolphe Quetelet, who largely invented the modern field of statistical probability, a figure of the nation appears in the lines and curves of mathematical analysis. This new figure is the face of the country, the resolution of numerical abstraction into visual image, a character of an unprecedented type, a hidden identity among variation. The analytical process for achieving this identity closely resembles Balzac’s descriptions of the humble, secretarial work of the novelist-historian, which in turn, echoes his characterizations of bureaucratic functioning. In this new order, Balzac separates nationhood from an identitary attachment to the local earth and relocates it in the abstract impersonality of clerical work and mathematical determination. The figure for the French, the French as figure, thus becomes an implement of the abstract and universal. Is it an accident that the centerpiece of the modern field of statistical probability, the method of least squares, was first developed in 1805 by Adrien-Marie Legendre as a means to estimate the size of the earth? Or that Carl Friedrich Gauss used it four years later to predict the movements of suspected planets? For the principal of the nation emerges from a theoretical undertaking of precisely planetary scale and transforms the nation into a potentially global entity. It is not just a new France that emerges. It is a new earth.

Kristina Roney (University of Kansas), “Balzac, Credit, & Industrialization: From Farming to Finance” The nineteenth century delineates France’s transition from a traditional agricultural to a modern industrialized economy in which credit played a pivotal role. Despite a tenuous relationship with banking in the aftermath of Law’s colossal failure, Napoleon established the Bank of France in 1800. This marked the first step towards an institutionalized financial structure. Though money was scarce during the periodic financial crises of the early nineteenth century, the French succeeded in developing a capital-intensive industrialized economy due to the development of their credit structure. The loan notes themselves became a marketable commodity. This study analyzes the evolution of investments from agricultural to financial products and encompasses an overview of the secondary loan market through the eyes of three separate genres of investors: the banker, the usurer, and the individual. Balzac concentrates his portrait of these investors and their strategies into three works; La Maison Nucingen details the establishment of Frédéric de Nucingen’s banking fortune, while “Gobseck” fulfills the classic role of the usurer, and finally Eugénie Grandet depicts Félix Grandet’s ruthless bourgeois ascent. Of the three, Grandet best reflects the economic trend; he initially invests his inheritance in agriculture before adopting increasingly complex financial methods. The establishment of the court at Versailles, and the French Revolution opened the flood gates for aspiring investors. Investment income traditionally stemmed from land holdings maintained by the aristocracy and passed down through inheritance. As they lost control of this asset, the bourgeois thirst for investments coupled with Napoleon’s institutional financial structures paved a path for credit to dominate the nineteenth century. Credit’s role was two-fold: it accelerated the downfall of French nobility and provided significant gains for the rising middle-class. It is no coincidence that none of these investors could claim aristocratic descent.

Francesco Spandri (Università degli Studi Roma Tre), “Balzac et le ‘non-sense’ de la terre” La question du statut de la terre traverse toute l’œuvre de Balzac. Avec la Révolution, en effet, c’est une nouvelle conception du sol qui s’affirme : sol au sens bourgeois du mot, individuel, vendu au plus offrant, affranchi de toute sujétion (Ernest Labrousse). Mais le Code civil, qui consacre les principes de 89, favorise le morcellement systématique de la propriété foncière. C’est ainsi que la terre issue du nouvel

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 ordre juridique est vouée à se dissoudre dans l’absurde de la parcelle. Le sol change de nature pour devenir, a-t-on envie de dire, le principe de l’infiniment divisible. Ce changement, qui vient de loin (voir p. ex. Malthus, Michelet, Tocqueville), apparaît à Balzac comme source de « non-sens » (Le Curé de village, Les Paysans). C’est précisément la valeur de ce non-sens que nous nous proposons de mettre en relief à partir d’un triple point de vue : 1) contextuel : il s’agira de rendre manifeste que le thème de la parcellisation de la terre se situe dans une tension radicale entre fiction et réalité, vérité et mensonge 2) idéologique : il importera d’identifier les motivations d’ordre politique, social et économique que l’auteur invoque pour la défense de la grande propriété 3) symbolique : il faudra montrer comment derrière les objections idéologiques que le romancier jette à la face de ses adversaires (et du lecteur), se dessine un discours décisif sur la déconstruction des conditions d’intelligibilité du monde naturel, sur la brusque démonétisation d’une forme de la richesse et sur le glissement morphologique qui résulte de cette transformation.

Misha Avrekh (Montclair State University), “Sentimental Land Statistics of Jacques Peuchet” In the early nineteenth century, land statistics was all about feelings. The sentiments that statisticians explicitly sought to evoke in their readers -- usually in the prefaces to their ostensibly unsentimental works, but often in the body of their works -- were a sense of the country’s territorial security and economic prosperity. Less explicitly, they elicited a sense of citizenship, danger, wonder, refinement, right and wrong, nostalgia, xenophobia, and any number of other sentiments. Statistics, in other words, was not the actuarial science we know today. In my presentation, I will elucidate the links between the land statistics of Jacques Peuchet, one of the most influential writers in this field in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and the literary sentimentalism of this period. Specifically, I will present examples of thematic overlap between statistics and melodrama. Melodrama, with its starkly delineated realms of good and evil, its themes of concealment and revelation, and its presentation of sharply outlined feelings, was closer to the “here vs. there” and “now vs. then” dichotomies that made up the essence of statistical reports. Science, in other words, had a genre. My presentation will outline the formation of the genre of land statistics.

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XI.D: Zola, La Terre II (Salon 2, 17th floor) Chair: David Bell (Duke University)

Éléonore Reverzy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3), “Livres et lecteurs dans La Terre” On s'intéressera à la représentation de la lecture dans le roman, qui est le fait d'hommes de loi et de savoir mais aussi de l'ancien soldat Jean Macquart à la lecture ânonnante, figure de « nouveau lecteur ». Le croisement de différents écrits – littérature de colportage, lectures passées de Jean, journal, plaquette sur les dangers du morcellement de la terre et l'invasion des blés américains – mettent en mosaïque des textes et confrontent des compétences de lecteurs variées pour présenter un panorama des relations du paysan et du livre.

Carmen Mayer (University of Alabama), “Sterile Ground and Fertile Toil in La Terre (A. Antoine) and Fécondité (N. Evreinoff and H. Étiévant)” Using as its points of departure Antoine's 1921 adaptation of La Terre and Evreinoff and Étiévant's 1929 (lost) adaptation of Fécondité, the essay considers thematic, symbolic, and esthetic connections between the films to discuss the utopianism toward which Zola turned in the secular gospel of the Quatre Evangiles.

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Véronique Cnockaert (Université du Québec à Montréal), “Entre la lettre et le corps : Les autorités nouvelles dans La Terre” Le roman La Terre de Zola est le récit tragique d’un partage entre vifs, partage qui s’élabore sur fond d’une contradiction : d’un côté le mythe d’une possession absolue et totale d’une terre aux frontières toujours susceptibles de s’agrandir, de l’autre la volonté de diviser des terres (celles du père Fouan) par souci d’équité entre les héritiers. S’écrit au coeur de cette alternative, la belligérance entre la coutume et la loi. Dans cette communication, nous voudrions justement analyser la place qu’occupent les nouveaux systèmes institutionnels administratifs et juridiques ainsi que le personnel qui les représentent, afin d'étudier leurs implications romanesques et esthétiques. On se demandera quelle nouvelle forme de domination ces systèmes et documents légaux installent-ils et comment le projet romanesque les investit? De là, quels habitus (transformations culturelles, symboliques et sociales) ces « autorités de papier » (A. Rauch) imposent-t-elles aux paysans qui y résistent fortement et souvent avec leur corps?

David Charles (Université du Havre), “La Terre, ou ‘ce que les paysans ne voient pas, ne sentent pas’” Seul Jean Macquart, l’ancien ouvrier des villes, le soldat dont le régiment a « élargi la tête » à la politique, « l’homme d’un autre pays, poussé ailleurs » (poussé à Plassans, origine des Rougon-Macquart, et jamais reparu depuis le roman inaugural), l’inassimilable « étranger », cet « intrus » venu « manger le pain des autres, dans un pays qui n’[est] pas le sien », ce « passant » acteur et objet d’« histoires » jamais racontées qui semble continuellement « en visite » et sur lequel s’ouvre et se referme le roman, seul Jean Macquart voit et sent dans la terre, et dans La Terre, « ce que les paysans ne voient pas, ne sentent pas ». Nous verrons ce qui, de son attachement patriotique à « la vieille terre de France » plutôt qu’à un « coin » que l’on ne veut pas « lâcher » pour « s’en aller se battre pour les champs des autres » ; de son indifférence à l’histoire d’une lignée dont il n’est pas ; de la facilité avec laquelle il travaille la terre quand tous s’épuisent à la « besogne » ; de son rapport, enfin, au romancier lui-même, explique cette « passion sentimentale, intellectuelle presque » de Jean Macquart pour la terre.

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XI.E: Cityscapes (State Suite B, 2nd floor) Chair: Alan Gómez (Brown University)

Roxane Petit-Rasselle (West Chester University), “Des terrasses de Lyon à sa fange : Perspectives de Dumas, Michelet et Tristan” Nombreux sont les auteurs du XIXe qui manifestent leur dégoût, voire leur mépris, pour la ville de Lyon et ses habitants. Qu’il s’agisse de Desbordes-Valmore, Dumas, Michelet, Stendhal ou Tristan, la ville est unanimement déclarée sale et noire. Dumas et Stendhal les premiers dénigrent son architecture et jugent la population mesquine et inculte. Ces généralisations, toutefois, sont loin de représenter la réalité locale, puisqu’elles correspondent davantage à la bourgeoisie, et non aux soixante mille soyeux qui font de leur ville le premier centre ouvrier d’Europe. Ces artisans-là sont avides de théâtre, de lectures et d’idéologies. Le Midi de la France par Dumas (1841), Le Banquet de Michelet (1853) et Le Tour de France de Tristan (1844) proposent trois perspectives de Lyon, rédigées après les révoltes des Canuts. Ces perspectives sont autant de pratiques urbaines telles que les définit Michel de Certeau. En effet, des terrasses dominant la ville, où se dresse l’église dédiée à la sainte patronne des Lyonnais, Dumas se campe en œil divin omni-regardant ; il rend compte du panorama et de sa vue plongeante sur un centre boueux

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 qu’il associe à la bourgeoisie et au commerce. Cependant, il occulte la colline d’en face, celle où se tiennent les masses laborieuses et que Michelet qualifie de « colossale ». A l’inverse de Dumas, Michelet gravit les âpres montées de la ville et s’arrête selon leurs terrasses pour y contempler les toits, les rues et la pauvreté. En tant que promeneur et observateur aérien, il appréhende la physionomie de la ville et sa géopolitique : il existe à Lyon une guerre intérieure qui se déroule entre deux collines mystiques aux idéologies opposées : l’une prie, l’autre travaille. Il faut attendre Flora Tristan pour saisir pleinement la distribution urbaine, la misère et les idéologies de la classe ouvrière. Parcourant infatigablement les deux collines, sans vue panoramique ni prétention à l’omniscience, Tristan s’approprie l’espace urbain dont elle énonce une véritable métaphore au fil de ses visites : ce sont ceux des hauteurs chrétiennes qui, par leur hypocrisie, se vautrent dans la boue, tandis que les habitants des bas-quartiers s'élèvent au-dessus de leur fange sociale par leurs aspirations intellectuelles et socialistes.

Jennifer Pride (Florida State University), “Disemboweling la terre: The Spectacle of Demolition in Second Empire Paris” This paper examines written and visual representations of demolition sites in Second Empire Paris. Napoleon III’s urban renewal project (1853-70), deployed by Baron Haussmann turned the city into a fragmented yet massive construction site for nearly two decades. To date, scholarship about Haussmann’s renovations employ government sponsored data and images such as Marville and Nadar’s photographs to illustrate the Haussmann’s urban renewal project. While these materials document Paris before and after Haussmannization, they lack a human presence and thus appear artificial and contrived. Instead, I take as my source the popular press that conveys the voice of the people who experienced the traumatic loss of their homes and neighborhoods and who were forced to navigate the dangerous terrain of major construction sites all over the city for nearly 20 years. I interrogate the discursive network of journalists, writers, illustrators, and caricaturists who worked daily to document and satirize the chaotic and overwhelming nature of daily life. In approaching Haussmannization from the perspective of the people, a different perspective emerges; one that offers a view of Paris that is rooted in the soil of the city as the walls crumbled and la terre was disemboweled. This multimodal discourse in nineteenth-century newspapers communicates and codifies the forced urban decay in the form of the worker with a pickax and the bourgeois spectator. These motifs, printed daily in word and image, mirror the experience of living with demolition and codify the act of watching the worker with the pickax. In Le Monde Illustré, Le Charivari, L’illustration, writers Jules Ferry and Pierre Véron use metaphor and allegory as rhetorical strategies to naturalize the unnatural evolution of the once organic city. Articles and images with the caption “Embellissements de Paris,” portray the buildings and neighborhoods as they return to the earth. In most cases, the caption becomes ironic since the images show stones, crumbling walls, dirt, and vast holes in la terre. The embellishment metaphor is meant to naturalize the process but in turn emphasizes the unnatural progression of decay and ruin. Likewise, illustrations by Maxime Lalanne and M. Felix Thorigny present detailed analytical views of individuals situated in demolition sites and caricaturists such as Honoré Daumier satirize the demolition sites and include figures that convey emotion in their melancholic bodily forms and the added elegiac captions. The pickax and the spectator motif, always present and often repeated numerous times in each image, becomes the primary symbol of nostalgia and renewal as the geography of Paris takes a new shape from organic to inorganic.

Christa DiMarco (The University of the Arts), “Gardening on the Outskirts of Paris: Van Gogh’s Montmartre: Windmills and Allotments” To date, scholars have not addressed Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) Montmartre: Windmills and Allotments (1887) in light of socialist-reform measures that affected agricultural production. Montmartre

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 depicts labor-class individuals on allotments (gardens measuring two or three-hundred square meters) that they most likely rented from the Debray family’s smallholding (a farm measuring less than 50 acres). Although peasant farmers worked small plots around urban French centers since the Middle Ages, an organized allotment system began under the Third Republic (1870-1940), and allotments moved to metropolitan areas during the 1870s. In the early 1880s, debates regarding smallholdings occupied socialist political platforms. Leaders questioned whether small farms should be collectively folded into larger operations, or if farmers should continue to individually work their land. Socialists adopted the latter policy and argued to allow farmers to maintain their acres. Unlike England where farmers moved toward large-scale practices, France depended on smallholdings and landowners were thus able to provide allotments—generating an agricultural revolution that kept pace with demands. In Montmartre, Van Gogh painted the allotments directly behind three windmills that dominated the Butte’s hilltop on the city’s periphery. The windmills were neighborhood attractions where Parisians could enjoy dancing, eateries, or a panoramic view from the windmill’s viewing deck—visible in Montmartre’s background and in Van Gogh’s Le Moulin de Blute-fin (1886). Unlike Camille Pissarro, who depicted peasants reaping a plentiful harvest in an expansive, rural landscape, Van Gogh pictorially constructed the Butte to obfuscate the city. In so doing, as I will explore, the artist indicated the truncated portion of land with which the urban farmer had to work, conveyed a space in which labor-class residents exercised agency, and kept the tenant farmers fixed under the gaze of the middle class within the context of the labor-reform movement.

Claire Nettleton (Pomona College), “The Fauves of the Faubourg: Ecological Aesthetics in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin” Beyond factory smokestacks, past the Parisian ramparts, a woman and two men lie on the banks of the Seine. This tranquil scene erupts in violence as one man drowns the other. Such is the story of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867), in which Thérèse and Laurent, a brutish artist, conspire to kill Camille, a bureaucrat who fears the natural world. However, once the couple returns to Paris, Camille’s specter tortures them. While the artist’s proximity to animals makes him a brutal killer and an avant-garde painter, Laurent’s urban location leaves him vulnerable. He is like a bear that attacks his prey in murky waters, only to be caged in a smoggy metropolis. The battle between Laurent and Camille mirrors that between wildlife and civilization in Haussmannian Paris. Their struggle could bring to mind Michel Serres’s analysis of Goya’s Men Fighting with Sticks (1823), in which two men fight in quicksand. Although we concentrate on the duelists, the focus should be on the earth that swallows them. Serres expands our approach to literary criticism by considering the larger ecological framework. The disappearance of wilderness after the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the theory of evolution, forced citizens to reconsider their relationship with other forms of life. I argue that this crisis regarding humans’ relationship to their ecological milieu is the source of a radical aesthetic that sought to unmask the human animal. Turning to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming animal” as a creative line of escape, I claim that Laurent embodies the myth of the “artist- animal,” who temporary experiences freedom from cultural constraints. Zola’s Naturalism parallels the fields of animal studies and ecocriticism, which redirect the focus away from a uniquely human experience.

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XI.F: Landscape and Power in the Second Empire (State Suite C, 2nd floor) Chair: Göran Blix (Princeton University)

Göran Blix (Princeton University), “Zola’s Geopoetics: The Senses of Landscape in Germinal” Landscape literally frames the story of Germinal: at the outset, the protagonist walks into a desolate and barren landscape of coal-mines which recalls the Inferno and at the end he leaves what seems like a sunlit pastoral which announces the resurrection of nature. The story of Etienne Lantier and the community of miners he mobilizes takes place in a concretely observed landscape that constitutes far more than an inert setting or mere backdrop for the people who live there. How the miners and their bosses inhabit, make sense of, use, transform, and assimilate this critical ground of their existence—the windswept plains, the miners’ village, and the ground itself, with its invisible geology of coal—is something Zola studies very closely and which merits a “geopoetic” reading that can tease out the reciprocal constitution of land and people. My reading of Germinal suggests that some very basic dimensions of human existence are mediated through the landscape in this novel, most notably our capacity to acquire knowledge, to communicate with each other, to procure nourishment, and to inhabit the world. These four dimensions of life in the community depend in quite specific ways on the topography of the country that Zola maps out. The novel’s opening already marks the crucial importance of space for the story: the opaque landscape into which Lantier wanders—a dark, starless night lit only by red flares—presents the protagonist with an incomprehensible scene, although it is clear that meaningful political action is going to depend on clear sight. At this point, only a cold, cutting wind animates the scene, denying him shelter, aggravating his hunger, and preventing him from hearing the words of the first miner he encounters. But the same wind that seems to fill and obliterate this negative space also carries the inarticulate “cri de famine” that will quickly politicize the landscape. If landscape has traditionally been understood as a visual relation to an area enclosed by the horizon—a relation heavily determined by painting and aesthetic modes of experience—Zola’s rendition of landscape deserves to be called “geopoetic” insofar as it integrates a far more complex, vital, and multidimensional relationship to the earth. Building on recent work of Jean- Marc Besse, Michel Collot, and Bertrand Westphal in landscape studies, this paper argues that Zola deploys “landscape” as a crucial way to read, think, and understand human community in Germinal.

Maureen DeNino (Princeton University), “Quand la charrue viendra: Eugène Fromentin and the Algerian landscape” After a trip to Algeria in 1846, the artist Eugène Fromentin wrote to his father describing the natural beauty of the land in terms of artistic resource extraction: “la nature est là-bas infiniment varié […] c’est une veine avec des ramifications multiples.” Fromentin would work from the material he ‘extracted’— by way of sketches, notes, letters, and log-books—for the rest of his successful career as an Orientalist painter and author. After the publication of two Algerian travel narratives, Un Été dans le Sahara (1857) and Une Année dans le Sahel (1859), coinciding with positive reviews of his paintings in successive Salons, Fromentin achieved fame as the peintre-écrivain of Algeria. Contemporary admirers understood his books as a continuation of his paintings and extolled his painterly descriptions of the Algerian landscape. In fact, I argue, the tendency to read Fromentin’s artwork into his writings and vice versa obscures his strategic approach to each medium. Fromentin deliberately deployed certain elements of his Algerian material, and of the complex media phenomenon of Algeria more broadly, in painting, while using others in writing. Reconstructing Fromentin’s relationship to his material in terms not of the peintre- écrivain, but of public relations strategy, reveals the way in which Fromentin’s double approach produced

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NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016 two very different readings of the Algerian landscape. Alongside Fromentin’s painted Orientalist landscapes, I will examine passages from Une Année dans le Sahel, in which the Algerian landscape is represented in ways that exceed the “œil du peintre,” calling up other contemporary colonial debates concerning the fertility of the land, settler colonialism, and colonial violence.

Anne O’Neil-Henry (Georgetown University), “Rien n’en sera perdu: Hugo’s Recycling in Les Misérables and Paris-Guide” In both Les Misérables and the introduction to the 1867 Paris-Guide occasioned by the Universal Exposition of that year, Victor Hugo addresses the need for what we might now call a more sustainable treatment of waste. In the first case, Hugo advocates for the reuse of urban sewage. To do so, he borrows in part from both nineteenth-century utopian socialist Pierre Leroux’s theory of circulus, the concept that human filth might be employed as both fertilizer and a form of tax, and British public health official Edwin Chadwick’s idea to transport urban “waste to the countryside where it could be used as fertilizer to raise food for the cities” (Reid, 56). More than merely reiterating the theories of his contemporaries, however, Hugo also advocates for the processes of recycling and regeneration by staging his arguments at the level of literary form. In the second work, he envisions a global food system whose practices would allow for the elimination of food waste in one place in order to feed those in need elsewhere. Indeed, the utopian, unified nation (“Europe”) described in Paris-Guide is one in which global resources will be shared and all poor will eat together at the same “table sous le même soleil” (5). This paper analyzes Hugo’s two interventions on recycling to show that from the micro-level of sentence structure and literary device to the macro-level of global agriculture, the author constructs his vision of closed systems in which “rien n’en sera perdu” (Paris-Guide, 5).

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Conference Banquet

Biltmore Hotel, Grand Ballroom, 17th floor 7:30pm

119

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

Index Cheyne, Michelle (V.C) Foerster, Maxime (I.C) Cladis, Mark (V.B) Fontaine, Xavier (VIII.E) A Clark, Katherine (III.A) Forrest, Jennifer (X.F) Abbott, Helen (V.A) Cnockaert, Véronique (XI.D) Foss, Colin (V.C) Acquisto, Joseph (VIII.A) Conroy, Melanie (III.D) Freed-Thall, Hannah (VI.E) (IX.A) Cooper, Barbara (II.F) Algazi-Marcus, Lisa (XI.B) Corbin, Kathryne (II.B) G Allar, Neil (IX.A) Corkle, Rachel (IX.D) Gantrel, Martine (III.F) Altergott, Renée (III.F) Coughlin, Maura (IX.C) Gardner, Darci (VIII.F) Andre, Pierre (IV.C) Counter, Andrew (VI.D) Garnett, Mary Anne (I.D) Avrekh, Misha (XI.C) Cowles, Mary Jane (XI.B) Garval, Michael (VII.E) Cravens, Arline (I.B) Gauthier, Nicolas (VII.D) B Cropper, Corry (V.F) Genova, Pamela (III.B) Barstad, Guri (VI.B) Crucifix, Edwige (X.D) Georgopulos, Nicole (I.A) Bauer, Dominique (III.F) Crummy, Ione (VII.A) Germain, Nathan (VI.E) Beach, Cecilia (I.B) Cutchin, Adam (VII.D) Gleisner, Nichole (IX.A) Belenky, Masha (III.E) (X.B) Godfrey, Sima (X.E) Bell, David (XI.D) D Gómez, Alan (XI.E) Bell, Dorian (VI.D) DalMolin, Eliane (VI.C) Goulet, Andrea (I.F) (VII.D) Bernthal, Sarah (II.D) Daniel, Robert (II.D) Goutas, Sylvie (III.D) Best, Janice (VIII.B) de la Motte, Dean (II.D) Grubbs, Caroline (IV.E) Birch, Edmund (V.D) de Tholozany, Pauline Guy, Kolleen (plenary) Blix, Göran (XI.F) (VII.F) Bloomfield, Elisabeth de Young, Justine (X.B) H (VIII.A) DeNino, Maureen (XI.F) Haklin, Kathryn (VII.F) Boisjoli, Sylvie (X.C) Desormeaux, Daniel (II.F) Hamrick, Cassandra (II.E) Boulard, Stéphanie (XI.A) DiMarco, Christa (XI.E) Hannoosh, Michèle (III.A) Bourguinat, Nicolas (IV.D) Doherty, Atticus (II.E) Hanson, Kristan (IX.D) Boutin, Aimée (III.E) Dolan, Terry (I.A) Harkness, Nigel (VII.C) Bouvier, Luke (I.F) Dord-Crouslé, Stéphanie Harper, Mary (IV.C) Braswell, Suzanne (VI.A) (VIII.D) Hart, Kathleen (IX.C) Bray, Patrick (I.F) Doussot, Audrey (IV.E) Hawthorne, Melanie (VI.B) Brehm, Brett (II.C) Dupont, Wannes (I.E) Head, James (VIII.E) Brevik-Zender, Heidi (VII.F) Duzer, Virginie (IX.F) Hennessy, Susie (XI.B) (X.B) Hiner, Susan (VII.E) (X.B) Browning, Cory (VI.A) E Hogan, Dennis (X.E) Brunau-Zaragoza, Sophie Edgington, Erin (V.A) Hollinshead-Strick, Cary (I.C) Emery, Elizabeth (X.F) (XI.A) Ennaili, Leila (I.C) Humphreys, Karen (VI.E) C Evans, David (V.A) Hunter, Mary (X.C) Cadieu, Morgane (VII.F) Canada-Smith, Donna (IX.D) F I Carpenter, Scott (II.A) Faivre, Cyrielle (XI.A) Igou, Anna (VIII.E) Carter, Karen (III.A) Fancy, Benjamin (VII.F) Ippolito, Christophe (IX.E) Charles, David (XI.D) Farrant, Tim (VIII.B) Irvine, Margot (II.B) Chavasse, Philippe (I.C) Field, Thalia (V.E) Izzo, Justin (IV.C) NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

J McCall, Anne (IV.B) R Jagannathan, Meera (I.B) McCready, Susan (V.C) Ramizi, Erag (VII.A) Johnson, Warren (VIII.C) Mesch, Rachel (IX.B) Raser, Timothy (IV.F) Johnson, Sharon (V.B) Meyer, E. Nicole (VIII.C) Ravindranathan, Thangam (VIII.B) Miner, Margaret (VI.A) (V.E) Monicat, Bénédicte (I.D) Reid, Martine (IV.B) K Morgan, Cheryl (VI.B) Reverzy, Éléonore (IV.D) Kahn, Nicholas (VII.D) Mortimer, Armine (III.D) (XI.D) (VIII.E) Muelsch, Elisabeth-Christine Rexer, Raisa (IX.B) Kaplan, Ed (VII.B) (VI.C) Rice-Davis, Charles (IX.C) Katsaros, Laure (IX.D) Rice-DeFosse, Mary (II.D) Kelly, Dorothy (IIF) (V.B) N Richer, Jean-François (IX.C) Kervennic, Youenn (III.F) Naginski, Isabelle (III.C) Ringelberg, Kirstin (VIII.F) Kessler, Marnie (VII.E) Neefs, Jacques (I.F) (IX.F) Robison, Christopher (V.E) Knee, Philip (VI.E) Nettleton, Claire (XI.E) Rohrer, Jaymes Anne (V.F) Knowles, Marika (II.C) Newmark, Kevin (II.A) Roney, Kristi (XI.C) Kolekar, Pramila (IV.C) Rosenfeld, Michael (I.E) Krueger, Cheryl (VII.C) O Krulic, Brigitte (I.C) Olds, Marshall (II.C) S Olson, Kory (III.B) Salsbury, Britany (I.A) L O’Neil-Henry, Anne (XI.F) Samuels, Maurice (VI.C) Larson, Sharon (VI.B) Orr, Mary (IX.E) Sanquer, Marie (IV.E) (VIII.B) Schaefer, Sarah (V.F) Le Calvez, Éric (VIII.D) P Schmitz, Catherine (I.B) Leclercq, Benoit (V.D) Paliyenko, Adrianna (III.C) Schreier, Lise (X.C) Lee, Susanna (II.F) (XI.C) Pappas, Sara (III.A) Sherak, Constance (V.F) Lee, Michelle (I.D) Parker, Thomas (VII.E) Shrem, Max (X.D) Lee, Daryl (II.E) (IV.E) Pasco, Allan (III.D) Shryock, Richard (X.E) Lehman, Meredith (IX.B) Paulson, William (II.F) Singletary, Suzanne (VI.A) Lemoine, France (X.D) Perras, Jean-Alexandre Sipe, Daniel (X.D) Lerner, Bettina (I.D) (III.C) Smart, Annie (XI.B) Lescart, Alain (V.E) Petit-Rasselle, Roxane (XI.E) Smeets, Marc (X.F) Lewis, Briana (VIII.C) Phenix, Sara (II.B) Smirnova, Larysa (III.E) Linton, Anne (IX.B) Pierre, Chantal (IV.D) Smith, Eliza (VII.B) Lyu, Claire (VIII.A) Pillet, Stéphane (VIII.E) Spandri, Francesco (XI.C) Porter, Larry (VI.F) St. Clair, Robert (IV.A) M Powell, David (I.E) (V.F) (VI.A) Mamoon, Sayeeda (VIII.C) Prescott, Brittany (VII.A) Stafford, Andrew (I.F) Marder, Elissa (II.A) Pride, Jennifer (XI.E) Stempniak, Kasia (IX.E) Marin, Mihaela (IV.D) Prince, Gerald (VI.F) Stéphan, Elsa (III.E) Markina-Baum, Irina (III.A) Proulx, François (VIII.F) Stivale, Charles (VII.B) Marquer, Bertrand (X.D) Przybos, Julia (X.F) Stone, Shiloh (II.B) Martin, Brian (X.E) Strauss, Jonathan (XI.C) Martin, Lowry (X.E) Q Sugden, Rebecca (V.D) Masson, Catherine (XI.A) Quandt, Karen (IV.A) Sullivan, Courtney (VII.D) Matlock, Jann (V.B) Quaranta, Kaitlyn (IX.D) Swankie, Ryan (IX.C) Mayer, Carmen (XI.D)

NCFS 2016: La Terre Brown University October 27-29, 2016

T W Williams, Ben (VII.A) Talley, Catherine (VI.F) Wadhera, Priya (VIII.F) Williams, Laurin (III.B) Tanner, Jessica (IV.D) Wampole, Christy (II.E) Williams, Rachel (III.E) Thériault, Patrick (VI.F) Weber, Julien (IV.A) Witt, Catherine (VIII.A) Theuriau, Frédéric-Gaël Weil, Kari (V.E) (III.F) Weingarden, Lauren (IV.A) Y Thomas, Jeffrey (VIII.D) Wettlaufer, Alexandra Young, Paul (II.D) Thomson, Clive (I.E) (VII.C) (IX.B) Whidden, Seth (II.A) (IX.A) Z V White, Claire (V.D) Zachmann, Gayle (VI.C) Valazza, Nicolas (V.A) White, Nick (V.D) (VI.D) Zanone, Damien (IV.B) van Zuylen, Marina (IX.E) Wicky, Érika (I.A) Zielonka, Anthony (IX.E) Vantine, Peter (VI.E) Wiedenfeld, Grant (II.C) Vatan, Florence (IX.F) Wilkinson, Lynn (III.B)