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Home , Albert Robida, Apollonie Sabatier, Charlotte de Sauve, Contre nature, Geography of Paris, Jules Verne (train)

Contamination: 41st Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium

Image: Louis Pasteur, by M. Renourad (L’Illustration, 1884)

Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Thursday 5 November Session 1 – 12:00 pm - 1:45 pm

Panel 1.A: Impurities of the Chair: Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania

“Space and in Les Misérables” David F. Bell, Duke University The logic of realist is causal, one event in a novel leads logically to another, and the is banished in favor of a logic of encounter and coincidence, organized around the structure of the biographies of individual novelistic characters evolving in a sort of “naturalized” space. Hugo’s Les Misérables is not always, perhaps not even principally, structured by this realist logic. It has been estimated, for example, that about twenty-five percent of the pages of the novel take the form of digressions, tied to narrative events in only loosely thematic ways, where Hugo discusses ideas and issues at a leisurely, didactic while the story in the narrative grinds to a screeching halt. It is almost as if the novel’s organization were a reactivation and exploitation of the classic rhetorical notion of the topos. As Frances Yates argued in The Art of Memory, the notion of topos, analyzed in Aristotle’s , came out of a tradition of architectural mnemonics, and this paper explores the role this architectural mnemonics plays in structuring Hugo’s novel.

“Une forme d’hybridation romanesque chez Balzac : organique/inorganique” Francesco Spandri, University of III Le problème des relations entre l’organique et l’inorganique se présente dans La Comédie humaine sous de multiples formes, et notamment à travers l’insertion dans le récit des interactions mutuelles entre le Minéral et le Vivant. Tout au long du grand cycle narratif, la matière minérale ne semble exister que pour modifier l’élément vital et en subir à son tour l’influence. Dans La fille aux yeux d’or la coappartenance tragique de l’immatériel (vue, pensée) et de la matérialité (métal, monnaie) se manifeste dès le titre du roman. L’exemple du père Grandet incite plutôt à voir dans cette coappartenance du « regard » et du « métal jaune » la preuve de l’existence d’un « langage secret » qu’il incombe à l’écrivain de décoder. Le nœud organique/inorganique marque également la condition “mythologique” d’un , créature moitié homme moitié bronze, à la fois être ordinaire et symbole de richesse. On retrouve encore ce type de rapport croisé dans le thème ferroviaire, si visible chez Balzac : c’est l’image de la société lancée dans sa « voie métallique » (Le Cousin Pons) qui se charge alors d’exprimer l’interconnexion étroite entre le monde minéral et le règne du vivant. Nous nous proposons donc d’étudier les différents modes d’ réciproque entre le Minéral et le Vivant en les inscrivant dans la perspective d’une conception large de la permettant d’articuler lecture immanente et signification historique du texte.

“La plume noire: Gaston Leroux's Impure (R)evolutions of the Underground” Andrea Goulet, University of Pennsylvania When the titular of Gaston Leroux's 1903 serial novel La Double vie de Théophraste Longuet begins exhibiting traits of the 18th-century brigand Cartouche in his speech NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 and behavior, his friend turns to Darwinian pangenesis for explanation: just as a pigeon can display the generation-skipping tare of a black feather on its plumage, the mild-mannered Longuet might have inherited a tell-tale variation of the human species in the form of Cartouche's disruptive violence. But the atavistic irruption of a low-life murderer into the body of a Third bureaucrat is not the only example of taint or contamination in this quirky, parodic novel. In this paper, I will explore multiple forms of contamination at work in Leroux's first roman-feuilleton: Contamination of genre. Through humorous citationality and formal experimentation, Leroux plays in this text with familiar tropes of the popular novel, from the mysteries and pursuits of the roman policier to the inexplicable phenomena of the fantastic and the rationalist discourse of proto-, with a provocative sprinkling of the criminal canard's sensationalistic melodrama. Contamination of medium. Like so many of his contemporaries, Leroux was a journalist (chroniqueur judiciaire for Le Matin as of 1894) and a prolific writer of serial published in the same newspapers as his reportage features. In Théophraste Longuet, he dismantles boundaries between fact and fiction by transplanting whole phrases from a press release on an 1897 underground concert into the text of his novel. Contamination of . Longuet's possession by Cartouche makes itself known through linguistic disruptions (rendered typographically through italics), as archaic phrases and bawdy tavern-songs puncture his speech and a graphological brutality sullies his writing. And of course the monstrous Talpa, these snout-nosed and sex-crazed subterranean holdovers from the fourteenth century, link retrogressive archaism to evolutionary biology by speaking the medieval langue d'oïl under the modern streets of fin-de-siècle . Contamination of space. I read Leroux's novel in the lineage of underground like Berthet's Les Catacombes de Paris (1854), in which criminals hide in abandoned quarries alongside counterfeiters, Revolutionary pamphleteers, and Templar knights invested in a pure monarchic line of succession. In the end, I will argue, Leroux's 1903 novel, for all of its parodic extravagance, constitutes an incisive comment on the ideologies of progress and purity in 's national history.

Panel 1.B: Political Ecologies of City and Country Chair: Sylvie Goutas, Wheaton College

“Paris is a Disease: Pathologies of Provincial Corruption in the Comédie humaine” Charles Rice-Davis, Augustana College This paper explores the peculiar and surprising intersection of two of Balzac's most expansive themes: human pathology and the corrupting influence of urban (particularly Parisian) manners on provincial ways of life. While a good deal of commentary has been devoted to each, three novels (Les Chouans, Le Médecin de campagne and Pierrette) point to a more complex, interrelated model of Parisian corruption as a pathological category, to be catalogued, diagnosed and (hopefully) cured. Pierrette provides a particularly useful lens for examining this confluence. The novel's heroine is diagnosed with the then-deadly disease of nostalgia, specifically with what the narrator calls "la nostalgie bretonne, maladie morale si connue que les colonels y ont égard pour les NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Bretons qui se trouvent dans leurs régiments." This fatal form of homesickness had indeed been associated in the medical world with displaced provincials (especially with Bretons), and had posed major difficulties for military medicine during the Napoleonic wars. Likewise, the details of Pierrette's case of nostalgia demonstrate Balzac's intimate familiarity with the scientific literature on the disease. Pierrette's ultimately fatal case of nostalgia is, however, never separate from the incursion of Paris, which "finit par égratigner la surface" of the world around her. With this diagnostic framework, I propose a reconsideration of critical moments in Les Chouans and Le Médecin de campagne in medical terms. In both novels, a character laments an earlier experience of corruption in the capitol: Marie de Verneuil (“mon séjour à Paris a dû me gâter l’âme”) in the former and the doctor Benassis (“je devenais Parisien”) in the latter. What can be gained by reframing these moments as not only dramatic confessions, but also as testimonies of diagnosis and survival?

“Terreur & Terroir: Wilderness and Resistance from Nineteenth-Century France to Québec” Brian Martin, Williams College In the introduction to Les Chouans (1829), the opening novel of the Comédie humaine, Balzac dramatizes the country landscape of as a wilderness worthy of French America: “La place que la Bretagne occupe au centre de l’Europe la rend beaucoup plus curieuse à observer que ne l’est le Canada.” Long after ’s dismissal of New France—in (1759)—as worth little more than “quelques arpents de neige,” Balzac’s comparison of Brittany and Québec inaugurated a new century of literary texts on French America in nineteenth-century France, from ’s account of the 1837-38 Patriots Rebellion in Famille-sans-nom (1888), to Louis Hémon’s celebrated novel on the lives of Québécois loggers and homesteaders in Maria Chapdelaine (1913). While Balzac, Verne, and Hémon sparked the French imagination and its fascination with the wilderness, culture, and people of French America, Québécois writers documented their own struggles against frontier adversity, colonial oppression, and cultural assimilation in nineteenth-century Québec. Inspired by folk tales and , Québécois texts celebrate the forest labor and rural courage of trappeurs, bûcherons, défricheurs, and patriotes, from Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle (1846), Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard le défricheur (1862), and Joseph-Charles Taché’s Forestiers et voyageurs (1863), to Louis-Honoré Fréchette’s Contes de Jos Violon (1899) and Honoré de Beaugrand’s Chasse-galerie (1900). Like Balzac’s Scènes de la vie de campagne, Québécois romans du terroir stood in contrast to the overpopulation, pollution, and exploitation of nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization, from Paris to Montréal. During this conference on “Contamination,” these texts invite us to compare urban and industrial forms of terreur to idealized notions of rural terroir: to consider the role of forest folktales and country novels as literary antidotes to urban contaminants and industrial dangers in nineteenth-century France and French America.

“Entropie urbaine et utopie pastorale chez Zola” Maxime Goergen, University of Sheffield Le développement accéléré de l'espace urbain est représenté chez Zola, comme chez Balzac avant lui, comme un acte de violence: violence physique à la ville ancienne qu'on éventre, à la campagne qu'on détruit, violence sociale à ses habitants. A mesure que la ville s'agrandit et que les rapports sociaux s'y complexifient, la nature, les frondaisons de la ville, deviennent NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 mobilisables par la littérature comme l'espace expérimental d'une sociabilité apaisée perdue ou en de se perdre. Mais, contrairement à Balzac chez qui l'utopie pastorale est pleinement fonctionnelle dans La Comédie humaine comme alternative à la vie parisienne, chez Zola l'autonomie relative et la complémentarité entre un espace urbain conflictuel et un espace naturel heureux est sans cesse menacée. L'agitation urbaine envahit l'espace naturel: c'est ainsi dans les frondaisons du péri-urbain, dans les bois et les parcs, que commencent les transactions louches qu'on mènera à bien une fois de retour en ville. Mais chez Zola c'est surtout la nature qui envahit la ville. Mais cette nature n'est plus la nature: transformée par la ville, elle est devenue maladive, artificielle ou perverse: la serre de La Curée, et son atmosphère méphitique, l'avalanche de linge blanc imitant la pureté des Alpes dans Au Bonheur des dames. Le rapport ville-nature se présente donc chez Zola sous le profil de la contamination et de l'entropie: le naturel y devient une valeur culturelle, reproductible, marchande, et s'inscrit dans le circuit des désir sexuels ou financiers de la ville. Cette communication placera d'abord cette contamination entropique entre la ville et la campagne au cœur des tiraillements idéologiques des Rougon-Macquart, entre amour du progrès et nostalgie d'un ordre ancien; elle présentera ensuite, en particulier dans les deux romans cités ci-dessus, les mécanismes de cette contamination. Dans une deuxième partie, enfin, elle s'intéressera au roman Paris et à sa tentative de dépassement paradoxal de cette entropie, dans ce que nous définirons, à la suite de Priscilla Parkhurst-Ferguson, comme une tentative ultime de construction d'une utopie pastorale… au cœur même de la ville.

“On the ‘champs renouvelés par l’industrie’: The Sung Ecology of Pierre Dupont” Xavier Fontaine, Princeton University Anthem of the Revolution of 1848, the “Champ des ouvriers,” dubbed “Marseillaise du travail” by Baudelaire, irrevocably elevated its author, Pierre Dupont, to the rank of icon among political songwriters. Does not Walter Benjamin make him the champion of the proletarian revolution in his Arcades Project? The solidarity of workers across borders, the defense of social progress, the exaltation of the forces mobilized by industrial work...: so many themes do indeed appear to foreshadow the lyrics of “L’Internationale.” Yet, this view needs to be expanded against the backdrop of Dupont’s vast corpus. Eschewing class struggle, the four volumes of the Chants et chansons—whose release spread over the years 1851-1859 saw the Second Empire succeed the Second Republic—attest, on the contrary, to a relentless desire to penetrate all layers of the social fabric. Blithely mixing erudite references, local realities, patriotic and political allusions, broaching alternatively the city or countryside, and disseminated by “colportage” to the most remote regions, Dupont’s compositions transcend all social (bourgeoisie vs. and peasants) and geographic divisions (urban vs. rural areas). At the core of this deliberately federative will lies a particular conception of the song’s essence. For Dupont, it is nothing but a rendering of a primordial melody: the sounds of nature. Across the diversity of themes surpassing the simply bucolic, nature acts as the creative principle at the root of the entire “Dupontian” repertoire as well as its continually regenerated product. The “grande voix de la nature”—in the words of —guarantees the “purity” of the songs all the while creating a dynamic in which any other mentioned reality is perceived as necessarily contaminating and inflecting nature, becoming its legitimate extension. In the preface to his last volume, Dupont does not even hesitate to talk about “champs renouvelés par l’industrie.” NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

This unifying perspective departs from an approach that reduces Dupont to a mere songwriter related to the 1848 events and will allow an outline of the political implications of what proves to be an authentic “ecological system,” notably by confronting Dupont’s rhetoric with other thinkers such as Leroux and Proudhon. How are the social body and the nation, not to mention the democratic ideal, articulated by the “voice of nature”?

Panel 1.C: Mapping Colonial Contaminations: Displacement and Difference in Theater, Fashion, and the Press Chair: Mary Harper, Princeton University

“Des Arabes à l’Opéra! Rifa’a al-Tahtawi et Mohamed as-Saffar au spectacle à Paris” Lise Schreier, Fordham University Le 3 octobre 2014 s’installe au premier rang de la salle de l’Opéra Bastille un couple de visiteurs du Golfe persique. Venus assister à une représentation de La Traviata de Verdi, ils deviennent l’attraction de la soirée. : la femme a le visage voilé. “Tous les spectateurs ont pu la voir, elle était en gros plan sur tous les écrans,” note l’administration de l’Opéra pour justifier le fait qu’on ait demandé à ces deux personnes de quitter les lieux en pleine représentation. Si cet incident est représentatif des complexités de la France contemporaine, il rappelle aussi d’autres épisodes datant du dix-neuvième siècle durant lesquels des Arabes, venus assister à un spectacle parisien, ont involontairement éclipsé les artistes pour devenir le clou d’une soirée. Ce déplacement de l’intérêt du public de la scène à la salle, présenté par les journalistes et les caricaturistes de l’époque comme une forme de contamination, forme l’objet de cette communication. Les dichotomies familières aux dix-neuvièmistes seront soulignées (ces Arabes, affublés d’éventails et de cachemires, affolent les dames). Mais elles seront également discutées de concert avec les récits de certains de ces visiteurs qui ont consigné leurs impressions de ces mêmes événements dans leurs journaux de voyage. Les témoignages de Rifa’a al-Tahtawi et Mohamed as-Saffar sur leur expérience des lieux de spectacle parisiens entre 1826 et 1846 pourront nous aider à formuler une généalogie de la difficulté à accepter une présence autre dans des espaces de sociabilité français tenus pour essentiels.

“Defending the homme de couleur in Paris” Pratima Prasad, University of Massachusetts, Boston In 1836, the Parisian Revue des Colonies espoused the cause of a young mixed-race man from the Indian Ocean island of Reunion (île Bourbon) who had been incarcerated and put on trial on the island for what were, by all accounts, trumped up charges of planning an insurrection. The young man was Louis-Timagène Houat, a self-identified mulâtre who would go on to be the Reunion’s first novelist. Pratima Prasad’s paper takes as its starting point a letter written by Houat in defense of himself and published in the Revue des Colonies. She reads Houat’s letter alongside other early nineteenth-century writings in the French press by hommes de couleur (free men of color) from Martinique and Saint-Domingue who were similarly accused, slandered, or whose reputations were sullied, in large part because they were perceived as a threat to the ruling whites in the colonies. In the colony, the identity of the homme de couleur is tethered to very specific types of communal attachments that he maintains with various ethno-classes: privileged whites, slaves, NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 free persons of color, etc. But in order to fashion himself as worthy of defense and protection from the liberal intelligentsia in France, he strips himself of these attachments “back home,” pledging instead his belonging to a purer and more benevolent French state, la Mère-patrie. In his telling, the metropole is a beacon of and liberty, whereas French ideals are corrupted and contaminated in the colonies.

“Alger, cette antichambre de l’Afrique’: Fashioning Exoticism in Bel-Ami” Heidi Brevik-Zender, University of California, Riverside This paper examines late-nineteenth-century connections between the Parisian metropole and the colonial Maghreb to which France was ever more aggressively laying claim in this period. The approach centers on intersections of sartorial objects and the of the antechamber in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. In particular the paper analyzes the ways in which garments the author’s critique of France’s expansionist by highlighting what Maupassant depicts as the harmful "contaminating" effects of colonization in France itself (as opposed to abroad). This reading of the novel implies that the impetus for Maupassant’s sharp criticism of colonization is not what it did to the colonies, but rather what it threatened do to French society more generally as brutal practices, personified by the novel’s anti-hero Georges Duroy, were domesticated, normalized and eventually imitated. The analysis focuses on examining the appropriation of exoticism in Bel-Ami, an endemic phenomenon of early-Third- Republic urban modernity, one that Susan Hiner, working through the lens of fashion, has called “the domestication of the exotic.”

“Le mal de la Kasbah: Pierre Loti in Algeria” Sage Goellner, University of Wisconsin-Madison Pierre Loti (1850-1923) is best known for his semi-autobiographical novel, Aziyadé (1879). This communication treats one of Loti’s lesser-known works, Les Trois dames de la Kasbah (1882), in part inspired by his visit to Algeria in 1868. In this deceptively simple tale, a group of French sailors arrive in Algiers and in a drunken haze they enter the Kasbah by accident. Three of the sailors stay the night with Algerian prostitutes. It is later revealed that they are infected with syphilis, which will eventually kill one of the sailors and infect the offspring of the others. In Les Trois dames de la Kasbah, the disease expresses a vicious cycle of cross- contamination between metropolis and colony that symbolizes ’s deleterious effects. However, the surrounding architecture of the collection in which the first appeared, Fleurs d’ennui (1882), is largely ignored in the scholarship on the Les Trois dames de la Kasbah. As its preface states, Fleurs d’ennui is “un livre double” recounted by two narrators, Loti and Plumkett. I argue that the to Les Trois dames de la Kasbah foreshadows the moribund anti-colonial morality tale it introduces. Just before Les Trois dames de la Kasbah, the dialogue between the two narrators in this refractive text begins to paint negative images of sickness and decay, presaging Les Trois dames de la Kasbah’s biting criticism of the sociocultural disorder wrought by the French in Algiers.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 1.D: Baudelaire, Gautier et le venin du réalisme Chairs: Karen F. Quandt, University of Delaware; Nicolas Valazza, Indiana University, Bloomington

“« Réalisme, un grand mot vide de sens »: Baudelaire, Gautier, and Landscape Painting” Cassandra Hamrick, Saint Louis University « On fit de [Courbet] l’apôtre du Réalisme, un grand mot vide de sens, comme bien des grands mots », writes Gautier in his review of the Salon of 1868. Confusion concerning the meaning of the term is also noted by Baudelaire: « ... réalisme, – injure dégoûtante jetée à la face de tous les analystes, mot vague et élastique », he writes in his 1857 on Madame Bovary. Later, he appears to question whether Realism has a sense at all (« Puisque Réalisme il y a »). At issue for Baudelaire, as would also be the case for Gautier, is what constitutes the « real ». Ultimately, for the poet of Correspondances, the question remains intimately linked with itself : « La Poésie est ce qu’il y a de plus réel, c’est ce qui n’est complètement vrai que » (ibid.). Nature is but a dictionary of signs reflective of a reality beyond the material surface of « ce monde-ci ». Similarily, Gautier speaks of the harmonious monde or microcosm that resonates in the individual artist’s work. In the drive to renew art, Realism, on the other hand, has fallen off course, stripping landscape painting of the principles of unity and cohesiveness that underlie what might be called a kind of pre-ecological vision of nature. Rather than a rejuvenating influence on art, Courbet’s Realism appears to have had a contaminating effect on artistic expression in the eyes of Baudelaire and Gautier. In this paper, we examine how the repercussions of this paradox are played out in the representation of nature in landscape painting, particularly as seen by Théophile Gautier.

“La poétique de l’aquarelle: Gautier décontaminé par Baudelaire” Karen F. Quandt, University of Delaware Dans son premier essai sur Théophile Gautier (1859), l’exhumation menée par Baudelaire des poèmes oubliés de son prédécesseur romantique révèle son désir de préserver le poète adamantin des années 1830, purifié des banalités des entreprises journalistiques, des éloges creux du progrès répandus au cours du Second Empire, et d’une esthétique de ‘l’art pour l’art’ hyper- stylisée. Gautier applaudit au blanchiment intensif des façades de Paris exécuté en vue de l’ universelle de 1855 (“Le Nouveau Paris”, Paris et les Parisiens au XIXe siècle) avec la même vigueur qu’il sacrifie l’aquarelle, dont les couleurs brûlées au four créent un émail inflexiblement dur (“L’Art”; Emaux et camées, 1852). Cependant, Baudelaire déjoue habilement la menace de cette “lourde nuée” de systèmes hygiéniques oppressifs, soulignant plutôt le flot “élastique”, voire naturel du lyrisme primitif de Gautier, ainsi que son éclat coloré qui éclipse même la clarté reflétée par le marbre ou le cristal. Baudelaire célèbre dans cet essai les “fraîcheurs enchanteresses” et les “profondeurs fuyantes” suggérées par la technique de l’aquarelle, ce qui nous invite à lire son exhumation d’un Gautier romantique comme procédant à un “aquarellement” de son propre lyrisme. Les poèmes urbains de Gautier enfouis dans le recueil Albertus (1832) me permettront, comme point de départ, d’établir comment leur teinte générale d’une atmosphère éthérée et suggestive d’une harmonie sourde inspirent la mise en scène établie par Baudelaire dans les “Tableaux parisiens” (Les Fleurs du mal, 1861). Même si Baudelaire insiste plus vigoureusement que Gautier sur les NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 laideurs produites par les pollutions et les chocs de la ville, mon propos sera de montrer comment son appropriation des nuances de l’aquarelle sauvegarde son lyrisme d’une entreprise nettement réaliste en même temps qu’elle détermine la forme ondulante de ses poèmes. Si l’atmosphère de Paris prenait une couleur décidément noire lorsque sa population et son zèle industriel s’épanouissaient avec abandon, le lessivage du paysage urbain mis en œuvre par Baudelaire laisse filtrer, malgré tout, des couleurs et des harmonies vives et rêveuses parmi la fange et la discorde.

“L’Œuvre empoisonnée : Baudelaire, Clésinger et la chair de la Présidente” Nicolas Valazza, Indiana University, Bloomington , surnommée « la Présidente », a servi de modèle, entre autres, à la statue de la Femme piquée par un serpent de Clésinger, et inspiré le poème À celle qui est trop gaie de Baudelaire, deux œuvres jugées scandaleuses lors de leur exposition et publication. La statue de Clésinger a ainsi donné lieu à un âpre débat dans la presse en 1847, alors que le poème de Baudelaire a été censuré suite au procès de 1857. Or, les scandales suscités par ces deux œuvres présentent des analogies frappantes : le sculpteur et le poète sont accusés d’avoir contaminé leurs œuvres avec la chair de leur modèle. D’une part, Gustave Planche soutient que la statue de Clésinger n’a pas été modelée, mais bien moulée sur le corps de la femme, de sorte que le procédé de l’artiste serait « à la sculpture ce que la photographie est à la peinture ». D’autre part, les vers de Baudelaire sont accusés de « tout dire, tout peindre, tout mettre à nu », et condamnés par le tribunal pour « réalisme grossier ». Mon propos est d’examiner, à la lumière du débat critique et des actes du procès, comment ces deux œuvres, qui ont préfiguré – bien malgré elles – la querelle du réalisme, thématisent cette contamination de l’art par la chair, tout en la dissimulant. En affirmant, dans À celle qui est trop gaie, vouloir « infuser [s]on venin » dans le corps de la femme (ce que fait effectivement le « serpent » dans la statue de Clésinger), le poète menace de rompre l’étanchéité entre l’œuvre et la chair ; une menace que les juges, avec leur « interprétation syphilitique » du poème, ont bien perçue.

“Baudelaire, pour rire ou pour de vrai” Paolo Tortonese, Université de Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 On rencontre dans le Spleen de Paris des rapprochements soudains entre des thèmes traditionnellement incompatibles, comme par exemple l’amour et la nourriture, des chutes brusques vers des thématiques basses, des plongées finales dans l’infect, qui laissent parfois le lecteur dans l’hésitation : il se sent suspendu entre le rire et l’angoisse, entre la lecture comique et la lecture sérieuse, ou tragique. La stratégie de Baudelaire, dans ces cas, semble répondre à une nécessité d’entraîner le lecteur du haut vers le bas, en dévoilant par surprise la réalité banale ou abjecte qui se cache derrière une apparence rare ou exquise. Cela ressemble d’une part à la stratégie comique, d’autre part à la stratégie réaliste. Comme les comiques, Baudelaire juxtapose la bassesse à la noblesse ; comme les réalistes, il dévoile le mal derrière le bien. L’équilibre instable entre ces interprétations possibles, ainsi que l’incertitude générique du Spleen, donnent à ses poèmes en prose un caractère unique d’ambiguïté.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 1.E: Public Hygiene and the Ecology of Waste Chair: Effie Rentzou, Princeton University

“Rehabilitating Matter: Recycling Waste in Sand, Flaubert, Zola” Manon Mathias, University of Aberdeen This paper will examine the production and recycling of human waste in narratives by Sand, Flaubert and Zola in the context of Pierre Leroux’s theory of the ‘circulus’. Drawing on the insights of thinkers such as Alain Corbin and Dominique Laporte, the paper will explore the new ways of conceptualizing relations between the body and the earth which emerged as a result of scientific reflection on the place of humankind within nature. The discovery of deep time and the theory of ‘transformisme’ challenged the assumption of man’s pre-eminence and inscribed humans within a vast animal, mineral and vegetal network. Leroux used this sense of interconnectedness to develop his ‘circulus’ theory in which human manure would be reused as fertilizer, solving food shortages and fostering a collaborative relationship between humans and the environment. Such rehabilitation of matter not only had a practical purpose but also carried and ideological implications, as it disrupted the hierarchy between pure and impure, spirit and matter. The regenerative power of matter takes on a political dimension in Sand’s work, as she uses the criculus principles of collaboration and solidarity to challenge individualism within human society. Although Zola foregrounds the breakdown of circulatory networks, his work also revalorizes matter and foregrounds symbiotic relations between man and his environment. Flaubert appears to mock the Leroussian ‘circulus’ theory, particularly in Bouvard et Pécuchet. But the centrality of matter, and particularly our inability to manage its fluctuations, is everywhere apparent in his œuvre. The nineteenth-century focus on waste and its reuse prefigures today’s concerns with ecology, sustainability and recycling, but it also reveals a particular fascination with the boundary between the human and the non-human.

“Thérèse Raquin and Second Empire Waste Management” Andrea Thomas, Loyola University Maryland In his 1868 preface to Thèrèse Raquin, Émile Zola defended himself against critics’ charges of “ordures et puanteurs,” “flaque de boue et de sang, d’égout, d’immondice,” and “littérature putride” by claiming that he was simply writing the truth which would, in turn, purify all. Here, in what is often considered a kind of manifesto for naturalism, and throughout the novel, Zola saturates his prose with waste, water, and fire. Preferring the title of “chirugien” to “égoutier littéraire,” Zola nevertheless provides some of his earliest commentaries on Second Empire sanitation and society. As a “chirugien” in Thérèse Raquin, Zola first experiments with Hippocratic temperaments—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic—for his characters, all of whom lack free will and a soul. For example, when the novel’s , Laurent, of sanguine temperament, and Thérèse, of melancholic temperament, commit murder, their remorse manifests itself in a purely physical way. Yet, even as Zola’s characters adopt humors, parts of Paris also take on a symbolic function in the context of these temperaments. As a dumping ground for dead bodies and refuse, for instance, the plays a crucial role in Thérèse Raquin. The phlegmatic temperament of Camille, who drowns in the Seine, is symbolically linked to water; both the river and the character continue to haunt the protagonists. Likewise, the morgue serves as a “spectacle” at the center of Paris and takes on a perversely erotic character. In this NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 presentation, I will show how Zola uses these temperaments symbolically in his urban in order to criticize contamination and waste in Haussmann-era Paris.

“Antidote Water: Public Baths and Swimming Pools in the Paris of 1830-1848” Jennifer Terni, University of Connecticut Between 1800 and 1850 the population of Paris had doubled, passing the million- person mark in 1846. The city’s concentration of population, which reached its apogee in 1851 at 99 000 inhabitants per square mile, was the real source of urban misery. The choking density of traffic, the perennial mud of Parisian streets, and the devastation of the cholera epidemic in 1832 were so many symptoms of urban overcrowding. Parisians responded in a variety of ways. On a public level, hygiene and beautification became urgent priorities in this first era of modern urban planning. It was during this period that the city was conceptualized in terms of systems and networks, and that its first public utilities— gaslight, public transit, and railways—were established.1 This was the context in which new suburbs were required to plant trees and flowers, to lay sidewalks and install gaslight, reflecting new standards of urban development. The development of water infrastructure, however, lagged far behind. While London installed indoor plumbing, the Paris prefecture added only 1800 public water sources during this period. Paris’ most important source of private water remained its 22,000 water carriers until Haussmannization.2 The problems of hygiene, beautification, and water found a private outlet in the growing popularity of the city’s public baths and swimming pools. My paper will explore how people used these venues to suggest that the enjoyment of Parisian water venues helped draw increased attention to the pollution of the city’s water sources. I argue, that the importance of clean resources for recreation in this highly urban foreshadowed an important strand in the logic of conservation.

Panel 1.F: Sound Pollution Chair: Florence Vatan, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Reading Noise” Misha Avrekh, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Digital and Print Media department If in the French urban novels of the late 1830s / early 1840s (Balzac, Sue) noise comes to be depicted as a ubiquitous nuisance and a pollutant to be avoided and regulated, it is relatively scarce in the regional novels from this period. In a way, this absence itself becomes a marker of provinciality: silence dominates the countryside just as noise supposedly prevails in the city. In my presentation, I will look at “noise”/bruit -- and, more generally, at notable auditory outbursts -- in Prosper Mérimée’s Colomba (1840) and Balzac’s Les Paysans (1844) as sensory tools that help make the countryside readable. In both novels, noise figures as an anomaly, a sign of confrontation, calamity, or simply of forthcoming novelty, of arrival or encounter. The geographic differences between the regions under study in these two novels -- an unassimilated

1 This is the argument of both Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris before Haussmann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), 8, 16-18, 33- 34. 2 Douglas Klahr, “Le développement des rues Parisiennes pendant la Monarchie de Juillet” in La Modernité avant Haussmann (Paris: Editions Recherche, 2000) 222-227. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 borderland in Colomba, an uncontested interior in Les Paysans -- set up some of the distinctions between the representations of noise that will be discussed in my paper. The metaphorical meaning of bruit as a symptom of notoriety is also relevant both as a sign of readability and as a way of interpretively connecting “provincial” noise (or lack thereof) and noise as an urban nuisance. More generally, recent literary studies have argued for the pre-eminence of visuality in the literary discourse of the eighteenth century (Wall, Levitt). My presentation will attempt to position the auditory as a competitor, if not a successor, to the visual as the dominant of depicting the world.

“Lyrical Contamination in Madame Bovary” Renée Altergott, Princeton University Throughout the period of genesis of Madame Bovary, ’s Correspondance reveals his aesthetic agenda to both elevate and purify the of prose through its prosody and content. First, in order to create a prose that would be “aussi rythmée, aussi sonore”3 as poetry without being metered or rhymed, he shouted and reworked phrases in his gueuloir until the contaminating poetic agents of assonance and word repetition had finally been neutralized. Second, he had to actively suppress his own authorly tendency to write in Romantic figures of style. In a letter to Louise Colet, he equates this with being riddled with lice: “Je suis gêné par le sens métaphorique qui décidément me domine trop. Je suis dévoré de comparaisons, comme on l’est de poux, et je ne passe mon temps qu’à les écraser” (27 décembre 1852). Restricting his figurative language to a few mediocre tropes that pollute the thoughts and dialogues of Charles and Emma, Flaubert turns to sound description as a new locus of metaphorical signification. While the repetitive leitmotivs of Hippolyte, Binet, and the blind beggar could pass for mere background noise, close analysis suggests that their repetition produces subtle meaning for both the characters and the reader. Moreover, comparison of successive drafts of these passages shows that Flaubert was able to use these descriptions to absorb the explicit similes and he had otherwise erased from his text. In this paper, I will examine the role of the textual leitmotiv in the realization of Flaubert’s project for prose. Sound descriptions seem to offer an efficient alternative to the metaphor, by conveying hidden meaning via realistic detail. However, Flaubert’s paratextual recourse to musical metaphors such as the “symphony”4 to describe his text seem to betray the ever-present influence of romantic tropes on his own conception of the of writing. Should we therefore regard the sound description as a catalyst of “new prose,” or rather as evidence of the persisting interpenetration of Romanticism in prose?

3 Lettre à Louise Colet, Croisset, 22 juillet 1852 4 “Si jamais les effets d’une symphonie ont été reportés dans un livre, ce sera là. Il faut que ça hurle par l’ensemble…” (Lettre à Louise Colet, Croisset, 12 octobre 1853; with regards to the Comices scene). NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“The Contagion of Poetry: Baudelaire’s Verse Contaminated by Strange Sounds” Helen Abbott, University of Sheffield In the wake of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal trial, Le Présent published a poem by Émile Deschamps entitled ‘Sur Les Fleurs du Mal. À quelques censeurs’.5 Two lines of Deschamps’ poem stand out, and merit further interrogation: Et la contagion, en vers, n’es pas possible, À moins qu’on ne les chante, – et ce n’es point le cas – Deschamps’ claim that verse in and of itself cannot contaminate is tempered by the suggestion that singing those same verse lines could, in fact, spread contagion. The subsequent claim that Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal are not to be sung (and therefore not capable of contaminating) is intriguing, even wrong-footed, given that we know that a number of Baudelaire’s poems have been set to music as song. This paper sets out to critique and examine this perspective on the musical contamination Baudelaire’s poetry, with a particular focus on poems which highlight the supposed depravity of Baudelaire’s poetic outlook, notably ‘Les Litanies de Satan’.6 It argues that contagion comes into verse through cross-contamination with other art forms such as music. However, it will also argue that cross-contamination does not have a negative, damaging effect on Baudelaire’s verse, but is an important means of expanding the poetic sound palette. Reviewing the critical scholarship which has largely ignored ‘Les Litanies de Satan’ and its musical settings – notably the unusual context of 1960s-1980s American electronica settings of ‘Les Litanies de Satan’ by Ruth White and Diamanda Galás – this paper concludes that musical contamination of poetry helps us to understand that we should expect Baudelaire’s poetry to turn up in very unusual places.

Break 1:45 pm - 2:15 pm

5 The poem is dated 13 August 1857, just one week before the judgement was passed on Baudelaire (20 August 1857), but did not appear in print until 1 September 1857. 6 Elsewhere Deschamps had praised Baudelaire for poems such as ‘Don Juan aux Enfers’, les ‘Spleen’, ‘Les Femmes damnées’, ‘Les Métamorphoses du Vampire’, ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, ‘Le Vin de l’assassin’, ‘Confession’, highlighting the power of their originality, daring to broach topics untouched elsewhere. See Émile Deschamps letter to Baudelaire, 14 July 1857. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Thursday 5 November Session 2 – 2:15 pm - 4:00 pm

Panel 2.A: Pourriture de Flaubert. (Dislocation de l’insignifiance) Chair: Anthony Zielonka, Assumption College

“L’écrivain vaurien. (Flaubert ou la tentation de l’insignifiance)” André Benhaïm, Princeton University Le bourreau des Bovary est-il vraiment si méchant ? La méchanceté est affaire de chute perpétuelle. Et chez Flaubert, tout semble toujours finir par s’écrouler, comme si casser la gueule — culbuter, injurier, gueuler à tue-tête — était sa raison de vivre. On trébuche, on tombe, on se ridiculise, on meurt bien sûr et, en général, très mal. Le pire, c’est que l’auteur semble se moquer de tout cela, de toute la misère et surtout de toute la bêtise qu’il voit comme le fléau de l’humanité, sa lèpre, et contre laquelle il n’a d’autre antidote à proposer que l’insulte. L’insulte, c’est-à-dire, qui passe par l’écriture. Et s’il n’y a pas de gros mots chez Flaubert, quelque chose cloche dans cette prose qui prolifère. Chez l’auteur qui met tout le monde en boîte l’écriture refuse d’être achevée, préférant boiter que se coucher. Une écriture qui s’inspire de ce qu’elle aspire peut-être donc moins à détruire qu’à sublimer. C’est du rien, du banal, de l’insignifiant que Flaubert tire la force de son verbe. L’extrait, oui, d’un mouvement ascendant, symétriquement opposé (inverse donc équivalent) à celui qu’il met en scène. Le rêve du « livre sur rien » est celui d’un vaurien qui au monde immonde cherche noise.

“Morbleu ! De la couleur qui jure” Aymeric Glacet, Sewanee, the University of the South Morbleu ! Corbleu ! Parbleu ! Sacrebleu ! Tout est bleu chez Flaubert, même les insultes. Même et surtout les insultes. Qu’on les entende dans le gueuloir ou qu’on les lise dans sa correspondance, elles sont passées au bleu. Mais si l’insulte est bleue, si l’injure est bleue, c’est aussi parce que toute l’œuvre tire au bleu. Les mots, comme les couleurs, sont plus ou moins couvrants. Là où d’autres voient rouge, là où d’autres broient du noir, là où ils en voient de toutes les couleurs, Flaubert voit bleu, n’imagine qu’en bleu, ne rêve que de bleu. Mais ce ciel sans nuage n’est-il pas un mauvais présage ? Et ne faut-il pas s’inquiéter de ce que cache réellement cette couleur, de ce qu’elle recouvre, et s’il n’a pas quelques bleus à l’âme, ou de quel blues l’écrivain serait victime tant cette couleur semble avoir un impact funeste sur ses personnages, tant elle semble avoir contaminé tout son art, tant elle semble également peser sur sa vie. Chaque couleur a son propre langage. Et c’est l’histoire de cette couleur que nous aimerions évoquer, parce que c’est la couleur du bovarysme, mais aussi parce que c’est une couleur qui lui colle étrangement à la peau.

“Poison d'envie, poison d'Emma” Gilles Glacet, Soka University Emma est envieuse. Flaubert sait qu'un envieux, peut-être parce qu'il en est un lui-même, ça se fabrique. Il la fabrique donc à petits coups, lentement, patiemment, à coup de frustrations. Alors oui, Emma est envieuse. De qui? De quoi? Peu importe sans doute, parce qu'envier nous dit Sartre, Gustave ne cesse de le répéter, c'est jouer perdant. Ainsi, Emma, par nature d'abord, mais elle s'en convainc régulièrement, joue perdant. Et puis l'envieux, explique encore Sartre en NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 parlant de Flaubert, n'a jamais le sentiment de posséder. C'est de ce sentiment, et de ces possessions, de ces jouissances frustrées que nous aimerions parler en particulier. Parce qu'en fin de compte, il y a ceux qui, comme Rodolphe ou le pharmacien Homais, se nourrissent en prédateur du monde ; il y a ceux qui, comme Charles, nourrissent le monde, et il y a ceux que le monde n'assimile pas et qui n'assimile pas le monde. Ceux-là, comme Emma, empoisonnent et/ou sont empoisonnés par le monde.

“Face au dégoût : Flaubert et l’art de la (dé)composition” Florence Vatan, University of Wisconsin-Madison L’oeuvre de Flaubert témoigne d’une attention marquée pour la matière décomposée: des fœtus pourrissant dans les bocaux du pharmacien Homais dans Madame Bovary au perroquet rongé par les vers de Félicité dans Un coeur simple en passant par les cadavres pestilentiels de Salammbô et par la “charogne boursouflée” de l’ennui existentiel, la décomposition et la pourriture forment un leitmotiv des romans et de la correspondance. Selon leur habitude, Bouvard et Pécuchet se plongent dans cet univers avec un zèle exemplaire, notamment lors d’une rencontre impromptue avec la charogne d’un chien et via la création d’une fosse aux composts. À la lumière des analyses phénoménologiques d’Aurel Kolnai sur le dégoût, j’examinerai comment et à quelles fins Flaubert mobilise cette émotion fondée sur une phobie du contact et sur une crainte ambivalente de la contamination. Il s’agira également d’explorer dans quelle mesure Flaubert contourne et transfigure le dégoût par le biais du grotesque et de la “chimie du style”. Sur ce point, la référence récurrente au fumier mérite attention. Si Baudelaire se propose de transformer la boue en or, Flaubert assigne au fumier un pouvoir fécondant inspiré en grande part de la théorie de la génération spontanée. C’est ainsi qu’il esquisse l’idéal esthétique d’un écrivain capable de faire naître la beauté à partir de l’immonde, et de tirer des “décompositions fécondantes” et des “putréfactions” de l’humanité de nouveaux joyaux esthétiques.

Panel 2.B: Contamination Across Fields: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Fin de Siècle Chair: Rachel Mesch, Yeshiva University

“The Marquis de Morès: A French Cowboy in the American West during the Fin de Siècle” Venita Datta, Wellesley College During the fin de siècle, William F. Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, became synonymous with the figure of the cowboy in France. Playing to sell-out during the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show introduced many in the French public to the of the American West. But in the years preceding Buffalo Bill’s arrival in France, other figures, among them, Edmond de Mandat-Grancey, through his novels and articles in the press, along with other such French travelers to the United States as Paul Bourget, contributed to French of the West, which had been shaped in the earlier part of the century by the novels of American and of Frenchman Gustave Aimard. In the 1880s, three French men of note made their way out west: Edmond de Mandat- Grancey himself, Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Morès; and Raymond Auzias-Turenne. The first two were aristocrats, the third a bourgeois with pretensions to aristocracy. All were monarchists and former military men. In this paper, I will examine the reasons for their departure from France and attempt to determine what they sought in the United States, as well as the ways in which their views of the American West were colored by their disdain of the Third Republic. For all three, the American West, which represented new opportunities akin to those found in the colonies, allowed them to give free rein to what they believed were the masculine, heroic and chevalresque ideals of the aristocracy. My paper, part of a larger book project on French-American cultural and political relations during the fin de siècle, is both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. I will be examining articles from the contemporary press, archival sources, notably, the papers of the Marquis de Morès at the North Dakota Historical Society, as well as novels and autobiographies written by the three would-be cowboys. As an historian who teaches in a French department, I frequently incorporate literary texts in my historical analyses because I believe that the cultural and political are inextricably linked and, moreover, that the literature of an age can often tell us a great deal about the historical perceptions and of the time.

“‘Salon of the Street’: Democratization of Art or Contamination of Public Space?” Ruth E. Iskin, Ben Gurion University The birth of modern advertising in the form of large color posters spread across the Paris streets during the last decades of the nineteenth century gave rise to early debates about high culture vs. mass media. My paper analyzes this debate by examining the contradictory responses to the color poster by critics, artists and architects. Enthusiastically welcoming responses were based on the belief that posters on the streets represented a democratization of culture – bringing art to people without the high-culture constraints of gold frames and galleries. Another favorable position approved of the posters on aesthetic grounds, viewing them as a welcome colorful decoration of the monochromatic modern urban space. One critic even argued that some posters manifested a great deal more talent than most of the paintings displayed in the official Salon, urging the audiences of art exhibitions to “cleanse their eyes” by looking at Jules Chéret’s posters on the street. At the other end of the spectrum, some observers – predominantly architects – objected to posters on the grounds that they corrupted taste, offended the eye by assaulting artistic standards of beauty, invaded the personal and psychic space of passersby, contaminated the views of architecture, spoiled city vistas and turned civic space into a commodified space. Embedded in this discourse were different political leanings as well as the professional identities of the commentators, pitting those who regarded bringing art to the streets as an important value against those who were invested in maintaining not only the integrity of architecture but more broadly the status of high art. The paper will analyze this debate by examining texts as well as a wide-range of contemporaneous visual materials, including black- and-white photographs, color lithographs, illustrations, and caricatures representing posters in the city.

“Conjugal Fictions: Fin-de-Siècle Marriage Plots and the New Biography” Rachel Mesch, Yeshiva University By the end of the nineteenth century, marriage—long considered the defining institution of French society—was widely perceived as under attack. Leftist Republicans fought against Catholics to loosen the constraining policies of the Napoleonic Code, and the 1884 legalization NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 of divorce inflamed passions in a nation already troubled by a declining birth rate and preoccupied by fears of psychosocial degeneration. Unlike previous scholarship devoted to the vulnerability of the institution, however, this paper argues that some of the most surprising, fascinating and creative responses to the fin-de-siècle marriage crisis took place not outside of but rather within traditional conjugal structures. Following Jo Margadant’s description of the “new biography” as one which recognizes that “identities are mobile, contested, multiple constructions of the self and others that depend as much on context as any defining traits of character,” I will present two (mini) “conjugal biographies,” of famous writing couples: Jane and Marcel Dieulafoy and Rachilde and Alfred Vallette.7 By examining each couple’s life together as well as their extensive writings on marriage (fictional and autobiographical), I hope to offer a snapshot of a transitional moment in the history of French marriage, when the institution was being refashioned—in myriad surprising ways—from within. In the process, I plan to highlight how cultural historical perspectives on Third Republic values can enhance the interpretive possibilities for reading fin-de-siècle literary texts, making legible certain interpretive elements otherwise hidden.

“Multidisciplinarity Run Riot? Editing the Cahiers (1898-1901) of Henri Vever” Willa Silverman, The Pennsylvania State University My remarks will focus on the challenges involved in editing a series of four unpublished diaries written between 1898 and 1901 by the Art Nouveau jeweler and prominent Parisian art collector, Henri Vever (1854-1942). While life writing is frequently approached from the perspectives of literary studies and textual analysis, Vever’s private writings, complemented by the critical apparatus (in the form of notes and a substantial introduction) that I am preparing to accompany them, invite approaches and methodologies drawn from numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. These include, but are not limited to, history (including social history, the history of private and daily life, and the history of technology), art history, urban studies, and material culture studies. Becoming sufficiently conversant with these disciplines in order to frame cogent analyses of topics as disparate as the competitive world of Parisian luxury commerce in the late-nineteenth century; attitudes towards the newly-invented bicycle and the transformed sense of time and space that resulted from its increased use; and relationships between bourgeois fathers and daughters, is an evident challenge in editing this account of such a vibrant life. However, maintaining an interdisciplinary frame of analysis for the diaries also enables insights into, for example, the connections among Vever’s book and art collecting practices, his social status, and his esthetic tastes. This paper, then, will address a range of theoretical and methodological challenges – and some tentative solutions to them – encountered in preparing the print edition of Vever’s diaries, and in thinking about a possible digital edition of them as well.

7 Jo Burr Margadant, ed. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France. (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) 25.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 2.C: Métissages Chair: Maureen DeNino, Princeton University

“‘Ange de la victoire et de la liberté’: Adrienne Leading the People in Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture” Molly Krueger Enz, South Dakota State University Alphonse de Lamartine’s “dramatic poem” Toussaint Louverture (1850) is set in the final days of 1802 when Toussaint Louverture was the undisputed leader of Saint- Domingue, fighting against the French for the liberty of his country and people. In the work’s preface, Lamartine declares that he intended to write a political work, “or rather, it was a cry for humanity in five acts and in verse.” As a member of France’s Provisional Republican government that abolished slavery in 1848, Lamartine was dedicated to the emancipation of slaves in the French colonies. Despite the title of the , the eponymous hero does not act alone and is not the only leader who rallies for his country’s independence. He could not have fought as effectively or achieved his goals without the unwavering support, loyalty, and aid of his niece Adrienne who symbolizes the political power struggle between her island homeland and the French métropole. As the central mixed-race figure born after her black mother’s rape by a white colonist, she represents France’s colonization of Saint-Domingue and the violent exploitation of its land and people. In this presentation, I argue that Adrienne actually surpasses her uncle in her steadfast dedication to her country and to the revolutionary cause that led to its independence from France in 1804. Just as her uncle Toussaint is called the “Black ,” Adrienne can be compared with the central figure in Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting “Liberty Leading the People” as Liberty’s mixed-race reincarnation who leads her Haitian compatriots to battle for their freedom.

“Oxiane ou les clés de la révolution de Saint-Domingue” Sarah Mécheneau, Michigan State University Publiée en 1826, l’œuvre anonyme Oxiane ou la Révolution de Saint-Domingue s’inscrit dans la tendance de la littérature de la Restauration, époque durant laquelle les notions d’égalité, de liberté et de fraternité faussement acquises après la Révolution française sont au centre du débat littéraire. De nombreuses œuvres, souvent écrites par des femmes, traiteront du destin tragique du personnage du mulâtre. Cet engouement s’explique par le caractère foncièrement romantique de ce personnage, tourmenté entre la souffrance de ses frères opprimés et imprégné de la culture de ses maîtres oppresseurs mais surtout protagoniste du grand traumatisme de la France du XIXe siècle, les insurrections de Saint-Domingue. Cette étude mettra en lumière la grande complexité d’Oxiane ou la Révolution de Saint- Domingue. Le titre de ce livre témoigne de sa double interprétation et du génie de son auteur qui manie avec brillance le genre sentimental afin de transmettre de véritables revendications sociales tentant de définir la société post-révolutionnaire mais inscrivant néanmoins son œuvre au cœur de la contemporanéité de son époque. Nous nous intéresserons aux nombreuses pistes présentées dans ce roman à clé qui, bien que peu remarqué par le lectorat de son époque, se distingue à présent par la richesse de sa narration. Il s’agit tout autant d’une nouvelle sentimentale qu’une chronique journalistique relatant la révolte des esclaves de 1791 à Saint-Domingue mais encore un manifeste pour l’égalité des races.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“Hugo, Dumas, Gobineau et Firmin: la bête noire ou l'Autre” Daniel Desormeaux, University of Chicago Qui n’a pris pour cible sa bête noire? Traquée partout dans les vieilles histoires comme dans les mœurs, dans les contes comme dans les proverbes; source de mythes, de peurs, de superstitions, de fantasmes érotiques, de grossesses méfiantes, de polémiques littéraires, de joutes électorales, elle devient même un beau sujet de roman exotique chez Dumas et Hugo. Eux-mêmes, Hugo et Dumas, furent des bêtes noires, mais pour des raisons distinctes. Dumas, à vrai dire, l'a peut-être été doublement, triplement même. Toujours est-il que la bête noire déborde les frontières littéraires pour s'engouffrer sur le terrain de la science, plus précisément l'anthropologie raciale, au milieu du XIXe siècle. La bête noire est pourtant sans forme et sans essence. Que vient faire alors cette figure quasi mythique dans l'anthropologie naissante? C'est à Arthur Gobineau qu'il faut commencer par poser une telle question. Et chez Anténor Firmin d'y trouver un premier élément de réponse. Car, pour une curieuse raison, à partir du début du XIXe siècle, au tournant de la vogue romantique, la bête noire apparaissait déjà comme moins dangereuse qu'une Autre? C’est cette Autre qui nous intéresse dans cette communication. Car la belle, au-delà des savoirs ou des croyances, n'en sera pas moins blanche, et la bête moins noire. Dumas et Hugo ont ainsi vaguement évoqué ses contours avant la psychanalyse de Fanon. Que dire en définitive de cette peur sournoise de mélanger, voire discuter des goûts et des couleurs?

Panel 2.D: Les plafonds enrichis: Mallarmé Defiled and Undefiled Chair: Thomas C. Connolly, Yale University

“(Im)Pure Reading: Blanchot on Mallarmé” Claire Chi-ah Lyu, University of Virginia In L’Espace littéraire, where Mallarmé figures prominently, Blanchot writes that reading, if it is to be authentic, must keep the void (or what he also calls the distance) of a literary work pure. My paper explores Blanchot’s intriguing, and hard to grasp, proposition that reading has to do with the purity of the void, and how this plays out in his treatment of Mallarmé’s work. I begin with a close examination of Blanchot's theory of reading; I then contrast it with Mallarmé’s poetics where purity and void also play a key role but in relation to writing (rather than reading); finally I reflect upon how these considerations might modify our concept of reading and open alternate possibilities for our critical practice. According to Blanchot, we read inauthentically most of the time, because our inherent “horreur du vide” makes us incapable of safeguarding the void as it is: we fill it up immediately. A prime example of inauthentic reading, which concerns us directly, is critical reading. This happens, for Blanchot, when a reader, as specialist, fills the void of the work with content. Once filled with and solidified into content, the work becomes seizable through understanding, which, in turn, paves the way for evaluative judgment of all sorts. Blanchot sees this as impure reading. But how can we not take content into account when we read? What would a pure, authentic reading look like? Is it even possible? Mallarmé’s “pure” writing, which strives to evacuate content (as exemplified in Un coup de dés where the void of le blanc displaces content in an unprecedented manner), might help us to approach the enigma and risk of “pure” reading that Blanchot proposes.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“Pores of Nothingness: Caloric Theory, the Hegel Question, and the Poetic Sublime” Grant Wiedenfeld, Yale University During his 1860s crisis, Mallarmé writes a letter famous for its mysterious and baroque metaphor: “Ma pensée a été jusqu’à se penser elle-même et n’a plus la force d’évoquer en un Néant unique le vide disséminé en sa porosité.” Here previous critics (especially Derrida) have seen evidence of his proto-existentialism—a crisis of faith that many have attributed to his reading Hegel or about Hegel. However, other critics have challenged the German influence (characterized as a contamination by Gaulists) and left open the “Hegel question.” I claim that Mallarmé takes the image of porosity directly from Hegel’s Science of Logic (1817, trans. 1859). The German philosopher borrows the idea of porosity from caloric theory, a theory of heat rendered obsolete in the late nineteenth century by modern thermodynamics. Caloric was the concept of a weightless fluid that transferred heat from warm to cool bodies. Hegel envisioned thought as an invisible flow through an object’s pores. The dialectician posits an emptiness at the center of every being, suspended between substance and its antithesis. Mallarmé takes the caloric analogy one step further and applies it to the sublime, creating a haunting picture of self-consciousness. Discovering this reference has implications beyond the Hegel question. Through Derrida and his interpretation of dissemination, Mallarmé has been read as an icon for the transgressive power of poetry to annihilate Platonic concepts. Yet caloric porosity and other ideas current in Mallarmé’s time give a different inflection, recovering his Idealist humanism. We are left to ponder the strange unity that the poet experienced in nothingness.

“Krysinska’s Palimpsests: Composing Theory before Mallarmé’s ‘Critical Poetry’” Darci Gardner, Appalachian State University In his youthful essay “Hérésies artistiques: l’art pour tous,” published in L’Artiste in 1862, Mallarmé makes bold assertions about poetry before having produced much of it himself. Such license was never afforded to his contemporary, Marie Krysinska, a pioneer of free verse who was ostracized from critical discussions of the form. Krysinska became the only woman to perform original chansons at Le Chat noir cabaret, and yet, as difficult as it was for her to secure an for her creative work, the greater challenge was to find an outlet for her critical insights. She wished to advocate a new kind of poetry, and while she could express her views in a feminist newspaper or through the mouths of male characters in her fiction, she was discouraged from encroaching on the masculine domain of academic prose. Bereft of opportunities to publish the type of writing that might define a movement or inspire followers, Krysinska resorted to theorizing her art directly in her poetry. In texts that make prominent use of palimpsest and mise en abyme (“Chanson d’automne,” “Berceuse macabre,” “Roman dans la lune”), she carefully establishes her conception of how poetic language operates and how readers process it. This paper first identifies the poetics of free verse that these texts enact and then illustrates how it informs the critical poems that Mallarmé published in Krysinska’s wake.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“Baroque et belle: Mallarmé’s Prose Smut and Other Open Secrets” Thomas C. Connolly, Yale University In response to one reader’s request for help in understanding a poem, Mallarmé is once said to have said: “Cherchez, et à la fin vous trouverez une pornographie. Ce sera votre récompense.” Mallarmé would never have allowed himself such unguarded expression in print, and he may never have said this in the first place, but regardless of whether such apocryphal anecdotes are true, any reader of Mallarmé will sooner or later find themselves confronted with the question of what is sometimes referred to as his “discreet eroticism.” In this short paper, I would like to re-examine the role of the erotic in two of Mallarmé’s prose poems, both from the 1880s, one more comic and less discreet than the other. In “L’Ecclésiastique,” the speaker of the poem comes across a cleric in the act of “polluting” (in the medieval and theological sense) a (not so) secluded spot of the . In “Le Nénuphar blanc,” the speaker rows upstream to visit an unknown female neighbor, but withdraws from the bushes without delivering his intended greeting. Although offering distinct perspectives on desire, morality, society, religion, and literature, each prose poem reminds us of the underlying structural importance of the body to Mallarmé’s poetic project, not only as that which is obscurely and provocatively represented, but as the thinking and feeling body that reads and finds pleasure in momentary and partial understanding. How should this poetics of the body be reconciled with Mallarmé’s ideal literature or “Idée”? Does the erotic interfere with and sidetrack, or facilitate and feed, Mallarmé’s lifelong pursuit of Beauty through literature? In short, what are we to make of these concessions to human appetite in the context of a literature that at various prominent moments asserts its ideality and incorporeality?

Panel 2.E: Iconic Female Figures Chair: Alice Price, Temple University

“Manet’s Street Singer and the Poets in 1862” Thérèse Dolan, Temple University Édouard Manet’s painting of the Street Singer depicts an incident that occurred in 1862 when the painter and his studio mate Antonin Proust strolled near the demolition sites around Boulevard Malsherbes that resulted from Baron Haussmann’s plans for the renovation of Paris. The picturesque features of street singers had also fascinated writers throughout the ages, and several of Manet literary acquaintances depicted aspects of their lives and characterized their songs. A pertinent literary parallel that has never been discussed in the context of Manet’s painting can be found in Baudelaire’s “À une mendiante rousse,” his poem on a female street singer. The young waif who inspired Baudelaire also had found herself limned in a poem by Théodore de Banville, celebrated in a song by Pierre Dupont, and painted in oil by Émile Deroy in the 1840s at a time when these four men were in close contact with another in the heady days of their bohemian youth at the cusp of their creative careers. Memories of these times before the February Revolution of 1848 and the works of these men had to have flooded Baudelaire’s thoughts as they wove themselves back into his life through his writing at the very time Manet was at work on his image of a street singer. The interplay of essays and poems by these men, along with a relay of images and discussions of popular songs, emerged in Parisian culture at the very time when Manet broached his subject of an entertainer sauntering out of the same type of NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 café where these men who depicted the street singer in the mid-1840s forged their aesthetic ideas, created their early works, and experienced their first flush of critical acclaim.

“La petite danseuse de quatorze ans d’Edgar Degas, figure hors norme” Liliane Ehrhart, Princeton University Edgar Degas n’expose qu’une sculpture de son vivant, la Petite danseuse de 14 ans, qui fait scandale à l’Exposition des Indépendants en 1881. Huysmans, qui suit le travail de l’artiste d’exposition en exposition, loue Degas pour son apprentissage autodidacte de nouvelles techniques picturales et ses représentations originales de sujets de son époque : des criminels, des prostituées, des danseuses en coulisses. Qualifiant Degas de « peintre de la vie moderne », il reconnaît cependant que la petite danseuse ne peut pas plaire. De fait, le petit rat de l’opéra est vu comme une curiosité : devant cette gamine en cire, le public « très ahuri et comme gêné, se sauve » et les critiques la caractérisent de troublante, animale, laide et monstrueuse. En offrant à voir une enfant à la peau déjà trop usée par l’exercice, Degas souhaite représenter anthropologiquement une réalité sociale de son temps, écartée par l’histoire de l’art et qui contraste avec l’image sociale et picturale plus éthérée des gens de la haute société. Mais sa figure de cire ne produit qu’une agression esthétique. La cire, matériau non noble, utilisée par de nombreux artistes pour des esquisses, se voit déplacée de l’atelier à la salle d’exposition à l’ahurissement du public et de la critique. Seul Huysmans écrit que la cire pourrait bien, aux côtés du bois, être la matière à redécouvrir au XIXème siècle, et ce, bien que la société ne jure encore que par des matières nobles comme le marbre et le bronze. Il s’agit dans cette présentation d’interroger aussi bien la portée symbolique de la chair en cire peinte, agrémentée de poils de pinceaux et autres matériaux issus de l’atelier que d’observer quels systèmes de représentations et de valeurs la Petite danseuse, figure de l’abject et sculpture anticonformiste de son temps, perturbe et corrompt.

“Purifying the Female Body in the Drawings and Paintings of Suzanne Valadon” Richard Gray, Ashland University This paper explores how Suzanne Valadon’s drawings and paintings featuring the nude female body produced in during the latter half of the Belle Époque disrupt the traditional notion of the male gaze (Mulvey 19) and also reposition both the woman as “viewing subject” and as a “subject to be viewed.” Suzanne Valadon rubbed elbows with Impressionists in the cabarets of Montmartre of late-19th century Paris, and from 1880 to 1893 she served as a model for artists including Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas. Valadon’s own art earned the backing of Degas, with whom she shared a close relationship. In her œuvres that depict the nude female body, Valadon paints a canvas of purity, innocence, and saintliness that operates in striking opposition to the crime, drunkenness, and debauchery of the Bohemian Montmartre with which she was closely familiar. Although Valadon produced her artworks in a Montmartre that Nicole Myers calls “a place for escape, pleasure, entertainment, and sexual freedom,” I wish to propose here that due to her intimate observation of the female body resulting from her experience as a model, a vibrant feeling originates from Valadon’s nude drawings and paintings that seeks to purify the female body and juxtaposes it against the district’s backdrop of sin and sacrilege. Arguably transgressive in her position as a woman painting the nude female body, through modeling Valadon had thus entered the male public domain of art and in due course transformed this domain as an artist. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Consequently, through her use of purified, self-possessed bodies that are not explicitly sexualized, Suzanne Valadon’s drawings and paintings presenting the naked female body resist traditional depictions of women through their class and supposed (hyper-)sexuality.

Panel 2.F: Romantic Contaminations Chair: Mary Jane Cowles, Kenyon College

“Mme de Staël, Literature and Other Contaminating Discourses” Patrick M. Bray, The Ohio State University In her De la littérature, Staël proposes for the first time, according to Jacques Rancière, a historically determined conception of the art of writing. She stands at the crossroads between the 18th and 19th centuries, containing two systems of thought in germ – while she uses the term “literature” in its former, broader meaning of elevated writing, what we might call the “humanities” today, she also moves, almost imperceptibly to the modern sense over the course of De la littérature. Literature holds revolutionary potential, but only on condition that it privilege its status as the art of writing over the representation of other discourses, such as politics or history. Literature, specifically the novel, must not be contaminated by and must in turn not contaminate other forms of writing. This tension, between what she calls “les écrits philosophiques” and “les ouvrages d’imagination,” is developed and transformed in her two subsequent novels. Delphine, published soon after De la littérature, shies away from any detailed description of the turbulent historical events that pass during the narrative; the radical politics of the novel must be inferred from the narrative and the characters’ own assessment of concrete situations in their letters. By contrast, Corinne is a hybrid novel, introducing the French reading public to the many faces of even as it makes claims about politics and literature, mediated by the tragic love of Corinne and Oswald. Fictional narrative, instead of representing politics as , thus becomes a means of mediating the complex emotions and conflicts that arise in post-Revolutionary politics. I would like to argue that while Staël establishes the parameters of theory, politics, and aesthetics in the modern novel with De la littérature, her writing practice shows literature’s potential to exceed categories, contaminating other discourses, and pointing the way to an emancipatory politics.

“La contamination romantique” François Vanoosthuyse, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 Le terme un peu bâtard de « préromantisme » a traditionnellement servi à désigner, dans les histoires littéraires, les productions françaises identifiables au romantisme mais antérieures à la Restauration (voire à 1830). Cette approximation ne permet de comprendre ni l’importance quantitative et qualitative du phénomène, ni la vigueur et la nature du débat que suscitèrent des œuvres pour nous aussi inoffensives, et patrimoniales, qu’Atala de Chateaubriand ou Le Cid d’Andalousie de Lebrun (1825). Le fameux discours, prononcé en 1823 à l’Académie Française par le « classique » Auger contre la contamination de la littérature française par la barbarie teutonne et anglaise, est l’un des innombrables documents qui pourraient être utilisés pour rendre compte de la crispation nationale occasionnée par la pénétration progressive de Shakespeare, de Schiller, des romantiques allemands et anglais en France depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Cependant, le fait est que les pièces de Lebrun ou de Soumet, que les romans de Mme Cottin et de Mme de Duras – exemples qu’on pourrait compléter par de très nombreux autres – ont peu de choses à voir, structurellement et linguistiquement, avec les productions théâtrales, poétiques et romanesques d’Hugo, Dumas, Nerval et consorts, autrement dit de ceux que l’histoire littéraire a appelés traditionnellement « la génération romantique ». Il y aurait donc eu d’abord un romantisme par contamination, affectant des genres traditionnels en France (comédie, tragédie, roman psychologique, élégie), un romantisme peu étudié et mal connu, bien que fondamental et abondant, et c’est cette littérature, et les problèmes « généalogiques » qu’elle pose, qu’on prendra pour objet.

“The Romantic ‘Contamination’ of French Literary Language by the Vernacular: Claude Fauriel’s Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne and ’s Le Dernier jour d’un condamné” Alex Raiffe, Princeton University The Greek language is often thought of in relation to French literature and culture as an elitist and erudite source of inspiration, allegory, and etymology for poets and prose authors. This presentation, however, seeks to tell the lesser-known tale of how common Demotic Greek was the first vernacular to enter modern European literature with Claude Fauriel’s 1824 publication of Les Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne, a philhellenist collection of Greek popular ballads translated into French prose. Riding on a wave of mass support for the Greek War of Independence, Claude Fauriel presented Demotic Greek, often disparaged by Classicists as a degenerate version of Ancient Greek, as bearing traces of the genius of the Ancients and as a potential source of inspiration for French poets and of enrichment of French literature itself. I argue that Fauriel’s pioneering of the literary value of the Modern Greek vernacular paved the way for the appropriation of the French vernacular into Romance literature in the 1830s. Following the revolutionary upheavals of that year, the inclusion of French popular speech in works of literature became an integral part of the Romantic aesthetic of the grotesque and the idiom, as formulated by Victor Hugo in the Preface to Cromwell. I more specifically focus on the foldout facsimile of a handwritten chanson en argot in the first edition of Victor Hugo’s 1832 Le Dernier jour d’un condamné, which I argue is an important moment for the emergence of the French vernacular in literature. Perverting the paradigm in which Ancient Greek served as a model for the perfection of modern French, Fauriel perhaps unwittingly launched a new, Romantic paradigm, articulated by Victor Hugo, in which Demotic Greek became the model for how vernaculars could enhance (or contaminate) their national literary traditions.

“‘La Poétique du Poitrinaire’: The French Stage Consumptive as Romantic Vector, 1828- 1834” Roberta Barker, Dalhousie University Though consumptive heroines such as Dumas fils’ Marguerite Gautier are among the icons of the nineteenth-century French theatre, there was a time when the very notion of placing a poitrinaire onstage appeared an abomination against the canon of bon goût. When the actress Mme. Albert dared to play a dying consumptive heroine in the vaudeville Valentine, ou la Chute des Feuilles in 1828, Le Figaro’s critic remarked that many would tremble to see “le dramatique des scènes d’hôpitaux transporté sur le théâtre.” Yet Albert’s performance was a great success. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

A few years later, the well-loved figure of Henri Muller in Dumas Père’s Angèle (1833) would definitively establish the poitrinaire as a popular theatrical archetype. In 1880, a doctor writing in the medical journal L’Union médicale recalled that Muller’s role provided “un tableau assez complet de ce qu’était la poétique du poitrinaire en l’an de grâce romantique 1834.” In this paper, I show how this theatrical poétique du poitrinaire served as a powerful vector, popularizing Romantic notions of subjectivity and theatrical aesthetics. German characters both, Valentine and Henri embodied the influence of German Romanticism upon French literature, their fragile bodies emblematizing the French Romantics’ rejection of the neo-classical tradition. They were quintessential Romantic subjects whose depth of feeling rendered them both exemplars for and sufferers in the modern world. The daring physical language of the symptom by which performers externalized the physical and emotional agonies of these characters helped to shape new acting techniques that would culminate in the rise of naturalism. Viewed as a hideous contamination of the theatre by some and a noble purification of it by others, the Romantic poétique du poitrinaire created an intensely affective performative language that would spread across transnational stages and that remains influential to our own day.

Break 4:00 pm - 4:30 pm

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Thursday 5 November Session 3 – 4:30 pm - 6:15 pm

Panel 3.A: The Insalubrious Chair: Marie Sanquer, Princeton University

“Contaminating Spaces: La Cousine Bette and the Doyenné Neighborhood” Dorothy Kelly, Boston University The metaphor of contamination in La Cousine Bette functions in two different symbolic spaces. The first is Bette’s interior, psychological space, where her repressed resentment for her subaltern treatment, like a dormant plague germ, lies waiting to be set loose by the Hulot family betrayal: “l’envie resta caché dans le fond du coeur, comme un germe de peste qui peut éclore et ravager une ville, si l’on ouvre le fatal ballot de laine où il est comprimé” (82). After her family’s betrayal, Bette becomes a ‘puissance occulte’ as she moves among various households in the text, spreading her poison, similar to Valérie’s Brazilian lover, who brings a real toxin “plague” to Paris. The second symbolic space of contamination is the physical Doyenné neighborhood, a space of living death, whose inhabitants are “probablement des fantômes” and who inhabit “des tombeaux vivants.” This city space threatens to spread death to those who enter its “coupe- gorge.” Like the wool that wraps Bette’s plague, the Doyenné at first harbors and adequately contains three outcast characters: Bette, the poor cousin; Valérie, the illegitimate, disinherited child; and Steinbock, the Polish immigrant. However this containment ends with Hortense’s odd incursion with her father into the Doyenné space. Their infiltration sets in motion the exodus of Bette, Valérie, and Steinbock out of the Doyenné, prompting the downfall of the Hulot family. I shall show first how the Doyenné symbolizes Balzac’s recurring representation of the fearful marginalized poor, who threaten to contaminate the rest of the city. However its ghostly dilapidation also figures Hulot himself and the plague of the leftover elements of Napoleonic heroism, who are dangerously set adrift in the changed capitalist Paris, as Hulot’s heroic administration during the Napoleonic wars evolves in the new era into financially devastating commerce in women and criminal commerce in Algeria.

“Decontaminating the Dead in Post-Revolutionary Paris” Erin-Marie Legacey, Texas Tech University The “Revolution” of the dead at the end of the eighteenth century in Paris is a familiar narrative: In 1780, after decades of complaints from civilians and Enlightenment Reformers, Paris’ long-standing churchyard cemeteries were condemned for reasons of public hygiene. Louis-Sebastien Mercier described the “air” in Paris’ oldest and largest cemetery as “the most insalubrious in all of Paris.” Over the next half century a new culture of the dead emerged in Paris, characterized by visually stunning burial spaces on the city’s peripheries, most notably the Paris Catacombs and Père Lachaise cemetery. This process of relocating the dead irrevocably changed the landscape of Paris, but it also helped to redefine the role of the dead in the city, as a constructive, rather than a destabilizing force. Within the span of a generation, Parisians stopped talking about the dead as harbingers of doom and began turning to them as potent arbiters of the social and political discord that otherwise characterized the early nineteenth century in France. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

This paper examines the crucial role that the played in this process of transformation. Specifically, it demonstrates how the eighteenth-century understanding of “the dead” changed as a result of the Revolution. By the end of the Terror in 1794, individuals and communities began to reject the dead in their city as more than a miasmic danger; they had also become disquieting reminders of urban political violence, instability, and discord. The new culture of the dead that took shape at the beginning of the nineteenth century responded to these concerns. Both Père Lachaise (opened in 1804) and the Paris Catacombs (opened in 1809) were almost immediately interpreted as rational, apolitical, and cohesive social spaces.

“Le zonier et sa roulotte, ou la contagion aux portes de Paris” Derek Schilling, Johns Hopkins University Alors que les fortifications entourant Paris sont obsolètes dès 1870, les « fortifs’ » et sa zone militaire non aedificandi structureront jusqu’à la veille de la Grande Guerre la géographie parisienne, canalisant le mouvement des personnes et des biens, et imprimant aux citadins une « image de la ville » (Kevin Lynch) organisée par cercles concentriques. Sous l’égide de l’octroi, l’enceinte de Thiers composera pour l’économie parisienne sous la Troisième République un enjeu majeur. Mais dans les lettres, le douanier dans sa guérite fait piètre figure à côte de son voisin plus colorié, le « zonier ». Etranger à la ville comme à la banlieue limitrophe, le zonier ou la zonière paraît un corps inassimilable par excellence : voué à la précarité et manquant de soins, il incarne la double menace de la criminalité et de la contagion. Ainsi, dans des pamphlets, rapports officiels et compilations littéraires de « choses vues » des années 1890 et 1900, sur des tons diversement misérabilistes et alarmistes les observateurs opposent cette figure au citadin, bourgeois de préférence ; à la roulotte branlante du « romanichel », s’oppose la demeure parisienne en pierre de taille. Or le zonier sera sommé de porter un stigmate frappant toute population supposée nomade, donc dangereuse : il est ce par quoi voyage et se propage la maladie. S’appuyant sur des textes d’époque ou contemporains (Madeleine Fernandez, Jean-Louis Cohen et André Lortie), cette communication cernera la dynamique par laquelle la stigmatisation du zonier permet d’entretenir la croyance post-haussmannienne dans un Paris intra-muros assaini. Derrière les arguments d’utilité publique sur l’expropriation de la zone, se profile une pensée moins hygiéniste qu’eugéniste, selon laquelle la protection sanitaire de la ville ne peut se faire sans le rejet (et la réduction) d’un corps contaminé et abject menaçant de faire irruption chez soi.

Panel 3.B: Polluted Styles: Language as Poison and Remedy Chair: Mandy Mazur, Princeton University

“‘Dois-je en tout parler comme Rousseau?’: Reconsidering ‘, lecteur de Rousseau’ as a Fear of Narcissistic Contamination” Hadley Suter, Columbia University, Barnard College The question of “Stendhal, lecteur de Rousseau” has been interpreted as the classic story of paternal rejection: in general, it is understood as Beyle’s repudiation of Rousseau’s style, his skepticism about the possibility of self-knowledge, and his more agnostic approach to the “virtue” of originality. While the question of style most explicitly lends itself to the metaphor of NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 contamination—we all know Stendhal’s diurnal “antidote” of reading a few pages of the Code Civil to purge any penchant for flourishing his prose—the phenomenon of contamination may also be used to understand what I argue to be the key difference between Rousseau and Stendhal. This is their conception of that entity which impedes le naturel. For Rousseau, it is le regard d’autrui; as such, the natural self must retreat from society in order to stop feeling the inhibition of this gaze. For Stendhal, eminently more social than his predecessor, this entity is rather le regard sur soi, or what I call the “self-spectator,” whose gaze the natural self must learn to circumvent rather than escape. This figure of the self-spectator, though finalized and animated onto the page by Stendhal, can in fact be traced in its “fetal” incarnation to the “Devin du village” episode of Les Confessions. The difference, however, between this proto-self-spectator and the one at work in Stendhal’s œuvre demonstrates that Beyle’s real fear of Rousseau’s contamination was not, in fact, a question of style, but one of narcissism. This narcissism is defined by Stendhal in terms of how the “authentic” artist must relate to—and present—both his ambition and manifestations of his creative impulse. Rousseau finds pleasure in viewing not only his creative act enacted, in Le Devin, but also in the spectacle of the spectators viewing it alongside him; Stendhal, contrarily, often writes of his inability to “speak” of his past creative endeavors, or of his creative ambition at all. Situating Stendhal’s commentary on the subject, as it appears throughout his autobiographies and private journals, and calling on his famous fear of pronouncing “cette effroyable quantité de Je et de Moi,” I will demonstrate how through the figure of the self- spectator, an alternative route to relating to the self’s ambition is plotted out. This method is a means of self-protection from the “contamination” of Rousseauian “narcissism,” and adopts instead what I call the “myth of the métier” and the ideal of “circular contact with the real.”

“Deux duchesses et leurs maux d’esprit; de Balzac à Tremblay” France Lemoine, Scripps College Dans cet essai, j’analyserai d’Honoré de Balzac et la « duchesse » de la « Main » du roman québécois Des Nouvelles d’Édouard de Michel Tremblay au travers du prisme du langage. Le charme des mots de l’héroïne balzacienne Antoinette de Langeais, créée en 1834, enflamme non seulement la passion du général Montriveau mais aussi celle du travesti Édouard, personnage créé en 1984, à plus de cent cinquante ans d’écart, et sur un autre continent. Ces textes sont intimement liés puisqu’Edouard prendra comme nom de scène « la duchesse » (de Langeais), cimentant ainsi l’idéal social qu’elle incarne pour lui et les deux faces de son identité franco-québécoise. Je considérerai ici la notion du langage comme poison, toxicité et décadence puisqu’on peut considérer ces deux récits comme recouvrant une étude du pouvoir du langage dans la conscience individuelle comme dans ses interactions avec autrui. Cet essai explorera comment ces romans expriment une angoisse profonde du mot qui se révèle, tour à tour, mensonge, trahison, sadisme, souillure, obscénité et/ou corruption. La thèse de cet essai est que, malgré les profondes et multiples dissemblances internes et contextuelles de ces textes fictionnels, l’enjeu central est identique : la maîtrise du verbe. Selon nous, la faillite amoureuse et sociale de chacune des deux duchesses est due à son envoûtement avec le langage de Paris et son incapacité à se détacher de son milieu et dès lors d’exprimer sa véritable identité par la parole. En sus, l’amour inexprimé de la duchesse de Langeais pour Montriveau et celui inexprimable de « la duchesse » Édouard pour Paris sont assimilables à des NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 maladies incurables qui tueront la première et marqueront à jamais la seconde. Le dialecte du faubourg Saint-Germain tout comme le joual des « provinciaux » d’Amérique du Nord se révéleront contaminés, corrosifs et intraitables, menant également à la dégénération, l’aliénation et l’abjection.

“Empire Wastes: Puns and the Poetics of Contamination in La Curée” Sara Phenix, Brigham Young University The poetics of La Curée is thoroughly a poetics of contamination. With its transposition of the story of Phaedra to Second Empire France, La Curée is contaminated in the strict sense that it intercalates myth into the chronicle of real estate speculation under Louis-Napoléon. While the concept of contamination is suggestive in obvious ways in the novel’s portrayal of political and moral corruption, I claim that Zola also theorizes contamination on the semantic level of the text. Whereas studies of other rhetorical figures have shed much light on the novel’s meaning, I argue that the pun more accurately typifies the sociostylistics of the novel. As the juncture of multiple meanings, the pun is the linguistic incarnation of contamination par excellence: one meaning cannot be understood without others simultaneously resonating. This kind of paronomastic play in La Curée is the rhetorical figuration of the novel’s depiction of instances of corrupt convergence: regulators with speculators in backroom deals; the beau monde with the demi-monde in seedy theaters and cafés; and, more dramatically, stepmother with stepson in an incestuous affair. In order to underscore themes of duplicity and corruption, Zola positions key puns in La Curée at spatial and temporal corollaries, or, in other words, at moments and in spaces that also join disparate entities: at sunsets, at doorsteps, and at thresholds. Renée’s discovery of her husband and her stepson’s complicity coincides with her inability to distinguish silk from self in the famous mirror scene: by indulging in all of her sexual and sartorial , Renée realizes that she has privileged, to devastating effect, l’amour de soie over l’amour de soi. While critics characterize Renée’s failure to see her husband’s manipulation as a symbolic extension of her myopia, it is also Renée’s inability to perceive the polysemic resonance of certain words that leads to her destruction and eventual death.

Panel 3.C: Phantasms of National Identity Chair: Maurice Samuels, Yale University

“Penser la hiérarchie des races pour arrêter la vague démocratique : le dialogue contradictoire entre Gobineau et Tocqueville” Brigitte Krulic, Université Paris Ouest, Nanterre La Défense La peur de l’indifférenciation qui brouille repères et hiérarchies traverse les débats, menés tout au long du XIXe siècle, sur les effets pervers d’une modernité démocratique individualiste accusée de se répandre comme une vague incontrôlable qui « contamine » le tissu social et l’ordre politique : destruction des barrières que la société inégalitaire préserve et renforce ; désintégration du lien social ; nivellement moral, culturel et politique. Il s’agit ici d’examiner comment le dialogue contradictoire entre Gobineau et Tocqueville, dont les relations personnelles et la correspondance sont connues, participe de ce débat. Dans la théorisation tocquevillienne, le principe d’identification à son semblable et son égal est aux fondements de l’égalité des conditions, fait générateur de la démocratie, à rebours de NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 la société inégalitaire « hiérarchique » inscrite dans la dichotomie pur/impur irriguée par le sacré (hieros) qui assigne à chacun, individu, groupe social ou ethnique, un rang défini dans une échelle de gradations et de barrières censée préserver des souillures de la proximité. Gobineau met les notions d’ « égalité/inégalité » et de « mélange » au service d’une construction idéologique visant à fonder « scientifiquement » le combat contre la démocratie, dans ses dimensions politique, sociologique et anthropologique. L’inégalité sociologique des sociétés hiérarchiques est transposée en inégalité entre races. On comprend que Tocqueville ait vu dans l’Essai sur l’inégalité des races de Gobineau un « système de maquignon », selon son expression, plus adapté aux « haras » qu’à l’humanité ; le fatalisme déterministe de Gobineau qu’il juge faux et nuisible s’oppose à sa conviction que la démocratie est irrésistible car ancrée dans la nature et que ce n’est pas le « sang qui fait la destinée des hommes ». Son engagement contre l’esclavage et la ségrégation raciale, tiré de son expérience américaine, en est une illustration.

“How a fait divers Becomes National : Literature and Citizenship during the Franco- Prussian War” Colin Foss, Yale University During the Third Republic, literature became a means to educate citizens, to erase regional difference, and to promote a certain conception of what it meant to be French. For Weber, this national literature was transmitted through regional education programs, while others such as Antoine Compagnon locate literary nationalization in Parisian university circles. These perspectives invariably situate the literary aspect of state building in the 1880s, 90s and beyond. However, in this paper as in my larger project, I argue that it was in the early days of the Republic, during the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1870-1871, that literary institutions began organically producing Republican literature. Moving from particularly viral faits divers in Parisian newspapers during the Siege, to their eventual representation in literature, I show how a series of rumors circulating within Parisian culture came to be canonized as national epics. Some, such as stories about Napoléon III’s capture at Sedan, eventually ended up in Zola’s novel La Débâcle. Others, like the myth of the “cuirassiers de Reichshoffen,” became not only a patriotic anthem to rival the Marseillaise, but also the inspiration for a popular adaptation of Corneille’s Horace. These instances demonstrate that diverse literary industries collaborated to transform dubious rumors into a corpus of literature that taught its readers how to conceive of a nation. Finally, I will examine how a generation of writers – including Daudet and Maupassant – ridiculed the elevation of these faits divers in their satirical short stories in the decades after the War. In conclusion, examining the institutional means by which national literature was first conceived, and the authorial reactions to this process, invites us to rethink the originality of governmental, top-down initiatives in the later years of the Third Republic.

“The ‘pure’ artist: artistic and national identities in Camille Mauclair’s La Ville lumière” Katherine Shingler, University of Nottingham This paper considers Camille Mauclair’s all-but-forgotten 1904 art novel La Ville lumière, aiming to show how it maps notions of artistic identity onto national identity. As such, the novel may be seen as quietly heralding the reactionary xenophobia for which Mauclair would later become known. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

La Ville lumière initially appears to follow the model of the Bildungsroman, tracking the progress of the young Julien Rochès as he arrives in Paris from the South and seeks to establish himself as a painter. And yet the narrative is not really concerned with what Rochès learns, as Mauclair makes it clear that he is already an accomplished, albeit ‘instinctive’ artist when he comes to Paris. What is at stake, rather, is his ability to resist the ‘faussetés corrosives’ that inhabit the city and threaten to contaminate the pure artist. The myth of the artist that emerges from Mauclair’s text – and indeed is common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art writing more generally – is one of the artist as a special kind of personality: ascetic, pure, saintly, and able to run the gauntlet of Parisian temptations. For Mauclair, moreover, this myth is politically inflected as the influences from which the artist must be protected are, implicitly, foreign: foreign not just to art, but to French art. To remain a pure artist, Rochès must ultimately retreat from cosmopolitan Paris into a culturally stable France profonde. Examining the novel in relation to Mauclair’s shifting aesthetic and political allegiances, I hope to show that in its simmering fears about Paris as a confusing and disorientating melting-poet of aesthetic ideas and identities, La Ville lumière foreshadows Mauclair’s later critical attacks on avant-garde art, which he characterized as barbaric and alien to French tradition.

Panel 3.D: Heads and Hands Chair: Allison Deutsch, University College London

“Magical Hats and Disembodied Heads” Susan Hiner, Vassar College This paper contextualizes the lady’s hat in nineteenth-century French fashion culture and looks at the practical and symbolic value of the tools of its production. Hyper-feminine, as a social symbol, the chapeau de femme offered a miniature, yet exaggerated, version of a dress. Removed as it was from its use value, this luxury commodity, concealing its seams, pins, glue, and thread, was also severed from its conditions of production—the very illustration of a commodity fetish. This process of erasure is strikingly obvious in the many advertisements for and illustrations of fashion hats over the course of the century, where the object is portrayed in all its magical glory, separated from the elements and processes of its creation, free-floating and often independent even from the heads of the women who purchased it. The consumer herself becomes secondary under the spell cast by the hat, and the women who produced it vanish altogether. Along with the hat, the head form, referred to as a tête à poupée, or marotte, filled multiple, and symbolic, functions. The marotte’s use value is obvious enough—it is a stand-in for the head of the female consumer on which the modiste could work and embellish the hat. But these têtes, descendants of the poupées de la mode of the eighteenth century and ancestors of twentieth-century mannequins, in their eerie verisimilitude and their status as objects to emulate, also serve as uncanny reminders of the power of commodification to shape the feminine and de- animate real women. The marottes are idealizing mirrors, inanimate doubles, often resembling the modiste herself. My paper will analyze these hats and heads and explore how their powers of animation and verisimilitude contributed to fashion’s cultural production of femininity.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“Expert Hands, Infectious Touch: Painting, Pregnancy and Mourning in Berthe Morisot’s The Mother and Sister of the Artist (1869-1870)” Mary Hunter, McGill University When Berthe Morisot asked Edouard Manet to have a look at her recently completed portrait of her mourning mother and pregnant sister in the days before the 1870 Salon, she did not expect him to completely repaint the depiction of her mother. “[I]t isn’t possible to stop him,” she wrote in distress to her sister. “He moves from the petticoat to the bodice, from the bodice to the head, from the head to the background.” While Morisot sought out Manet’s expertise, she feared that the painting’s public display would ruin her reputation as an independent artist as his heavy hand left too obvious a mark on her canvas. This paper will explore the gender politics of occupational expertise – artistic and medical – through an analysis of Morisot’s The Mother and Sister of the Artist. Firstly, it will consider the significance of hands and touch in Manet’s and Morisot’s work. Secondly, it will examine how the hands of male experts ‘infected’ female spaces, such as paintings and pregnant bodies.

“Facing Camille in Claude Monet’s On the Beach at Trouville” Marni Reva Kessler, University of Kansas In On the Beach at Trouville of 1870, Claude Monet represents two women who shade themselves from the sun and wind with hats and parasols. The figure on the left is quite likely Monet’s wife, Camille, and the woman on the right, probably the spouse of painter Eugène Boudin. The latter is clearly not Monet’s focus, though her almost caricatured facial features and barely described black mourning attire direct us to the bright star of the image, Camille, in her white, lace-trimmed dress, ornately flowered straw hat, holding a parasol, the underside of which is a splashy periwinkle blue. Whether Camille also wears a veil has stumped scholars and yet it seems clear to me, in part because the terrain of Camille’s face is so unclear, that a veil falls across the upper part of her visage. But, this veil reads as being at once a material presence and a shadow, a physical object that declines into its own immaterial trace. Using Freud’s discussion of contranyms, words that can have opposite meanings, I want to parse Camille’s veil as a contradictory object, one that, in formal and material terms, controverts itself. For Monet’s darkened film of pigment over Camille’s face stands for two disparate things: one tangible and the other not. Indeed, this makes sense, for a veil is also quite literally a screen, itself a contranym, since to screen can mean both to show and to conceal. This painted veil also stands for the thing that would have screened the wind and sand—problematic presences on the day Monet worked on the painting, for countless grains of sand dust the surface of the image— from Camille’s eyes and nose. With a sleight of hand, Monet blurred this veil of paint over Camille’s face into a richly layered and nuanced investigation of the contranymic status of the very object he represents.

“Le Chef” Michael Garval, North Carolina State University The term chef derives from the Old French word for head, and of course the chef de cuisine is also the “head” of the kitchen staff. The chef’s hat or tocque, in use since the early 1800s, points to both meanings of chef, marking at once the physical head it crowns, and the executive status it symbolizes. Across the long nineteenth century moreover, chefs from NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Antonin Carême through Auguste Escoffier acquired new-found prestige and authority, as they emulated the intellectual aura of the writer – posing as hommes de lettres, rather than cooks. For despite increasing professionalization in the culinary realm, and top practicioners’ growing celebrity, chefs remained associated with a long history of domesticity. In this sense, as a public figure, the nineteenth-century chef was caught between the luster of intellectual endeavor and the stigma of manual labor; or, more simply, between the head and the hands. This paper thus focuses on chefs’ heads and hands depicted in the period’s popular visual culture – including caricatures, illustrated menus, and postcards – as part of a broader reflection on the rise of the celebrity chef.

Panel 3.E: Chambres Doubles: Reading Chambers, Reading Baudelaire Chair: Scott Carpenter, Carleton College

“The Infinite Readability of Poetry: Ross Chambers on Baudelaire” Claire Chi-ah Lyu, University of Virginia I would like to present what I find most inspiring in the new book by Ross Chambers An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise and, in doing so, to share what I have learned from reading his works over the years. I wish to express my deep gratitude toward the generosity Chambers offers both in work and in person. In An Atmospherics of the City Chambers demonstrates how Baudelaire's poetry awakens to noise and traces its shift from "noise-adverse" to "noise-friendly" to "entropy-incarnate" and finally to the new genre of "urban diary." He shows that "urban diary," in its "formal manifestation of formlessness," takes literature beyond the limits of communicable message and opens it to "infinite readability." In this regard Chambers proposes Baudelaire to be an "initiator of discursivity" along with Marx and Freud whom Foucault had singled out in his well-known essay "What is an author?" To place a lyric poet amidst the two exemplary theorists and to show with rigor and inventiveness that poetic language is as foundational and consequential as other modes of "stronger" discourses -- I find this breathtaking. I propose to discuss the notion of "infinite readability" together with the idea of "meaningfulness" Chambers develops in Meaning and Meaningfulness. This will allow us to reflect upon the "dignity" of poetry with which An Atmospherics of the City closes. To the three characteristics of poetry Chambers identifies -- "infinite readability," "meaningfulness," and "dignity" -- I wish to add a fourth: generosity. In awakening to noise, poetry opens to what is most inimical to the poetic universe traditionally conceived as a closed system of harmony and order. Similarly, Chambers' works open for us the possibility of conceiving reading and criticism in terms of a capacity to open to the other: as a form of generosity.

“Tattered Allegory in ‘Le Vieux saltimbanque’” Ellen Burt, University of California, Irvine This paper will celebrate and argue with Ross Chambers’s long-awaited book. The narrative of Baudelaire’s literary evolution (from fetishized aesthetics to allegory to ) sketched out in the first part of his Atmospherics of the City will be set aside, in favor of Chambers’s later of the work as an urban journal where allegory and irony are proximate, alternating modes. The point will be argued by investigating Chambers’s definition NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 of allegory as a reflection on ruins that installs a narrative and implies a transcendent perspective. Through a reading of “Le Vieux saltimbanque,” where an old clown provides an allegorical figure for the allegorizing artist, identified by V. Swain with Rousseau, I will contend that Baudelaire’s are in critical ways different from those of Rousseau and the Romantics, where they are indeed extended, conversionary, and propped on the supernatural. To tatter the rich folds of allegory the better to respond to his needs as modern poet, Baudelaire transfers to it characteristics of irony—its disruptiveness, its explosive punctuality, its reliance on forces rather immanent than transcendent. Thus, Baudelaire disdains the conversionary scheme of Rousseau’s Confessions and its reliance on an eternal being and divine justice. His effects of supernaturalism are just effects, tricks of staging that require no belief in a providential order but only a superior calculation that can be related, as Benjamin does, to the market. No difference is to be found between prose and verse collections here. (In “Le Joueur généreux,” the devil implies that his practice thrives on disbelief. Remorse in ‘Au lecteur’ is not owed to God’s grace but to a pleasure economy operating in moral choice; sin is a better bet than virtue since through “adorable remorse’ the same act can be enjoyed twice—in the doing and in complacent recollection.) In The Arcades Project, Benjamin underscores the evanescent nature of Baudelaire’s allegories and the poor returns he gets on them: unlike the surefooted, extended allegory of London in Peter Bell, showing Shelley’s firm grip, the Baudelaire’s poet is a stumbler whose uncertain grasp lets allegories slip away. As for the old clown, it is revelatory less as figure standing for old things affected by time than on account of the clown’s potent allegorizing look that brings prematurely to dust what it touches. Allegory interrupts a narrative violently to cause the present to reveal itself as past; it brings out obsolescence in the contemporaneous. Because allegory allows Baudelaire’s relation to history to come into view, Chambers rightly wanted to preserve it by means of his evolutionary scheme. But unless one attends to the transformations Baudelaire has made in allegory itself, one misses its historical dimension at its sharpest, not as a reflection on events that have occurred, but where it makes the event appear as such in the falling away of the trappings of life. It is less Baudelaire’s literary evolution following 1848 than his economizing and ironizing tattering of allegory itself— available throughout his works—that is most revelatory of this historical dimension. Chambers’s conception of the work as metropolitan diary is the better way to gain access to these transformations that Baudelaire effects in the figure of allegory.

“Allegory in Tatters: ‘Les Sept Vieillards’” Kevin Newmark, Boston College It is not at all uncommon to greet the publication of an important new book by declaring it an event in its own right. And the publication of Ross Chambers’s book on Baudelaire, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise, is no exception to the rule. This book is an event, and a most welcome one, too—given the paucity of serious attention the reading of 19th-century French poetry seems able to generate in the wider field of literary and cultural studies today. But just what do we mean when we call a book an event? Especially when the book we are talking about is a book of poetry or a book about poetry? What is the relation between what happens (poetically) inside a book and what happens (historically) outside a book? If An Atmospherics of the City constitutes an event in its own right, it is due precisely to the way it responds to questions of this nature with unmatched intelligence, finesse, and resourcefulness. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

It comes as no great surprise that Chambers will identify the philosophical category of the aesthetic as the mediating principle that serves to link the events of empirical history to the poetic or literary experiences of reading and writing. “That Baudelaire was a prime mover in insisting on the indispensable role of the category of the aesthetic in the modern age is not a matter of dispute,” Chambers writes at the beginning of his book (3). And if we take Baudelaire’s allegiance to the category of the aesthetic as indisputable, then the thesis Chambers will draw from this allegiance would itself become nearly indisputable. “Art, as a practice of atmospherics,” Chambers goes on to say, “was to enact something like the etymological sense of the word aesthetics; poetry as [Baudelaire] practiced it was to function as an aesthesis capable of making sensible the dimension of strangeness inherent, most notably in the ‘moving chaos’ of the familiar urban street.” The singular strength of Chambers’s book resides in his own recognition that this general thesis about aesthetics as a bridge between historical and literary experience can be confirmed only by coming to terms with, in other words, reading, the allegorical and ironic operations that are actually performed in Baudelaire’s writing. But what is the relation between allegory and irony on the one hand and the category of the aesthetic on the other? What if there is something inherent to allegory and irony that contaminates, disrupts, or even “dispenses” with, the “indispensable role” played by the aesthetic in mediating between historical and literary experience? What then of Chambers’s powerful suggestion that Baudelaire’s “antiaesthetics” might offer at the very least a way of “awakening the poetic readers to the unconscious state of alienation in which they lived”? This paper will propose some preliminary responses to these questions by reading Chambers reading “Les Sept Vieillards.”

Panel 3.F: Littérature et crime : un cercle vicieux ? Chair: Andrea Goulet, University of Pennsylvania

“Le chef d’œuvre du crime : fonctions du meurtre dans la fiction courte de la fin de siècle” Jean-François Fournier, Appalachian State University Loin d’offrir aux lecteurs des modèles de vertu ou d’héroïsme, les contes fin-de-siècle sont peuplés de personnages déréglés dont le vice confine à la folie voire aux pulsions meurtrières. Le portrait des noirceurs de l’âme humaine procède d’une part chez les auteurs d’une volonté de choquer le bourgeois. Il répond aussi à une surenchère dans la course acharnée aux lecteurs qui anime la presse de l’époque. perçoit dans l’engouement omniprésent pour l’assassinat, cette grande préoccupation humaine, un des traits marquants de la société bourgeoise du progrès. Fruit d’une décomposition annoncée des mœurs, le désir criminel devient avec la folie un thème de prédilection des œuvres de fiction courte, dont la brièveté stimule le choc du lecteur en l’absence d’édification morale. À travers la lecture de contes et histoires courtes de Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mirbeau, Mendès et Richepin, il sera question de montrer la prégnance d’un sentiment de propagation du meurtre des centres urbains vers des campagnes jugées saines jusque-là. La contamination perçue de la société bourgeoise donne lieu à une angoisse que la tonalité d’humour noir renforce plus qu’elle ne la cache. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Dans ces œuvres, il ne s’agit pas seulement de proposer un miroir à une société désemparée par une perte des valeurs et un matérialisme croissant. Il existe par ailleurs une exigence de meurtre symbolique des règles usées du conte romantique ou classique. C’est bien à une rénovation esthétique, au moyen d’une exécution violente de formes datées, que ces auteurs nous convient. Nous exposerons les caractéristiques poétiques et philosophiques impliquées par un traitement humoristique du meurtre dans un format de fiction courte, où la contamination du tissu social aboutit à une renaissance littéraire.

“L’affaire Morrisset, un Lacenaire en 1880 ?” Judith Lyon-Caen, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales La « suggestion littéraire du crime » apparaît comme un motif récurrent dans la littérature criminologique et psychologique fin de siècle (Tarde, Proal et Scipio Sighele) mais aussi dans certains travaux d’histoire littéraire de l’époque (Louis Maigron). Repris par la presse, ce thème – dont on ne sait s’il relève de la vulgarisation de thèses scientifiques, ou au contraire d’une élaboration savante à partir du sens commun – apparaît comme l’un des leitmotive des discours fin-de-siècle étudiés par Marc Angenot. Ce panel propose d’en explorer la généalogie, les déclinaisons et les usages. Les travaux psycho- et crimino-logiques se nourrissent de « causes célèbres », anciennes ou récentes, qui apparaissent comme autant de preuves ou d’illustrations de la « contamination littéraire » ; ils recyclent toute une série d’écrits sur la « mauvaise influence de la littérature », produits au long du XIXe siècle dans des contextes multiples : mises en cause politiques de l’influence délétère du roman et du théâtre sur le peuple (autour de 1830 et de 1848), proscription des « mauvais romans » dans les milieux catholiques, dénonciation de l’industrialisation de la littérature au nom de la valeur littéraire elle-même. Comment comprendre l’articulation des « causes célèbres » et l’argumentation sur le caractère criminogène dans la littérature ? Par quelles opérations d’écriture cette articulation passe-t-elle ? Le recyclage du vieux discours de la mauvaise influence de la littérature sur les mœurs doit-il s’analyser comme une dépolitisation du regard sur la littérature ? Relève-t-il d’une forme de conquête de la criminologie sur l’ensemble des questions politiques et sociales ? Comment le discours de la suggestion littéraire s’articule-t-il avec les autres pensées de la contamination, de la contagion à l’œuvre dans les sciences de l’homme fin de siècle ? Quelle histoire de la littérature, et en particulier du moment romantique (Maigron), contribue-t-il à écrire ? A côté des réflexions générales, on voudrait privilégier des études de cas, autour des affaires qui deviennent des « cas » criminologiques – et qui, de ce fait, sont parvenues jusqu’à nous. Je pense notamment à l’affaire Chambige (J. Finkelberg), ou, dans mon cas, à l’affaire Morisset (1881), du nom d’un jeune employé de la ville de Tours qui, à défaut de devenir poète, pensait devenir célèbre en devenant assassin, sur le modèle de Lacenaire. L’étude de ces affaires (mais aussi d’affaires plus anciennes, comme l’affaire Lafarge étudiée par Jann Matlock, l’affaire Ferrand et l’affaire Bancal dans les années 1840) montre que la question de l’influence de la littérature y est centrale, non seulement comme motif dans le temps de l’instruction et du procès, mais aussi comme moteur même de l’écriture des « causes célèbres ». L’influence néfaste de la littérature fait alors l’objet d’appréciations paradoxales : dans le cours de certains procès (Chambige, Morisset), l’action de la littérature est davantage revendiquée par les accusés que par l’accusation, qui ne veut pas diluer la responsabilité des criminels. Dans d’autres procès (Bancal, Ferrand, Lafarge), c’est au contraire un argument NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 central de l’accusation, qui cherche à montrer la faiblesse des accusés. Comment comprendre ce paradoxe ? Comment passe-t-il dans l’argumentation des criminologues ? Comment atteindre le sens donné par les accusés à leurs usages de la littérature ? Dans le procès de Morisset, l’accusation refuse de prendre au sérieux l’identification de l’accusé à Lacenaire ; dans l’affaire Chambige, la défense du jeune homme insiste sur la dimension littéraire de la vie de Chambige, et l’affaire devient, dans la presse, le procès de la littérature décadente, du rapport brouillé de l’art et de la vie. Chambige, fort de ses relais dans les milieux littéraires parisiens, réussit à faire entendre sa voix, là où Morisset échoue : la question de la suggestion littéraire du crime est aussi une question sociale.

“The Chambige Affair: A Study of the Relationship Between Crime, Literature, and Science in France at the End of the Nineteenth Century” John Finkelberg, University of Michigan On January 25, 1888 in a villa on the outskirts of Constantine, Algeria 22 year-old law student Henri Chambige was found wounded next to the half-naked corpse of Magdeleine Grille, a 30 year-old married mother of two. The case was brought to trail before the Cour d’assises de Constantine from the 8th to the 11th of November 1888; two opposing explanations were presented before the courtroom. Henri Chambige claimed it was an attempt at a double suicide; the lovers planned to consummate their love for one another and then commit suicide to avoid public disgrace. The prosecution accused him of drugging, hypnotizing, and murdering Mme Grille, and assessed that ambition and literary interests corrupted him. The scandal garnered public attention both in Algeria and the French metropolis. From the beginning, language of literary “contamination” and “suggestion” characterized the arguments made in the courtroom, as well as the debates in the French press, about Chambige’s psyche at the time of the crime. The press played a major role in shedding light on the question of literary suggestion and crime, which caught the attention of psychologists, criminologists, and sociologists. Intellectuals in France including Louis Proal, Gabriel Tarde, and Scipio Sighele understood there to be a critical link between Chambige’s psyche and the contemporary novel. In their rereading of the scandal, these men developed theories on crime, suicide, and the powers of literature to influence the human psyche. The following work argues that the Chambige Affair reveals an intimate relationship between psychological sciences, criminology, and literature in France at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Reception – Maclean House, 6:45 pm - 8:00 pm

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Friday 6 November Session 4 – 8:30 am - 10:00 am

Panel 4.A: Outbreak/Breaking Out: Theater and War Chair: Florent Masse, Princeton University

“Aesthetic Quarantine: Theatrical Modernism in Lenormand’s Le Lâche” Susan McCready, University of South Alabama Set during the First World War, H-R Lenormand’s 1926 play Le Lâche is the story of an artist who attempts to avoid war service by feigning illness and retreating to a Swiss sanitarium. Tableaux devoted to meditations about art, identity, and suffering in war alternate with those that advance a of espionage and betrayal. Lenormand’s overt theatricality forces a reflection on the ambiguous and shifting ground of identity in wartime, and of aesthetics in the postwar theater.

“The Sullied Stage: Ideological Impurities in Great War Theater” Leon Sachs, University of Kentucky Students of the First World War are familiar with the term “union sacrée” referring to the wartime truce in France between opposing political and ideological camps, one rooted in the traditions of the Church and the Ancien Régime and the other in secular humanism inherited from the Enlightenment and the Revolution. But how did this “union” manifest itself in artistic form? This paper considers three different plays appearing in the aftermath of war — Paul Raynal’s Le Tombeau sous l' (1924), François de Curel’s Viveuse et le moribond (1926) and Maurice Rostand’s L’Archange (1925) — in order to reveal the kinds of theatrical inventions required to produce the new ideological admixture.

“Theater, Theatricality and the Crimean War” Sima Godfrey, University of British Columbia Whereas the Crimean war does not figure prominently in the canonical literature of 19th- century France, it was amply represented in large scale paintings, popular novels, and theater of the second half of the 19th century. With reference to the theatricality of the Crimean War, this paper looks at representations of the as depicted in some of those popular plays.

Panel 4.B: Exorcizing the Church Chair: Stamos Metzidakis, Washington University in Saint Louis

“Censorship and Scandal: How George Sand Picked a Fight With the ” Kate Bonin, Arcadia University In October 1862, when George Sand proposed the manuscript of her new novel, Mademoiselle La Quintinie, to her editor François Buloz, she warned him that its contents were potentially dangerous: “Avec un gouvernement de bon plaisir et de caprice imprévu, vous risquerez un avertissement […]. [N]ous serions tancés, honnis, maudits, attendez-vous à cela. Si vous publiez ce livre, vous ne serez jamais canonisé et peut-être jamais pardonné.” Sand was right to anticipate institutional censure of what was arguably the most scandalous novel she ever NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 wrote; the following year, the Vatican placed Sand’s entire œuvre on its Index Librorum Prohibitum. With Mademoiselle La Quintinie, Sand attempted to offer her readers what she termed “la solution du problème religieux;” that is, the novel seeks to counter what Sand perceived as the undue, anti-modern, even unhealthy influence of the ultramontane French Church and its supporters (the parti clérical) in Second Empire politics and social life. Quintinie’s attack on the parti clérical articulates Sand’s positions on issues ranging from Church doctrine and policy, the Italian Risorgimento and the contested legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These were controversial subjects, but Sand had already written other polemical, even censured works of fiction: what then sets Mademoiselle La Quintinie apart? In answer to this question, this paper analyzes the ways in which Sand employed canny tactics of citation, provocation and even downright trolling, both within the novel and in complementary texts written before, during and after Quintinie’s publication. Appropriating and subverting the Church’s own rhetoric of purity and corruption, sin and redemption, Sand cleverly orchestrated the voices in conflict with her own. Quite clearly, Sand conceived of scandal and censorship as weapons that she could use to shape public opinion and bring about real social change.

“Contamination et religion dans Madame Gervaisais des Frères Goncourt, L’Evangéliste de Daudet et Lourdes de Zola” Anne-Simone Dufief, Université d’ Il s’agit d’étudier le regard porté sur la religion et les phénomènes de conversion qui se multiplie dans la seconde moitié du XIX) siècle, dans trois romans qui se font écho et dont les auteurs sont athées ou agnostiques. Le phénomène religieux y est moins envisagé dans sa dimension individuelle et spirituelle que dans une relation à l’institution et à la collectivité. Ces œuvres se penchent sur les phénomènes d’influence et de contamination à une époque où va bientôt se développer la psychologie des foules. Fautes morales et pathologies sont constamment mises en relation tant sur le plan thématique que métaphorique. Il faudra resituer dans le contexte de l’histoire de la psychologie ce phénomène de constant va-et-vient entre une nosographie souvent répugnante et la souillure morale qui toutes deux appellent la purification.

Panel 4.C: Containing Crime in the Prison and Penal Colony Chair: June K. Laval, Kennesaw State University

“La contagion du mal au bagne guyanais : symptômes et remèdes dans deux romans de Louis Boussenard” Cyrielle Faivre, Providence College La peur de la contagion est dans une certaine mesure à l’origine de la fermeture des bagnes métropolitains en France : on commence, à partir des années 1820, à s’inquiéter de la présence des forçats, ces êtres « incurables » qui menacent d’« infecter8 » la population locale. Pour remplacer ce que Ginouvier qualifiait d’« écoles normales de la dépravation publique », on a recours à la colonisation pénale qui est supposée éloigner ces agents infectieux d’une métropole encore traumatisée par la sanglante insurrection de juin 1848.

8 Je reprends ici les termes utilisés par Hubert Lauvergne, médecin en chef du bagne de , dans son ouvrage Les Forçats, considérés sous le rapport physiologique, moral et intellectuel (1841). NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Dans Les Robinsons de la Guyane (1882) et Les Chasseurs de caoutchouc (1886), Louis Boussenard reprend la métaphore du corps malade pour dénoncer le bagne colonial qui répand, selon lui, les germes de la criminalité en Guyane. Fervent défenseur de l’idéologie colonialiste, l’écrivain cherche en effet à « réhabiliter » la Guyane que les Français se représentent à l’époque comme « le réceptacle de toutes les maladies ». Ainsi Boussenard utilise-t-il l’argument invoqué par Napoléon III – la propagation de la maladie criminelle en métropole – pour dénoncer le Second Empire qui a inoculé le virus dans l’eldorado guyanais par le biais des transportés (les criminels de droit commun). Ces derniers affichent des symptômes inquiétants, de la laideur à la variole en passant par le cannibalisme, et menacent de contaminer les autres habitants. Au contraire, le déporté Robin, qui incarne les valeurs de la Troisième République, est dépeint comme « une tache de propreté » capable de guérir le corps insulaire guyanais.

“De la contamination au laboratoire hygiéniste : imaginaires des prisons en France au XIXe siècle” Marion Croisy, Université Paris III, & Thomas Le Roux, CNRS Dans un siècle hanté par l’hygiénisme, la prison, lieu clos dans lequel l’observation sociale peut aisément s’effectuer, devient l’un des symboles de la contamination : investie par le regard des médecins autant que par celui des homme de lettres, la prison perçue comme espace de contamination est un lieu commun des discours « sérieux » et littéraires qui la représentent. Ces textes témoignent alors des différents aspects que revêt la contamination car avant la théorie pasteurienne, les voies de la contamination sont perçues comme multiples : tant par la dégradation sociale que par la malpropreté qui y règnent, les prisons sont l’archétype de la souillure et de sa diffusion. Cette communication a pour ambition d’étudier la circulation des savoirs et des images au sein d’un corpus d’hygiénistes et d’un corpus littéraire, croisant ainsi l’approche littéraire et l’approche historique. Il s’agira de montrer comment ces textes participent de la construction de l’imaginaire de la prison pénale, cette prison qui, au XIXe siècle, est aussi pensée comme une voie de guérison. Ainsi l’exclusion et l’isolement du détenu apparaissent-ils comme les meilleures façons de prévenir la contagion du vice.

“‘Les galères font le galérien’: The Bagne of Toulon As a Site of Revolt, Abjection and Transmutation In the Nineteenth-Century Imagination” Amelia Fedo, New York University Crime has long been seen as contamination, uncleanness, or impurity. According to Foucault, the medicalization of crime led to prisons and hospitals being used to contain contagious sufferers and prevent them from propagating their disease in society. Crime was no longer simply a social ill: it was a personal pathology as well. To this end, criminals were typically only exhibited to the public in one spectacular moment of violence, part sacrifice and part lesson; otherwise, they were either hidden behind the walls of a prison or transported. This is the logic of the universe of François Villon and ; but what of Vidocq, and Valjean? They belong to the universe of the highly atypical, paradoxical, and at times even carnivalesque bagne métropolitain, an institution which originated in the mid-eighteenth century but which did not exert a powerful hold on the French imagination until the Romantic era. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

In the bagne, those sentenced to travaux forcés were neither executed nor hidden, but on permanent view in the space of everyday life: working in proximity to civilians, convicts were a curiosity for visitors but a commonplace for inhabitants of the town. Halfway between the Foucauldian categories of supplice and punition, the bagne was incompletely medicalized: despite phrenology's identification of various "types," convicts were indiscriminately mixed together—where, to the dismay of reformers, they could "corrupt" each other socially, linguistically and sexually. This porosity and liminality made the bagne an object of particular fascination and horror for nineteenth-century writers, journalists, moralists and reformers. Romantics in particular were intrigued by the fate of the forçat, a marked man who had to either take society as his enemy or struggle to redeem himself, while reactionaries found such attitudes dangerous: for to rethink the abjection of the bagne was to destabilize all of society.

Panel 4.D: Becoming Animal Chair: André Benhaïm, Princeton University

“Infectious Affections and the War on Pity” Kari Weil, Wesleyan University “War is waged over the matter of pity” Derrida writes in The Animal that therefore I Am, adding that it is a war that has been waged for some two hundred years. This paper will explore possible origins of that war within the contested “emotive regimes” of post-revolutionary France and their relevance for the representation of human-animal relations during the 19th century. While one may expect that pity played a role in the establishment of the Society for the Protection of Animals and anti-cruelty laws of the 19th century, I want to argue through a range of texts from Eugene Sue’s Godolphin Arabian to Gustave Le Bon’s “Psychologie du dressage” (which I read as companion to his crowd theory), that pity “mattered” in contradictory ways. Formerly considered to have relevance for politics and the public sphere, pity, and especially pity for animals would come to be “othered” as a lesser, animal instinct (not unlike some theories of empathy today) better suited to Arabs, the English or peasants. Advocated by the likes of Michelet or Hugo, the political or ethical force of pity or empathy for animals was regarded by others with suspicion or mockery. Concerns for its contagious (or magnetic) quality, moreover, and for its cultivation through unconscious (and suspect) practices like animal magnetism, or the unruly energy of crowds, led to the importance of having an unaffected, if not ironic master to control is public manifestations.

“‘J’aurai grand soin que vous ne vous trouviez plus en société’: Infantile Feral Behaviors and the Fear of Contamination in 19th-century Children’s Books” Pauline de Tholozany, Clemson University Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, several cases of feral children marked the minds of the European elite. Peter of Hanover, the wild girl of Champagne, and Victor of were some of the most famous cases. When they were found, these children intermittently walked on all fours and were unable to speak. Reports also describe an animal-like relation to food, depicting them in the act of dismembering animals, devouring raw meat, or eating grass. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Drawing examples from 19th-century children’s book and education treatises, this paper will analyze the ways in which the misbehaving children in these texts share traits with their feral counterparts. In these stories, the naughty child embodies a state of nature that dangerously triggers animalistic behaviors. These texts systematically involve a physical isolation of the problematic child from the rest of society: the naughty child’s body contains traces of a past state that cannot be eliminated, but that can be contained through physical ostracism. Paradoxically, this fear of contamination was absent from the attitudes towards real cases of feral children: on the contrary, much effort was done to socialize them and include them into neighboring communities. A comparison between reports on those children and their later fictionalized incarnations shows two conflicting perspectives on un-socialized children: between humanistic ideals and ontological fears, the question of whether or not the animalized child risks contaminating others is one that preoccupied pedagogues and educators throughout the century.

“Devenir-animal et poétique de la trace dans La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier de Flaubert” Julien Weber, Middlebury College Dans le premier volume de La Bête et le souverain, Jacques Derrida a attiré notre attention sur l’étrange ressemblance qui affecte en occident les figures du souverain, du criminel et de la bête en vertu de leur commun “être-hors-la-loi”. Or, La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier dramatise singulièrement cette contamination mutuelle. Comme plusieurs critiques l’ont déjà remarqué (Elisabeth de Fontenay, Anne Simon) l’identité humaine du personnage s’y trouve affectée par l’animalité dès les premières scènes de chasse. Mais il faudrait ajouter à ce constat que l’animalité dont il s’agit est particulièrement complexe, puisqu’elle se présente sous la forme d’un pouvoir souverain qui s’exerce sur la vie de tous les animaux, un pouvoir étranger à toute règle ou toute forme de ritualisation de la mise à mort de l’autre. Dans cette communication, je voudrais discuter les rapports de miroir qui s’esquissent au cours du conte entre cette pratique excessive de la chasse et un certain idéal eshétique que Flaubert qualifie d’esthétique du “stylet” dans sa Correspondance (“un style qui vous rentrerait dans l’idée comme un coup de stylet”). Alors que la pratique silencieuse du meurtre en série de Julien a souvent été opposée à celle de l’écrivain, je voudrais suggérer qu’il existe une complicité entre le “tuer pour le plaisir de tuer” du personnage et la pratique nominative quasi-cratylienne qui caractérise en particulier la première partie de La Légende. Loin de s’en tenir toutefois à cette esthétique, le conte dramatise au contraire son interruption ainsi que l’émergence d’une poétique de la trace, dont le dernier alinéa – si souvent commenté – n’est que la manifestation la plus évidente. Quel est le rôle des animaux dans l’émergence de cette poétique de la trace? Et qu’est- ce que le conte nous dit finalement sur les rapports de contamination entre chasse, souveraineté et écriture?

“Devenir pieuvre” Stéphanie Boulard, Georgia Tech La pieuvre est l’animal central du roman de Victor Hugo Les Travailleurs de la mer. Le récit s’étoile de corps qui viennent se prendre dans la trame mortelle de ce monstre-araignée ou hippogriffe. La pieuvre qui est le monstre par excellence, le seul monstre véritablement animal de l’œuvre hugolienne, et dès lors constitutif des mythes hugoliens. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Or, ce monstre qui est tour à tour « prodige » ou « chef-d’œuvre », est, nous dit Victor Hugo, « gangrène » ou encore « scorbut », une sorte de maladie sur pattes, flottante, qui s’infiltre de pages en pages, qui contamine chaque personnages (Gilliatt, Clubin, Déruchette) pour tresser une « toile-palais » qui est le livre lui-même. Et ce, jusqu’à Hugo lui-même écrivant sans ambages dans sa lettre du 19 décembre 1866 à Paul Meurice qu’il essaye d’attirer sur son île à Guernesey, « car moi aussi je suis une pieuvre, et rien n’est tenace comme une vieille amitié ». Je veux étudier alors ce que j’appellerai le devenir-pieuvre. C’est-à-dire l’enchainement, la transmission, voire la traduction de l’acte du face à face qui vrille sur lui-même, s’éprend de son adversaire, concilie l’inconciliable, et par là s’illimite dans le corps de l’autre. Le concept de devenir que fabrique Deleuze recouvre l’opposition identité / devenir au sens où le devenir repose sur le principe de variation de l’identité. Ce que je veux appeler le devenir pieuvre, c’est cette infiltration qui produit une identité hybride, le devenir étant phénomène de « double capture, d’évolution non parallèle, de noces entre deux règnes ». Je veux montrer en quoi l’ombre portée du monstre impose sa variation à tous les personnages de l’œuvre, mais aussi en quoi il étant ses ramifications tentaculaires au-delà du livre lui-même.

Panel 4.E: The Politics and Poetics of Cholera Chair: Melissa Verhey, Princeton University

“La flânerie aux temps du choléra dans l’Horace de George Sand” Morgane Cadieu, Yale University Dans Surveiller et punir, Foucault analyse la gestion de l’accumulation des malades en France en contrastant la distribution spatiale de la lèpre au Moyen Âge et celle de la peste au XVIIe siècle. La lèpre supposait une exclusion des contaminés hors des murs de la cité, tandis que la peste était traitée sur le mode du quadrillage : la ville était découpée pour permettre le contrôle des pestiférés qui étaient combinés, intra muros, avec des personne saines. Cette étude de Foucault ouvre le chapitre sur le panoptisme, montrant ainsi que la gestion d’une maladie est conjointement topographique et optique : sa répartition dans l’espace détermine son mode de visibilité et renseigne sur la spécificité du processus de contamination. Foucault explique que le XIXe siècle voit ces systèmes de « partage » et de « découpage » fusionner dans des lieux clos tels que l’hôpital ou l’asile. Les épidémies de choléra de la première moitié du XIXe corroborent-elles cette thèse, ou l’exemplarité de cette maladie a-t-elle nécessité l’élaboration d’un autre modèle de répartition spatiale ? Je me focaliserai sur les liens entre l’urbanisme et l’hygiénisme, et notamment sur la cartographie des égouts de Paris par Bruneseau en 1806, et leur étanchéisation et recouvrement suite à la deuxième pandémie de choléra en 1832. Neutraliser la contagion a eu pour conséquence de soustraire au regard le système de traitement des déchets. Je prendrai pour exemple paradigmatique l’Horace de George Sand : le choléra a-t-il conditionné les déambulations des personnages et la description de l’espace parisien ? A-t-il déterminé la mise en scène du regard des flâneurs et flâneuses ? Et dans une perspective autobiographique relevant de l’éco-féminisme et de la biopolitique du genre, les modes de visibilité du choléra ont-ils contaminé la visibilité même du genre de Sand, c’est-à-dire son travestissement ?

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“« Un fléau sans imagination » ? Représentations du choléra de 1832” Anne-Sophie Morel, Université de Savoie Notre contribution souhaite s’interroger sur les représentations que les écrivains ont pu donner de l’épidémie de choléra de 1832. Il s’agira à la fois de mesurer les implications esthétiques et morales de cette contamination et de montrer en quoi elle participe d’une (ré)invention d’une poétique moderne de la mort. Nous nous appuierons notamment sur les Mémoires d’outre-tombe de Chateaubriand et l’« Histoire du choléra » de Jules Janin, publiée dans les Contes nouveaux. Chez Chateaubriand, l’évocation du choléra qui frappe Paris en 1832 est mise en perspective : s’inscrivant à la suite des récits de peste de la littérature antique et des grandes épidémies de l’histoire européenne, elle montre l’affrontement de deux esthétiques contraires, construisant un diptyque entre grandeur et décadence. Aux prestiges de la représentation du choléra médiéval, inspirée de l’Histoire épique, succèdent les spectacles grotesques de la modernité. « Fléau sans imagination », réduit à un accident sanitaire quantifié, inspecté, administrativement traité, le choléra témoigne de la dépoétisation du monde contemporain. Il signale aussi la maladie qui affecte plus profondément le corps social, gangrené par l’argent-roi et coupé de toute inspiration religieuse. La représentation de l’épidémie emprunte à des intertextes et des topoï hérités du passé. Elle s’accorde avec l’imaginaire macabre des romantiques et l’esthétique fantastique qui leur est chère. Le choléra esquisse ainsi au gré des textes une danse macabre, teintée parfois d’une noire ironie.

“Re-imagining Contagion: Stendhal-Balzac-Michelet-Baudelaire” Michael Tilby, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge Given the cholera epidemics in Paris, and elsewhere in France both in the 1830s and again in 1854, it is unsurprising that the phenomenon of contagion was a recurring preoccupation in the country for much of the nineteenth century, especially since the medical profession was undecided as to whether cholera was contagious or not. But if literary representations of contagion were initially situated within the depiction of plagues, for example in the fictional Dernières lettres de deux amans de Barcelone (1822), by H. de Latouche and L’Héritier de l’Ain, which took as its setting the recent outbreak of yellow fever in the Catalan city, they were still more evident outside the context of epidemiology. This paper will be specifically concerned with examples of the figurative representation of contagion in a selection of literary authors writing during the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. It will begin by establishing as its reference point the allusions by Baudelaire, in two of his prose poems, to ‘extase contagieuse’ and ‘[l]a contagion de la folie’ and to which I shall return by way of conclusion. The intervening discussion will explore the literary hinterland to Baudelaire’s evocations of these phenomena, focusing on love, as well as ecstasy and madness, and making reference to representative medical and religious discourses of the period. With reference to earlier, above all Neoplatonic, notions of love, the analysis will highlight the originality of Stendhal’s evocation in Lucien Leuwen of ‘le plat et vulgaire moyen de la contagion de l’amour’. Balzac will be considered both with regard to his extension of the range of positive phenomena and conditions with the potential for contagion and for his specific concern in this context with ecstasy and madness. La Sorcière will be examined in the light of Muriel Louâpre’s discussion of the way Michelet uses the image of contagion to re-think the concept of transmission; and in relation to the little-known work by his fellow historian Napoléon Peyrat, Histoire des pasteurs NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 du désert (1842). Finally, the paper will return to the prose poems with which it began. In the light of the preceding investigation of the wider context, it will view Baudelaire’s evocations of contagion as examples of the poet’s frequent re-working of contemporary commonplaces, before outlining a possible reading of Le Spleen de Paris in terms of the poet-persona’s relationship with his fellow denizens of the city viewed in terms of a form of contagion.

Panel 4.F: Sex, Slang, and Squalor: Modes of Contamination in Hugo’s Novels, Plays and Adaptations Chair: Kathryn Grossman, The Pennsylvania State University

“The Άνάγκη of Άναγνεία: Claude Frollo’s Inevitable Impurity” Briana Lewis, Catherine LeBlanc, and Leah Thirkill; Allegheny College On the wall of the cathedral in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, beneath the famous word “ΆΝΆΓΚΗ” or “fatalité,” Jehan Frollo glibly notices that his brother has also carved the word “Άναγνεία” or “impureté.”1 And yet, whereas ἀνάγκη is foregrounded as a unifying in the novel, the text makes clear that ἀναγνεία was inscribed there first; that is, in the implied narrative of Claude Frollo’s descent into the madness of his deadly obsession with Esmeralda, his preoccupation with impurity predates his focus on their seemingly inevitable shared fate. At the root of his impurity is an irresistible urge to look where he shouldn’t — Claude Frollo himself identifies the moment he first sees Esmeralda as the beginning of a kind of invasion of his mind and body: “à dater de ce jour, il y eut en moi un homme que je ne connaissais pas” (274). For him, even watching the beautiful girl perform in front of the cathedral is an illicit act, an act of voyeurism, which becomes a kind of contamination, psychic “matter out of place,” making him unfit for both his ecclesiastical work and his occult practices. In this presentation, we will explore the multiple connections between ἀνάγκη and ἀναγνεία as they pertain to the character of Claude Frollo — the inevitability of this voyeurism and the sense of impurity it creates in Claude as voyeur. In the end, his perceived unavoidable contamination sets in motion the inexorable fate, the ἀνάγκη, that befalls both him and Esmeralda.

“Linguistic Contamination in Hugo’s Hernani and Les Misérables” Laurence M. Porter, Oberlin College Critics fulminated at the irreverent treatment of nobles and of the king in Hugo’s Hernani, as well as the explicit mentions of the bandits led by the title character. John J. Janc’s revised critical edition of the play (2014) allows one to attempt to assess Hugo’s intentions. Was he advancing any sort of egalitarian agenda? On the linguistic level, the presence of familiar expressions seems an irreverent intrusion into the exalted domain of high , and a smug endorsement of the democratizing tendencies that led to a quasi-constitutional monarchy in 1830. When Les Misérables appeared from the depths of Hugo’s exile in 1862, he raises the ante by devoting entire scenes of the action and complete chapters of authorial digression to depicting and analyzing unsavory milieux: and aggravated recidivism after Notre-Dame de Paris. The author’s detailed, loving exploration of varieties of thieves’ cant descends the social ladder

1 Hugo, Victor. Notre-Dame de Paris. Collection Folio Classiques. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. p. 400. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 by several notches. Its very presence struck some as scandalous, especially as it was accompanied by an appeal to treat vagabond children and even hardened criminals humanely, out of enlightened self-interest. In a word, an entire legislative program has now become attached to depictions of undesirables, and the target of this contestatory use of sermo humilis is no longer the language of seventeenth-century Classical Tragedy, but of social inequities in the hic et nunc of French society. Hugo mischievously juxtaposes to these thrusts a depiction of the private language of bells in the convent, also used in part to circumvent the regulations of the modern state. As an outcast from the French state between 1851 and 1870, he was particularly well situated to sympathize with others who remained beyond the pale.

“Wretchedness on Air: Orson Welles Adapts Les Misérables” Bradley Stephens, University of Bristol Orson Welles’s 1937 radio dramatization of Les Misérables has to date received no critical attention. Anyone with an interest in how and why this pioneer of twentieth-century American culture adapted one of the previous century’s most globally recognized novels has had to make do with passing discussions by Welles’s various biographers. Such a critical blindspot both in the history of Welles’ storied career and in the international reception of Hugo’s epic itself demands to be investigated. The theme of contamination indicates a telling lens through which to achieve this objective. Notwithstanding the narrative instances of dirt and abjection which Welles adapts, including Fantine’s squalor and Jean Valjean’s flight through the Parisian sewers, more figurative understandings of the term bring into focus the appeal of Les Misérables for him. In the socio-economic sense of degradation, and in the moral sense of corruption, Hugo’s novel offered Welles the opportunity to engage the American public with the despair of the 1930s. Each of the seven episodes in his radio serialization – produced by the Mercury Theater repertory company he had co-founded – opens by paraphrasing Hugo’s own preface that “So long as these problems are not solved, so long as ignorance and poverty remain on earth, these words cannot be useless.” Welles insisted that the appeal of canonical writers such as Shakespeare should be harnessed to attract a popular rather than elitist audience in order to maximize the moral impact of such works. Not only did his appropriation of Jean Valjean’s plight reiterate the scope of Hugo’s novel to stimulate public debate around the issues of economic misery and social depression, but it also exemplified what Neil Verma has elsewhere theorized as radio’s ‘theater of the mind’, itself an often ignored media form in adaptation studies.

Break 10:00 am - 10:30 am

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Friday 6 November Session 5 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Panel 5.A: Contaminated Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and (Poetic) Spaces Chair: Adrianna Paliyenko (Colby College)

“Un milieu immonde: Pedophilia, Homosexuality and Sodomy in Tardieu’s étude médico- légale de la Pédérastie” Sharon Johnson, Virginia Tech In the medical world of nineteenth-century France, fear of contamination became a leitmotiv in works on homosexuality, pedophilia, and sodomy as suggested by the corpus produced by E. Salle (1835) Ambroise Tardieu (1859), Louis Pénard (1860), and François Antoine Hippolite Fabre (n.d.). It was a crime “contre nature” (Tardieu, De la pédérastie, 123 ; Salle, “Défloration et viol,” 225), “repoussant” (Tardieu 119), “un vice honteux” (Tardieu 119, 123 ; Fabre 346) involving a “une funeste passion” (Pénard 100). Practitioners of “ces abominables turpitudes” (Pénard 99) had “des goûts dépravés” (Tardieu 123), and “une imagination déréglée et de la plus scandaleuse débauche” (Fabre 346). Yet, Dr. Tardieu’s reasons for writing the most complete study at that time were admirable: he observed a daily increase in instances of blackmail related to male prostitution and pedophilia in the cases he was asked to evaluate for the courts, stating that the July 1845 crime, “Affaire de la rue du Rempart,” created the need for a new category of classification in forensic science. In this paper, I will provide an overview of Tardieu’s pioneering study, De la pédérastie, which documented cases of “violences pédérastes” and the signs of homosexual activity while underscoring the images of contamination and impurity that replicate this rhetoric of “immondices” and “fange” in the nineteenth century.

“, Bodies, Desires in Verhaeren and Noailles” Aimée Boutin, Florida State University The image of the railway’s contamination of the landscape is a recurrent topos in the 19th- century imaginary. NCFS scholars will no doubt be familiar with Emile Zola’s use of the metaphors of disembowelment and rape (éventrer) to connote the train's penetration into virgin territory—body and land—in La Bête humaine. The novel further develops implicit connections between insanity (a neurasthenic illness known as “railway spine”) and the fury of the railway. As opposed to the novel, poetic discourse explores different figurations of this motif, ranging from violent intrusion to welcome interruption. The poetry of Emile Verhaeren and Anna de Noailles illustrates the diversity of approaches to the railway’s overall productive rather than destructive contamination of body and landscape. Verhaeren’s “L’En-avant” (Les Forces tumultueuses, 1902) famously communicates the engine’s drive as it channels through the speaker’s “muscles bandés,” whereas “Les Conquêtes” (La Multiple Splendeur, 1906) conveys the entanglement of the railroad with other cultural flows. Less well known than Verhaeren’s poetry of the railway, Noailles’s Les Éblouissements (1907) explores the train’s association with desire, escape, and sexuality. In poems such as “Embrasement,” “Tumulte de l’aurore,” and “Trains en été,” the sensuality of the railway “contaminates” mind and body by blurring inside and outside.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“La « femme romanesque », une contamination pour rire ?” Damien Zanone, Université Catholique de Louvain Albert Camus a rappelé dans L’Homme révolté (1951) l’usage qui voulait, au XIXe siècle, que « les jeunes filles fussent “romanesques”. On entendait par là que ces créatures idéales ne tenaient pas compte des réalités de l’existence ». Ce fut en effet l’affaire de toute une littérature que de rappeler aux jeunes filles et aux femmes qu’elles avaient là, dans l’inaptitude au réel, un rôle à tenir : posé comme diagnostic, le mot de romanesque semblait considéré comme suffisant pour dire un mal moral et aussi son remède (écarter les romans). Ce discours traditionnel de la critique contre les romans devient, dans les cent années qui précèdent l’intervention décisive de Flaubert dans ce débat avec Madame Bovary, un thème de convention susceptible de représentations ironiques ou pathétiques. L’adjectif « romanesque » est alors l’attribut nécessaire de sujets féminins : « elle paraît romanesque » (Balzac, Ursule Mirouët, 1841), « cette petite fille est sans doute romanesque » (Musset, Fantasio, 1833), « les femmes sont si romanesques » (Sand, Le Secrétaire intime, 1834), une « femme singulière et romanesque s’il en fût » (Stendhal, Mina de Vanghel, 1832), etc. L’emploi du mot dans un titre suffit pour annoncer tout un programme (La Femme romanesque, pièce d’Alexandre-Joseph Le Roy de Bacre, 1801 ; Une femme romanesque, roman de Claude Vignon, 1881). À partir de ces deux derniers ouvrages, la communication interrogera le discours qui prospère sur l’idée qu’une contamination s’opère, comme en un milieu homogène, entre romans et femmes et entre femmes et romans. Le traitement comique de la figure de la « femme romanesque », sorte de reformulation propre au XIXe siècle de la « précieuse ridicule » moliéresque, nous retiendra particulièrement.

Panel 5.B: Stealth Contamination: The Commune at the Fin-de-Siècle Chair: Peter Brooks, Princeton University

“Vallotton, Fénéon, and the Legacy of the Commune in La Revue blanche” Bridget Alsdorf, Princeton University In 1897 the anarchist art critic Félix Fénéon published a series of responses to a survey he conducted on the political and cultural legacy of the Paris Commune. Fénéon’s “Enquête sur la Commune” appeared in La Revue blanche, a leading journal of avant-garde arts and letters, accompanied by fifteen prints by the the Franco-Swiss artist Félix Vallotton. An artist closely associated withLa Revue blanche, Vallotton was similarly fascinated by the Commune’s continuing influence on Parisian culture. His portraits of political and cultural leaders illustrate the text, providing another form of reflection on the Commune and its ideological afterlife in fin- de-siecle France. This paper will consider Fénéon’s survey alongside Vallotton’s illustrations as well as several related prints that the artist published in the 1890s. By addressing the enduring memory of the Commune — both its revolutionary crowds and their suppression — in late nineteenth- century Paris, Vallotton’s work conveys a profound ambivalence about the relationship between the Parisian people and forces of social order. Vallotton’s ambivalence registers a central fact about the changing dynamic between artists and their audiences in this moment, a turning point in the emergence of mass media and social psychology.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“Explosive Contaminations: Mallarmé and Anarchist ‘propagande par le fait’” Cory Browning, University of Oregon When questioned about the anarchist bombing of the Chamber of Deputies in 1893, Mallarmé riposted, “je ne sais pas d’autre bombe, qu’un livre.” This comment and several others have fueled speculation about purported anarchist leanings and raised questions about how to read his explosive poetry. This presentation begins with the premise that such speculation misses the broader context and, consequently, fails to fully understand how Mallarmé’s poetry and anarcho-terrorism interact to inform larger questions of aesthetics and politics. It proposes that we situate Mallarmé’s poetry alongside the anarchist development of a new strategy for revolutionary action, “propagande par le fait”( of the deed). Upholding Marx’s observation that we make our own history but under conditions handed down from the past, I argue that Mallarmé’s poetry and its relation to anarcho-terrorism are best read as a reworking of the conditions for revolutionary action handed down directly from the Commune and indirectly from the Jacobin Terror. I trace the development of propaganda of the deed to the Marx/Bakunin debate, identifying as the fulcrum the contested influence of the Terror on the Commune. Bakunin, I demonstrate, recognized the Jacobin legacy as not merely ideological but, more important because more insidious, affective and aesthetic. Propagande par le fait, I suggest, thus developed as a form of revolutionary action that sought to alter the affective aesthetic conditions of the present. Within this broader context, I then turn to a close reading of Mallarmé’s “Accusation” to more fully explicate the explosive contaminations of aesthetics and politics.

“1886, Year of the Commune: , Artistic Sociability, and the Persistence of Revolution” Effie Rentzou, Princeton University 1886 was a key moment for symbolism: it marked the introduction of the “vers libre” and the “monologue intérieur,” formal innovations that would revolutionize poetry and prose to come. These formal breakthroughs were largely elaborated collectively through magazines that proliferated during this period, a plethora of symbolist publications that is a symptom of an intense group activity. A new artistic sociability arose within the symbolist circles, accompanied by a flourishing of ephemeral publications, but also a parallel elaboration of forms and theory in these publications. But why do these phenomena appear with such intensity specifically in the 1880s? This paper will argue that the transmutation of literary activity in the 1880s is a cultural response to the political (but also cultural and ethical, in the sense of the reorganization of the everyday) radicalization brought by the experience of the Commune. The Commune offered a model of both social organization but, chiefly, of the symbolic value and function of artistic creation that would be reproduced in the symbolist circles and later on in the avant-garde: importance of the group and communal creation, proliferation of small press/journals, written declarations, manifestoes, petitions, and mainly the reconceptualization of literature as not just a metaphor but as an integral part of a society in flux. The paper will discuss the reemergence of the blueprint that the Commune created and its cultural recuperation by the symbolists, as a moment of deferred action, of “afterwardness,” in the psychoanalytical sense. It is to be noted that the structures that the symbolists created - group activity, magazines, theory and practice, polemic statements (manifestos) and formal innovation - are all elements that will reappear thirty years later as constitutive parts of the historical avant-garde. The paper will link thus these three NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 historical moments, 1871, 1886, the 1910s, and trace the survival of the Commune as a constantly reactivated experience within culture.

Panel 5.D: Dirty Business: The Muddled Reception of Artistic, Intellectual, Commercial, and Manual Labor Chair: Elizabeth Emery, Montclair State University

“Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and the Journalistic Unconscious” Edmund Birch, University of Cambridge It has become a critical commonplace, in nineteenth-century French studies at least, to conceive of the relationship between fiction and journalism in terms of contamination. The newspaper is deemed to have infiltrated – or, in a more pessimistic vein, to have contaminated – the novel, a notion which goes beyond the mere fact that many novels were first serialised in the press. In a discussion of Marc Angenot's 1889. Un état du discours social, for example, Fredric Jameson explores the ways in which Angenot's particular argument about fiction and social discourse 'directs our attention toward the contamination of nineteenth-century discourse in general by the narratives of journalism'. And these concerns equally crop up in more recent work by Marie-Ève Thérenty, for whom the connections between fiction and the press are invariably couched in terms of 'transferts', 'collusion' and, of course, 'contamination'. With the critical perspectives of Angenot, Jameson and Thérenty in mind, this paper will seek to trace the sense in which the structure of the feuilleton weaves its way into Alexandre Dumas's Le Comte de Monte- Cristo. First published in Le Journal des débats, this novel makes coded reference to the fact of its own serialisation in its depiction of fragmentary text: in one memorable episode, the whereabouts of buried treasure are only revealed when two distinct fragments of text are placed side by side. In this way, I hope to outline the ways in which the particular forms evoked in the novel mirror the manner of its publication, and to question whether the presence of serialisation at various levels of the narrative points to the possibility of a journalistic unconscious.

“‘L’Affaire Tcheng-Ki-Tong’: A Chinese Diplomat amid Celebrity and Scandal in the Third Republic” Ke Ren, Bates College The Chinese diplomat-writer Chen Jitong (1852-1907) was one of the most colorful transcultural figures in fin-de-siècle Paris. A secretary at the Qing legation, he reinvented himself as a widely read author of seven French-language books, such as Les Chinois peints par eux-mêmes (1884), a skillful speaker at learned societies and international congresses, and a charismatic public personality. “Le Général Tcheng Ki-Tong” also owed his celebrity to two public controversies around 1889-91. The first was a dispute over the authorship of his first two books, which were claimed by one Adalbert-Henri Foucault de Mondion, a former tutor at the Chinese embassy who was also a spy for Georges Boulanger. The second scandal resulted from a series of aborted government and personal loans Chen attempted to negotiate with French banks. Both incidents were played out in the French mass press, with many journalists and commentators either coming to Chen's defense as an honorable cultural mediator or producing embellished accounts of Chen's flamboyant lifestyle in France. The much publicized nature of these scandals may be seen in Max Nordau's Degeneration (1895), in which the social critic NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 included, among list of items he found to be wrong with decadent Paris, the story of the deceptive “fin-de-siècle diplomatist” from China. Situating these events in the historical context of French imperialism in Asia, the Boulanger Affair, and late Qing China’s self-strengthening movement, this paper traces the various public images of Chen Jitong in the Parisian press in the late 1880s and early 1890s. I argue that these portrayals and of Chen actually reveal conflicting self-images on the part of the French public. The proliferating discourse surrounding Chen were as much about fascination with the Chinese diplomat as about contemporaneous celebrations of cosmopolitanism in the Third Republic or anxieties over the decadence of the fin-de-siècle.

“Fedor Hoffbauer and the Work of the Historical Imagination” Catherine E. Clark, MIT This paper will analyze the historically reconstructed scenes of Paris produced by architect and artist Fedor Hoffbauer and their reception between 1867 and 1906. His scenes were published in the two-volume, critically acclaimed, Paris à travers les âges in 1875 and exhibited at his Diorama de Paris à travers les âges, which ran for two years at the Théâtre Marigny on the Champs-Elysées starting in 1885. Hoffbauer got his start as a reconstructionist of Parisian history in 1867, when the city commissioned him to produce a series of watercolors showing its streets and neighborhoods before the transformations of Haussmannization. These would become the basis for the color lithographs of Paris à travers les âges, whose research and execution took Hoffbauer five years of full-time labor in dozens of archives and collections. And yet the artist, once a darling of the Parisian historical world, would become something of an intellectual pariah by the early 1900s. In 1906, a Musée Carnavalet employee dubbed the paintings from his diorama of “no utility” for the and proposed putting them out with the trash to free up storage space.9 This paper argues that Hoffbauer fell from favor because his work was tainted by the fact that it dared to visually depict elements of imagined history, the product of the “historical imagination,” or the mental images of the past formed by all students of history. It explores the distinction, which emerged at the turn of the century, between depicting the reconstructed past in images and in words. It explains how Hoffbauer’s work was rejected because the resulting products of his meticulous archival research were pictures rather than texts, and in doing so questions emerging hierarchies of intellectual labor and history in images that persist today.

Panel 5.E: Politics in the Paris Sewers: Progress, Decadence, and Chair: Andrea Thomas, Loyola University Maryland

“Contaminating Discourses: Progress, Aesthetics, and the Sewers of Paris” Dean de la Motte, Salve Regina University In his Grand Dictionnaire universel du dix-neuvième siècle (1866-79), Pierre Larousse describes le Progrès as the religion of nineteenth-century France. He is not, of course, alone in his enthusiasm, which is shared by such literary luminaries as Victor Hugo and Émile Zola. At the same time, a powerful—and ultimately triumphant—counter-discourse centered on

9 Charles Sellier, “Note à Monsieur Brown, Inspecteur en Chef des Beaux Arts,” January 10, 1906, VR 234, Archives de Paris. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 modernity and decadence takes shape in the work of Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire and Huysmans, to name only the most notable. In abandoning the utopian political impulse underlying the ideology of progress, these authors nevertheless consistently seek to create their own version of utopia, a self-enclosed aesthetic realm that would lie safely beyond the “filth” of contemporary society. It is not surprising, then, that this influential strain of French literature—at once politically reactionary and artistically innovative—reinforces through its narratives and its imagery a consistent association between what it believes to be a sham discourse of progress and dirt, filth, and, especially, excrement. The great irony, of course, is that the very society these writers so revile in their work was engaged, at the same historical moment, in a comprehensive program to sanitize Paris, most obviously in Eugène Belgrand’s massive sewer project. This talk will examine the many paradoxes that arise from a close examination of the discourses concerning “filth” and “sewage” as they emerged from what, at first, appear to be diametrically opposed camps: the forces of le Progrès and those who—despite their commitment to artistic innovation—shared Huysmans’s character’s belief in Là-bas (1891) that “il n’a pas inventé grand’chose, ce miserable siècle!” Drawing on well-known literary texts, but also correspondence, newspapers, government publications and historical and theoretical literature on the Paris sewer project itself, I will suggest that neither of these camps could fully escape being contaminated by the other.

“La contamination ou le contrôle : obsession de la maîtrise et séduction des souterrains dans le Paris du XIXe siècle” Marta Caraion, Université de Lausanne Dans cette communication, je me propose d’étudier, dans le discours sur Paris de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, l’expression d’une dialectique paradoxale entre la peur de la contamination (un frisson qui n’est pas sans attraits) et le fantasme du contrôle (caractéristique du Second Empire), en examinant deux ouvrages monumentaux qui fonctionnent comme des baromètres socio-culturels d’une époque : -Paris-guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France, 2 vol., 1867 ; ouvrage collectif préfacé par Hugo, comportant une centaine d’articles signés des plumes les plus diverses (Georges Sand, Michelet, Edouard Fournier, Champfleury, Gautier, Du Camp…), publié à l’occasion de l’Exposition universelle de 1867 ; -, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, 4 vol., Hachette, 1867-1873. Je me pencherai, dans ces ouvrages, sur le traitement du Paris souterrain et du Paris des égouts (chapitre XXX chez Du Camp, partie «Paris souterrain» dans le Paris-guide, comportant entre autres un texte de Nadar intitulé «Le Dessus et le dessous de Paris»), et sur leurs rapports aux autres discours sociaux de cette période : littéraires (les égouts dans Les Misérables de Hugo, 1862), traités de politique urbaine (projet d’urbanisation de Haussmann sur les égouts, repris vingt ans plus tard dans ses Mémoires, 1890-1893), discours de soi (Nadar, «Paris souterrain, aux catacombes et égouts» dans Quand j’étais photographe, 1900)… Il s’agira de comprendre comment le souterrain, l’égout constituent à la fois le noyau d’un imaginaire dysphorique de la contamination et la possibilité euphorique d’une métaphore du réseau en tant que processus idéal de communication et de maîtrise.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“Sewer Trains: Contamination, Technology and the Underground in 19th-century Paris” Caroline Grubbs, Southern Methodist University During the last three decades of the 19th century, Paris was inundated with speculative designs and ambitious projects for a chemin de fer métropolitain. The idea of a Métro souterrain, however, incited virulent reactions in fin-de-siècle urban culture. The situation of a public transportation network below ground would require a symbolic reordering of urban space as the underground, traditionally the province of organic refuse, criminals and social outcasts, would become accessible to the average citizen. To what kinds of pathogens – both moral and biological – would bourgeois Parisians be exposed by routinely venturing underground? In this paper, I argue that projects for a Métro souterrain unearthed subterranean anxieties from the first half of the century that had been buried in the wake of Second Empire renovations to the city’s infrastructure. These anxieties were articulated through images of contamination. In 1878, for example, architect Louis Heuzé warned of the dangers involved in excavating this “fetid heritage of past generations” otherwise known as the Parisian subsoil. “What mephitic exhalations may be released from this earth,” he asked. “Shouldn’t we worry that epidemics might break out in Paris following so much exposure of putrid ground?” Heuzé’s characterization of the underground as a receptacle of disease harkens back to early 19th-century depictions of the sewers, in particular to Pierre Bruneseau’s official reports on the Parisian sewers from 1805-1812 (which inspired Hugo’s treatment of the underground in Les Misérables). Latent in critiques of subterranean railways is, moreover, the persistent association of the topographical underground with moral decay. Through comparisons with literary and scientific explorations of the sewers from the first half of the 19th century, this paper shows that underneath concerns for hygiene and contamination surrounding fin-de-siècle plans for an underground Métro lay enduring cultural anxieties about the underground as a site of social pathology.

Panel 5.F: The Transition to Prose Chair: Colette Windish, Spring Hill College

“Psychic Contagion and Bertrand's Scarbo: Infected by Form in ‘La Chambre gothique’” Ryan James Swankie, University of Texas, Austin In a letter from 1837, Louis “Aloysius” Bertrand describes his book Gaspard de la Nuit as an attempt to create a new genre of prose. Ironically, his new literary form--the bambochade-- initiated a new genre of poetics: the prose poem. My paper proposes the idea that his desire to influence a change in genre is an attempt to alleviate the psychic contagion of traditional poetic form. I argue that the medieval ballad, with which Bertrand was enamored, is represented in Gaspard de la Nuit as a bogeyman figure who dominates the poet's reverie and infects the text with nightmarish hallucinations. Bertrand's aestheticizing of form into content, or ballad into bogeyman, heralds avant-garde poetics. Who is this bogeyman in the bedroom? He is the amorphous character Scarbo: a sadistic, frenetic dwarf-insect. This supernatural figure appears in the prose poem “La Chambre Gothique” to interrupt the vision of reverie that is a voyage into the medieval past. During the subsequent prose-poetic suite, Scarbo tortures the poet physically and psychologically. His haunting presence and sadistic actions are a staging of the violence inherent in the conflict NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 between the infinite vision of reverie and the constraint of fixed, poetic form. Scarbo inflicts an angoisse felt by the poet, who seeks form to capture the harmonious vision, but only finds the decayed corpse of the medieval ballad upon which is the dung beetle (escarbot) bogeyman who infects the poet's mind and the textual body. I conclude that Bertrand's re-imagining of traditional form--the ballad as a reinvigorated prose-poetic text--serves as a modernist figure of a remedy, or potentially even a "cure," for the terminal contagion of diseased and decaying modes of expression. Indeed, Gaspard de la Nuit's own intertextual contagion can be seen not only in modernist form, but perhaps even more significantly, in the echoing images of "the poet in his bedroom" fighting the bogeyman of formal infection from Baudelaire's "La Chambre double" to Mallarme's "Frisson d'hiver" and beyond.

“Reforming Art and Society in Hugo's ‘Claude Gueux’” Allan Pasco, University of Kansas Victor Hugo’s desire to reform both society and art marks all of his work, as one would expect of the leader of the Romantics. Determined to create a militant, utilitarian, literary work that was also aesthetic, he reformulated the in his attempt to reform society. His ‘Claude Gueux’ tells a pathetic tale that reveals the penal system’s profound injustice. Much as he explicitly liberated the drame of certain strictures, including verse, with a ‘shadow’ tragedy, so he implicitly freed the fable genre of verse, replacing the traditionally short generic form with a fabular short story.

“Baudelaire and Benjamin in the Streets of Paris” Beryl Schlossman, University of California, Irvine is on sure ground when referring to Walter Benjamin’s exploration of verse, but Benjamin says little about Baudelaire’s prose poetry. On the one hand, he underlines the impact of Baudelaire’s verse, and maintains throughout his writings that Baudelaire’s most powerful insights appear in his verse rather than in his essays and theoretical writings. On the other, Benjamin often refers to Baudelaire’s verse and prose poems without emphasizing the formal distinction between the two. The result of this ambiguity is a generalized uncertainty about Benjamin’s position in relation to Paris Spleen. The role of Paris Spleen in Benjamin’s work has received little critical attention, even though Benjamin explores the topics and themes that run throughout the work. But comments on ‘Loss of a Halo’ and other works give evidence of Benjamin’s interpretive approach to Paris Spleen as poetry. In several essays on Baudelaire, Benjamin’s commentary places the work in the lineage of The Flowers of Evil and draws a clear trajectory from the verse to Paris Spleen.

Lunch 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Friday 6 November Session 6 – 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Panel 6.A: Popular Media and the Arts of Vulgarization Chair: Xavier Fontaine (Princeton University)

“Art de la contamination et effets de contagion: la vulgarisatrice et le microbe” Bénédicte Monicat, The Pennsylvania State University L’histoire des sciences au XIXe siècle est intimement liée à des pratiques de vulgarisation scientifique dont Daniel Raichvarg et Jean Jacques présentent l’éventail dans Savants et ignorants (1991) et que Bruno Latour inclut à l’analyse développée dans Pasteur : guerre et paix des microbes (2001), pour ne citer que ces deux ouvrages parmi bien d’autres. Mon intervention se situe à l’intersection et dans le prolongement de leurs lectures respectives : elle examine de manière plus ciblée la contribution des femmes à la transmission des savoirs scientifiques et elle envisage cet engagement dans le contexte du « déplacement général des pouvoirs » (196) que le mouvement pastorien exemplifie selon Latour. Que peut donc nous dire de cette histoire l’ouvrage qui fera l’objet plus précis de la présente analyse, Ferments et fermentations, travailleurs et malfaiteurs microscopiques, publié par Isaure Rey en 1884 chez Hetzel dans la Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation puis réédité dans la Bibliothèque des professions industrielles, commerciales et agricoles ? De quelles façons la vulgarisatrice investit-elle l’objet scientifique ? Dans quel projet social s’inscrit-elle, et comment ? L’art et les effets d’une écriture définie et justifiée par ses qualités de contamination et ses capacités de contagion sont-ils porteurs des germes (…) d’une autre histoire ? C’est peut-être une fable que nous donne à méditer l’histoire de la vulgarisatrice et du microbe, une fable qui a plus d’une morale à nous livrer.

“Une épidémie dionysiaque: Guignol, marionnette lyonnaise” Roxane Petit-Rasselle, Westchester University Fort prisées sous l'Ancien Régime, les marionnettes connaissent leur apogée au XVIIIe siècle, notamment avec Polichinelle et les spectacles d'ombres chinoises. Le besoin d'appartenance culturelle succédant à la Révolution entraîne l'éclosion de marionnettes régionales: Guignol à Lyon, Lafleur en Picardie, Barbizier à Besançon, Jacques à Lille et les Cabotan à . A la différence des autres pupazzi, les spectacles de Guignol se propagent comme une épidémie, d'abord en milieu urbain et régional, puis dans le reste de la France, provoquant l'inquiétude des autorités et avec elle, une censure implacable. Cette communication se focalise sur la construction lyonnaise de Guignol en tant que phénomène social: pourquoi ce personnage devient-il un mythe populaire? A partir du répertoire classique de Guignol, notre étude démontrera d'abord la filiation directe de la marionnette à Dionysos. Réceptacle des traits subversifs et idéologiques de la divinité, Guignol incarne la transgression, l'homme du peuple face à l'élite, la solidarité, le partage, l'éloquence et l'esprit d'indépendance. En s'appuyant sur des rapports de police, des arrêtés préfectoraux et des lettres de cafetiers, nous verrons comment --malgré la censure-- les stratégies du texte, alliées à celles du spectacle, coïncident avec la disposition mentale et idéologique du contexte d'accueil, posant à la fois une menace grandissante pour l'ordre en place et les jalons d'une nouvelle "identité" lyonnaise dans la France post-révolutionnaire. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“‘À tacher ce beau et grand génie’: David d’Angers’ Reproducible Portrait Medallions and the Market for Celebrity” Sean DeLouche, Baylor University During his forty-year career, the French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers (1788- 1856) produced over 500 bronze portrait medallions of the most famous living celebrities of the period, including artists, actresses, writers, soldiers, politicians, and revolutionaries. These bronze medallions are nearly uniform in size and shape: circular and averaging sixteen centimeters in diameter, or about the size of one’s open hand. On the obverse, the artist sculpted the famed contemporary in antique profile, sometimes with a facsimile autograph and a list of his or her famous accomplishments. The artist conceived of these medallions as perpetuating a long and distinguished tradition of artistic commemorations of grands hommes in France. The mass- produced portraits were sold on the open market in order, David d’Angers hoped, to edify and uplift the people. Despite the loftiness of this project, David d’Angers expressed great “distaste” for the medallions. Scholars have traditionally understood the sculptor’s disparaging and often contradictory remarks about the bronze portrait medallions as an aversion to their reproducibility and more broadly to their potential commercialization and commodification. This paper suggests that what David d’Angers feared more specifically was the contaminating associations of the burgeoning market for celebrity culture, which was coming into being in France during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Reexamining the writings by the sculptor and his celebrated sitters and the portrait medallions themselves within the contemporary discourses of la gloire and la célébrité, this paper demonstrates that they dreaded depiction in this mass- produced pantheon would “dirty” their image with a less respectable form of fame. The artist feared his portraits would be seen not as virtuous, disinterested art but as the bric-à-brac of celebrity culture, and the famous sitter feared being transformed from a worthy grand homme into a mere célébrité. This paper also makes use of some of the three dozen medallions of celebrities by David d’Angers in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Panel 6.B: Rires, Satires, Révoltes - Rimbaud and the Poetry of Corruption Chair: Winter Borg, University of California, Davis

“Rimbaud, poète-pitre” Alain Vaillant, Université Paris Ouest La communication partira d’une analyse du célèbre poème de Rimbaud « le Cœur du pitre », dont les allusions à peine voilées à la sodomie ont dès l’origine intrigué les commentateurs et suscité toutes sortes d’hypothèses fantaisistes à caractère biographique. Nous nous proposons de montrer que toute le texte repose sur une réécriture parodique des prières rituelles à l’adresse du Sacré Cœur : au-delà de ce texte particulier, cette interprétation conduit à réévaluer la signification religieuse de la poésie rimbaldienne, mais aussi à s’interroger sur la vraie portée de son rire satirique et parodique.

“Clara and the Ulcer: The Photographic Contagion of Rimbaud's ‘Vénus anadyomène’” Bridget Behrmann, Princeton University Among the perenially most shocking texts of Rimbaud’s perenially shocking œuvre, “Vénus Anadyomène” offers a remarkable vision of beauty corrupted. The goddess, as Rimbaud NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 describes her, incarnates an aging prostitute’s unsightly and decaying flesh, replete with an anal ulcer and a tattoo (“Clara Vénus”). Seth Whidden has called the poem’s Venus “allegorical of Rimbaud’s new aesthetic and his poetic project with relation to the Parnassian poetic approach.” Yet in satirizing a classical ideal of aesthetic closely associated with a certain strain of Parnassianism, Rimbaud also engages with a broader cultural dispute that set pure art against vulgar science. This paper analyzes “Vénus Anadyomène” within the mid-nineteenth century context of this dispute, focusing on the mediating role played by photography. Since the artistic value of photography had beeen hotly contested for decades prior to the composition of “Vénus Anadyomène,” Rimbaud’s appropriation of photographic techniques in the poem is a crucial element of its provocation. Drawing on contemporary photographic practices, from images of the planets to images of statuary, I argue that the Venus of the text is itself photographic. The poem’s radical poetic experiment—a revolting and a satirical revolt—is animated by a deliberate cross-contamination of art and science.

“Revolting Bodies –The Poetry of the People in Rimbaud’s Forgeron” Robert St. Clair, Dartmouth College In “Le Forgeron” – a long poem written in the Fall of 1870 – we find Rimbaud borrowing from a widely disseminated corpus of representations of popular revolt in the 19th century, if not of the peuple as a figure of social excess, dérèglement or abjection (cf., Frégier’s classes dangereuses, Hugo’s ochlocratie or Flaubert’s “peuple qui pue” in 1848, etc.). Simply put, we seem to see the peuple appear as a challenge to coherent political discourse. The crowd figures a potential site of danger – of unthinking upheaval rather than rational movement (“C’est la crapule / Sire. Ça bave aux murs, ça monte, ça pullule”) – and the eponymous Forgeron, read as a metonym for le peuple, seems to incarnate a process of misery and degradation so thorough and intolerable as to announce a kind of total destitution of humanity, a radical impoverishment reducing “le peuple” to its rudimentary bio-power of reproduction. Noting a shift in denomination, from the “C’est la crapule” to “Nous sommes ouvriers,” this paper argues that Rimbaud’s discursive citations are in fact détournements, the aim of which is to transform poetic space itself into a noisy, mouthy fabrique (etym., faber) for the articulation of a radical denunciation of the disorder of the “given,” and for the production of a revolutionary desire for a rupture with the actual. Situating the present of 1870 on a revolutionary continuum with a past of world-historical events (whence the paratextual date given at the outset of the poem: vers le 10 août ‘92), “Le Forgeron” stages an antagonistic, epic prise de parole which uses the prosodic corporeality of the text itself to reject at the level of metrical order, and as a kind of fabrication of politics, a political logic or partage du sensible relegating those who belong to the race de fer to a position of naturalized inferiority, of mind-numbing toil and mute suffering. In its dramatic staging of two antinomic political logics – the monology of monarchy and the master signifier of the King’s Body vs. the polyphony and dissemination of –, and in its inauguration of a body-politic without a permanent or definitive subject (i.e., the body of the king vs. the void or the multitude into which the eponymous “Forgeron” recedes), Rimbaud’s epic of the people in revolt is not just a key text participating in a cultural archive, or corpus, of Communard politics which flourished in the late Second Empire (cf., Kristin Ross, John Merriman); in confronting the reader with the imperatives and aporias (in 1870 perhaps as today) NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 of what might be called the “constitution of a people” (Laclau, Casarino, Rancière), and in its gesture of revolutionary anamnesis reminding readers of the possibility of the “impossible” (i.e., changing history itself), “Le Forgeron” is also emblematic of what we might call Rimbaud’s poetic politics, the lyrical materialism linking his poetic texts to their historical contexts and literary intertexts.

Panel 6.C: Discipline and Commodify: Women’s Bodies on Stage and in Print Chair: Karen Humphreys, Trinity College

“A Cruel Pleasure: Les Piqueurs of 1819 and the Art of Sexual Harassment on the Streets of Paris” Heather Belnap Jensen, Brigham Young University In the fall of 1819, it was reported in the press that a number of young bourgeois women had been pricked on their buttocks by a sharp instrument while walking in the parks, streets, and public promenades of Paris. Wielding a cane or umbrella with a long needle attached to it, this individual (or individuals?) would surreptitiously stab unsuspecting girls and then disappear into the crowd. While this rash of incidents elicited, in the words of one journalist, “cruel pleasure” for the perpetrator and engendered panic in les Parisiennes, for others, it provided rich fodder for literary and visual puns. Unsurprisingly, bawdy songs and vaudeville acts quickly emerged, lampooning the act of these “piquers,”as well as the proposed remedy, offered by an earnest pharmacist in , for treating these wounds. Of particular interest are the print caricatures that were produced in response to this season of street harassment. Images with descriptors such as Étrennes pour le jour de l’an 1820. Préservatif certain contre la piqûre or Par brevet d’invention, cuirasses préservant des piqûres focused on preventative measures, showing young women in shops trying on prosthetic buttocks to hide under their skirts. Others focused on the act itself, with the indignant reactions of the young girls being enjoyed by the perpetrator and his audience. Yet another, titled Le résultat d’une Piqûre, features a fashionable young woman now heavily pregnant. The dozen or so prints associated with this little-known event share a common thread: the diminution of the violence of these acts. In this paper, I seek to not only identify the iconography of street harassment in early nineteenth-century French print media, but also to consider how such caricatures functioned to (re)produce a culture that sanctioned sexual violence against women.

“Art for Art’s Sake at the Opéra: The Moral of Gautier’s Ballet” Rachel Corkle, BMCC CUNY This paper reads Romantic ballet, and specifically the ballet blanc, as a site of struggle between purity and contamination. I read Gautier’s libretto for Giselle in the context of his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin and its famous call for art for art’s sake. Giselle is an emblematic Romantic ballet, divided into two acts: the first expresses a complicated plot with the help of props and pantomime, the second is a ballet blanc and stages women in white in well- ordered geometrical forms. The transition between the two acts is stark. The drab autumnal browns of a Rhineland village make way for the emblematic “whiteness” of the ballet blanc. This second act is purified in color and contrast and furthermore purified of props, pantomime and plot. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Romantic ballet’s interest in form and technique has been criticized as neglecting expression, yet lauded for embodying art for art’s sake—uncontaminated by moral utility. I argue that ballet blanc’s prioritizing form and technique plays an integral role in the expression of a specifically nineteenth-century preoccupation with and moral discourse on emotion. The technical virtuosity of the Romantic ballet goes hand in hand with a new attention to both disciplined bodies and the discipline of the interiors—physical and emotional—that govern these bodies. The plots of Gautier’s libretti in which our heroes and heroines suffer for letting their bodies act out of passion, could not be translated into a more fitting form than virtuosic ballet. Giselle’s ballet blanc is at first glance an embodiment of art for art’s sake, but has it truly been purified of utilitarian drives? When read in the context of post-Revolutionary corporeal and affective discipline, it is perhaps as morally “useful” as it is “beautiful.”

“Classified Contamination: Prostitution, Abortion, and Abortifacients for Sale in the Belle Époque Mass Press” Hannah Frydman, Rutgers University In fin-de-siècle France, a reader who turned to the back pages of many Parisian newspapers could find, in the guise of miracle drugs, articles for intimate protection, and massages, thinly veiled advertisements for abortifacients, contraceptives, and prostitutes. This commodification of women’s sexual but non-procreative bodies circulated quickly and noiselessly, tucked between the folds of the journals. Alongside the news—central to Republican ideals—once-virtuous readers’ minds came into frequent communication with dangerous contaminants; a seemingly inoffensive ad for “English lessons” pushed imaginations into the gutter with images of flagellation, the “English vice.” These unobtrusive ads became targets for vice crusaders who pushed for the application of obscenity laws to prosecute these “affronts to public morality.” Much has been written about the prosecution of obscene artistic representations of women’s bodies, but work on censorship has said little about advertising and even less about the way obscenity laws targeted flesh and blood women. I explore classified advertisers, advertisements, and campaigns for anti-vice legal reform in the last years of the long nineteenth century in order to argue that illicit commerce in women’s sexuality, coupled with women’s attempts to gain sexual and economic freedom, created a conundrum for Republican policymakers: their interests in promoting economic liberalism and freedom of the press were at odds with their desire to control women’s use of the classifieds. This led to policymakers moving away from the nineteenth-century preoccupation with contamination, with the attendant need to protect innocent minds from obscenity, to the explicit targeting of women’s (sexual) freedom, culminating in the anti-contraceptive law of 1920. By analyzing these often overlooked back pages, I show the ways in which women’s unorthodox businesses both exploited the gaps between law and morality and played a role in the history of women’s rights (and of their revocation).

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 6.D: Recycling the Nineteenth Century Chair: Stéphane Pillet, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Mayaguëz

“Mallarmé and the Caribbean Mosaic” Neal Allar, Cornell University The beauty of Caribbean poetry, to paraphrase Derek Walcott, is its imperfection, its inability to reassemble the fragments of a broken history and recuperate its African, Asiatic and European origins. Caribbean poetics, especially as conceived by Walcott and his Martinican counterpart Édouard Glissant, thus embraces cross-cultural contamination as a founding principle – a principle based upon chance encounters between disparate cultural signifiers. It is no coincidence, then, that Stéphane Mallarmé has served as a key inspiration for contemporary Caribbean poetics, for Mallarmé’s sinuous syntax requires a haphazard reassembly of language: the eye jumps up and down the page as it reads, seeking antecedents for pronouns, subjects for verbs, nouns for modifiers. The opacity of Mallarmé’s poetry is due, in large part, to the necessary impurity of this repiecing, much as Caribbean poetry, often equally opaque, resists reduction to a single, unproblematic meaning. To read this poetry is to participate in its poetics, to take part in its meaning-making, with the knowledge that this creation remains incomplete. In this paper, I focus particularly on the relationship between Mallarmé and Glissant: not only how Glissant drew on Mallarmé in his own poetic practice and social criticism but also how Glissant’s notions of Relation and opacité – poetic categories conceived in opposition to rationalist, colonial epistemologies – can help us hear Mallarmé with a Caribbean ear. Mallarmé’s engagement with the notions of hasard and nonsense in “Igitur” and “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” often associated with a plunge into the darkness of the néant, takes on an affirmative, liberating potential in the Caribbean context. Mallarmé, who finally “cède l’initiative aux mots,” releasing his words into the realm of chance, lays the groundwork for a postcolonial poetics that invites the reader to participate, with each reading, in the construction of a new mosaic.

“21st-Century Symbolism?” Nikolaj Lübecker, University of Oxford One of the major concerns in 20th century was to interrogate the limits of the human subject. Inspired by thinkers such as Marx, Freud and Saussure, critics argued that the human subject was caught up in various social, psychological and linguistic structures that restricted its autonomy. An important tendency in 21st century theory has been to radicalise this decentering of human subjectivity. Writers associated with affect theory, new materialism, speculative realism and ecocriticism (among others) now contend that the push towards economics, the unconscious and language was insufficient, because it largely remained stuck in an anthropocentric perspective that recent scientific discoveries (in the biological and cognitive sciences, for instance) and contemporary socio-political developments (such as the climate crisis) force us to challenge in a much more radical way. For many, very good reasons, the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé appealed to the readers of Marx, Freud and Saussure. But it is becoming increasingly clear that French symbolist poetry also offers a lot to those 21st century readers who are keen to radicalise the critique of anthropocentrism. This paper will focus on Baudelaire’s prose poetry in order to reflect on the potential – and the limitations – of these largely ‘non-anthropocentric’ NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 interpretations. It will focus on three big questions: What does ‘spleen’ mean when associated with a city and not a human subject? What does ‘soul’ mean when the lyric subject is entirely caught up in logics of contamination and ‘transversality’ (Guattari)? What role should ‘beauty’ play in a 21st century interpretation of French symbolism?

“Degradation of a Profession: the Choice of Images for a guide-conférencier Protest” Sara Pappas, University of Richmond In January 2015, a protest was staged in Paris outside the Palais Royal-Musée du metro stop and across from the Louvre itself. The demonstrators were mobilized against a new law that would disassociate the "carte professionnelle du guide-conférencier" from formal study and a degree program and replace the carte professionnelle with a registry based on a voluntary declaration by the registrant. The protestors handed out flyers that decried the unraveling of their profession, the possible elimination of jobs, and even "[la] dévalorisation de l'image de la France et de son patrimoine." My paper will focus on the choice of images for this protest. In addition to banners and signs with declarative statements, the demonstrators held up large images of specific works of art, most of them paintings. As far as I could see, there were two representative images for the nineteenth century; the first was appropriately emblematic of revolution and protest: Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple. The second painting was not a large nineteenth-century history painting, nor was it a Courbet or Manet that so scandalized the Salon. It wasn't even a familiar and recognizable Impressionist image. The second painting representing the nineteenth century at the protest was Gustave Caillebotte's Les raboteurs du parquet. Why the Caillebotte? Is it a straightforward reference to gentrification and neo-liberalism? Or is the choice of Caillebotte more nuanced? I will consider the Delacroix and the Caillebotte in the context of the protest and their relationship to the demonstrators and to the other images chosen for the demonstration.

Panel 6.E: “What’s your poison?” Distillations of French Alcohol Culture Chair: E. Nicole Meyer, Georgia Regents University

“Viral Marketing: Le Vin Mariani and the Export of French Culture” Elizabeth Emery, Montclair State University Le Vin Mariani, a tonic of Bordeaux wine and cocaine concocted by chemist Angelo Mariani in 1863 Paris, had, by the 1890s, become the ultimate international energy drink, extolled in the pages of Life magazine (1894) by world-renowned Naturalist novelist Emile Zola as “the Elixir of Life, giv[ing] vigor, health, and energy.” Mariani’s wine has become an obligatory reference in the history of cocaine addiction, yet much less attention has been devoted to exploring the commercial mechanisms behind its tremendous international success. Drawing on Doug Rushkoff’s writings about viral marketing, this liberally illustrated presentation will examine the highly effective (and often unscrupulous) techniques used by Mariani to make his product a household name, in France and in the United States. Within this examination of marketing techniques the paper will concentrate on Mariani advertisements targeted to American women, major consumers of this “health tonic.” Capitalizing on received ideas about the “healthiness” of Bordeaux wine and the cultural sophistication of the French nation, the marketing campaign featured notable women writers and NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 performers (among them Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Rachilde, Louise Michel, and Polaire) who provided enthusiastic autographed testimonials. Mariani’s techniques—including free samples, word of mouth promotions, special packaging, celebrity endorsements, and collectibles—made the addictive product an irresistible part of early American soda fountain culture, itself targeted to female consumers. The wine may have been delicious, but its remarkable global expansion can be credited to Mariani’s early “viral marketing”—his clever exploitation of social networks to promote French culture abroad.

“The Fairy and the Aphid” Gretchen Schultz, Brown University I propose to look at the culture of drinking in the late 19th-century, specifically with regard to two elements associated with infestation and contagion. The vine-eating phylloxera aphid, accidentally imported from the US, laid waste to French vineyards in a slow, but steady march across the country, beginning around 1865 through the turn of the century. In so doing, this small bug devastated and forever altered an industry that was both a source of national pride and essential to the health of the French economy. The resulting wine shortage, among other factors, contributed to the rise in consumption of absinthe, la fée verte. Once considered a fashionable apéritif at the mid-century, absinthe came to be considered a national peril and was a central focus of the temperance movement. Hygienists and physicians detailed and denounced the scourge of absinthism, which was thought to lead to criminality, epilepsy, and degeneration, among other ills. At the same time, French wine (and in particular the reds of Bordeaux and Burgundy) was touted as a healthful dietary staple. The absinthe prohibition campaign succeeded with its interdiction in 1915. This paper will explore these two threads with particular emphasis on their relation to French nationalism.

“‘A l'heure des mains vides’: The Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour” Melanie Hawthorne, Texas A&M Renée Vivien entitled one of her poetry anthologies "A l'heure des mains jointes" (1906), evoking either--as the English translation has it--"the sweet hour of hand in hand" (Naiad, 1979) when women hold each other's hands, or—as the cover of the first French edition would seem to suggest—the moment when one puts one's hands together in prayer. This (illustrated) presentation takes as its starting point a different moment of the day, when one's hands are empty. Since poetry is often considered "difficult," what better way to approach it than with a drink to fill the empty hand? And since Vivien herself was so fond of cocktails, why not a cocktail invented specifically for her? I will share the recipe for the "sunset goddess" cocktail (perfect for when the sun goes down), and use the setting of the cocktail hour as the occasion to re-read Vivien's poem "The Sunset Goddess." In addition to reviewing the question of who served as the inspiration for this poem (Eva Palmer? Natalie Barney? Hélène de Zuylen?), I will explore the poem's tribute to and its later influence on the work of Guillaume Apollinaire.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 6.F: Contaminating the Social and Cultural Orders: Class, Gender, and the Politics of le partage du sensible Chair: Armine Mortimer, University of Illinois

“Social Transgressions: Rancière's Reading of Le Rouge et le noir” Marina Van Zuylen, Bard College The danger of passing from one class to another, the ability to dream or write oneself out of an assigned milieu, is at the center of Jacques Rancière's work on the nineteenth-century novel. This paper will address what I will call "contamination control" in his reading of Le Rouge et le noir. Rancière is known to focus on moments of epiphany, moments when real or fictional characters break out of their allotted roles and reclaim agency. These out-of-body experiences, as utopian and short-lived as they might be, coincide with a radical divorce from place and time. They reside outside the logic of calculation, connecting the subject back to his or her senses. Out of the porous underground man of Parisian life, Julien is reborn, perfectly immune to the scorn or praise that sculpted his previous identities. Just before his mise à mort, he sheds his esprit de ressentiment and develops a Bartleby-like indifference to advancement or social failure. Casting aside his master plans, he experiences a sustained reverie, a blissful torpor that inoculates him against the vicissitudes of ambition. Rancière explains how Julien's becoming immune to the gaze of the outside world coincides with a new form of receptivity, a redemptive "partage du sensible." Paradoxically, it is when Julien is able to take in the micro- elements of life rather than its great philosophical abstractions that he ceases to be contaminated by class envy. By changing the vocabulary with which class is described (no longer using words like parvenu, arriviste, or nouveau riche), Rancière examines how the novel's final twist allows Stendhal's vocabulary of contamination to morph into a vocabulary of flight and autonomy.

“Urban Locomotion and Social Contagion in 19th-Century Paris” Masha Belenky, George Washington University “Le voyage en omnibus unit toutes les classes sociales sans distinction ni division. De tous les milieux parisiens où l’on se puisse rencontrer, la voiture d’omnibus est évidemment celle qui offre la plus parfaite image de démocratie et de fraternité courtoise.” Writing at the turn of the century, offers this romantic and nostalgic vision of the Parisian omnibus, the first vehicle of urban mass transit. Yet this vision of social class cohesion stands in stark contrast with numerous nineteenth-century visual and textual representations of the omnibus interior, which portray it instead as a site of deep class tensions and “social contagion.” When the omnibus service was first launched in 1828, the most striking feature of the new vehicle was that it was by law open to everyone regardless of class, wealth, or social status. Yet by all historical accounts, in reality the omnibus fell short of this universal inclusiveness. The wealthy and status-conscious travellers eschewed it in favor of private carriages or carriages for hire, while the poor and the working class could not afford even the low fare of the new service. The placement of initial omnibus lines clearly privileged the neighborhoods where wealth and commerce were concentrated. As a result, the majority of real-life omnibus passengers in the early years were most likely commercial and other petit bourgeois, and thus the class composition of the vehicle’s interior was a far cry from the universal inclusiveness that the vehicle purportedly boasted. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

And yet, despite this reality, it was the potential inclusiveness that inexorably captured the imagination of contemporaries. The omnibus literature from across nineteenth century capitalized on the idea embodied in the vehicle’s name – “for all” – to express a panoply of anxieties associated with the (theoretically) democratic nature of the vehicle, and more broadly, with rapidly shifting social relations which characterized nineteenth-century France more generally. Focusing on a number of popular lithographs and works of urban observation from the 1830s and 1840s, this paper shows how different forms of nineteenth-century popular culture used the figure of the omnibus to construct class tensions within the discursive space of the page. Rather than reflect the “reality” of class mixing on the omnibus (a reality that is questionable at best), the omnibus literature articulated bourgeois preoccupations with the perceived potential for “class contagion” within the newly created urban spaces, and shaped the way class tensions were perceived by the public.

“‘Cette lèpre sentimentale’: Sandisme, Female Contagion, and the Politics of Representation” Alexandra Wettlaufer, University of Texas, Austin As Jacques Rancière explains in his “Dix thèses sur la politique,” the essence of politics is “a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason…that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique]”10 and manifests a “specific rupture in the logic of the arche” or the principles of knowledge (Thesis 3). Challenging the distribution of power and subjectivity, politics, within this framework, proposes new configurations of what is “thinkable” or “imaginable” and new ways of seeing the world. For Rancière, politics “is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one” (Thesis 8), thus exposing the exclusionary nature of structures of power and rendering visible “new” subjects that had always been present but previously not perceptible, thus voiceless, silenced. This “constitution of a specific subject” takes place, for Rancière, not as much in the subject’s utterances as in the recognition of those utterances (or actions, consciousness) in political terms by those already endowed with political subjectivity, for “if there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding that it is an utterance coming out of the their mouths” (Thesis 8). In this paper I will examine the double effect of George Sand, both in her novels and in her public persona, in altering the partage du sensible to give voice and visibility to previously silenced subjects: women, peasants, and the urban proletariat. In reading resistance to Sand, through mainstream (male) literary critics, authors, and caricaturists I will consider the various strategies of anxious containment that sought to empty the figure of the female author—that is, both Sand and her followers—of political subjectivity by turning their “utterances” into empty echoes, devoid of meaning, and returned to the realm of the unimaginable. Yet, in the proliferating representations of the female author by her critics and the repeated use of the tropes of disease and contagion, emblematized by Balzac’s characterization of “le sandisme” as “cette lèpre sentimentale,” we paradoxically find an affirmation of precisely that which these critics are trying to deny: radical change in the body politic and the constitution of new aesthesis.

10 Jacques Rancière, Thesis 1 in “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5.3 (2001). NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 6.G: The Syphilis Plague: Prostitution and Hygiene in Fin-de-Siècle France Chair: Candace Skorupa, Yale University

“Textual Contagion: Syphilis and the putain naturaliste” Steven Wilson, Queen’s University Belfast The embodiment of a potent threat to the social, cultural and biological ideals of purity and hygiene, the nineteenth-century prostitute left her mark not only on the mind, but also on the body, of a generation of French writers, many of whom were personally affected by the contagious disease with which she was inextricably associated: syphilis. A prime source of contamination, the syphilitic prostitute’s abject body is often depicted in the literature of the time as putrid matter – oozing fluids, decomposing and rotting. Heavily infected by the discourses of medicine, science and public hygiene, the representation of the ‘putain naturaliste’ – ‘par nature corrompue, puteo’, as Patrick Wald Lasowski puts it – enjoys a privileged position in the broad literary-cultural imagination of nineteenth-century France. This paper considers the discursive and ideological construction of two of naturalism’s lesser-known syphilitic prostitutes, the sexually-contagious figures of Lucie Thirache in Paul Adam’s Chair molle (1885) and Alphonsine in Adolphe Tabarant’s Virus d’amour (1886), and reads them within an intertextual framework that includes Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s treatise on prostitution, Alfred Fournier’s neo-regulationist rhetoric, and Edmond Fournier’s theory of hérédosyphilis, all of which testify to a nineteenth-century obsession with transmission, contagion and the challenge of the porous body. In this way, our examination of the prostitute who is, at the same time, victim and source of contamination, serves as a departure point for a consideration of syphilis as a textual as well as a sexual epidemic, circulating across discursive boundaries, corrupting not only the physiological body, but bodies of knowledge. The paper will thus conclude by suggesting that the metaphor of the text as body (corps, corpus), subject to rhetorical, intertextual and discursive contamination, provides an interpretative framework that allows us to appreciate more fully the sense of hantise that characterises syphilis in nineteenth-century France.

“Sexual Contamination and the Threat of Transmission: Syphilis in 19th-Century Regulations, Representations, and Testimonials” Sayeeda Mamoon, Edgewood College In her compelling essay “From to Prostitute: Mercenary Sex and Venereal Disease, 1730-1802,” Kathryn Norberg argues that in the years immediately following the French Revolution, streetwalkers became “increasingly identified with syphilis” while the affliction suggested “hidden moral corruption.”11 The conflation of syphilis and prostitution at the dawn of the 19th-Century made venal sex an issue of public policy where the ownership of the whore’s body shifted to the domain of medical science.12 Archival records from the period indicate that as early as 1800, two doctors were appointed by the Parisian police to inspect female sex workers and officially document their names.13 By 1812, all prostitutes had to comply with mandatory registration and pelvic examinations while brothels and solicitation were

11 See Kathryn Norberg; “From Courtesan to Prostitute: Mercenary Sex and Venereal Disease, 1730-1802” in Journal of the History of Sexuality vol. 8, No. 4 (April 1998) 42 12 Norberg, 44. 13 Ibid. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 limited to designated red-light areas. 14 Despite measures to contain the disease and the continued scapegoating of streetwalkers as the agents of contamination, syphilis reached its peak between 1879 and 1880, with as many as 5000 new cases of annual outbreak.15 According to some reports, between thirteen to fifteen percent of the male population carried the disease, and the number of contagious syphilitics in French society rose to the staggering figure of one million by the turn of the last century.16 In this paper, I investigate how cultural productions, namely literature and the visual arts between the 1870s and the 1890s address and depict the syphilis epidemic. My reading focuses on “La vengeance d’une femme” by Barbey d’Aurevilly (1874), Zola’s Naturalist novel Nana (1880), Maupassant’s patriotic short story “Le Lit 29” (1884), and the dream sequence in Huysmans’s decadent novel A rebours (1884). I also look at Toulouse Lautrec’s 1894 Rue des Moulins tableaux along with Félicien Rops’s Mors Siphilitica etchings from the same year. In addition, my study is informed by testimonials from Maupassant and Daudet, as well as anecdotal reports from their cohorts. In my research, I am interested in learning to what extent the works perused resist, reproduce, regulate or sublimate the venereal disease. My examination lends particular attention to the following questions: How do gender and class play into the iconography of syphilis? Who are the perceived victims and perpetrators? How are the transmitters of the infection pathologized? What are the artistic devices and narrative strategies used to allude to the illness without naming or figuring it? Can the disease be contained and destroyed through its representation or is the ailment allegorized? And finally, whether attitudes, perceptions and preventions related to syphilis change and evolve over the course of the 19th century and the ways in which these developments are acknowledged in the written and visual representations of the Fin de Siècle.

“Les bas-fonds et la tératologie syphilitique chez Maupassant” Céline Brossillon, Ursinus College Alors que la sexualité des couples bourgeois est propre et tournée vers la procréation, la sexualité célibataire est perçue comme sale, n’ayant d’autre but que le plaisir. Le célibataire devient ainsi l’emblème d’une société décadente où le plaisir est roi et la prostituée reine, ces deux êtres complices dans la prolifération d’un cancer social. La maison close, sorte d’initiation à la virilité, est le lieu où l’adolescent se fait homme, et où les célibataires reviendront régulièrement. Toutefois, l’amour vénal inspire à la fois désirs et dégoût : les filles sont généralement décrites dans l’outrance, leur hygiène est médiocre, et leur chambre pue la misère humaine. Par ailleurs, Maupassant fait référence aux « taches suspectes » sur leurs draps, évoquant ainsi le mal vénérien rampant chez les filles de rue. Les bas-fonds de la société cachent sous des parfums leur odeur d’égout, et le célibataire vit dans l’angoisse de la contagion, parfois paralysé par la syphilophobie. La fréquentation des prostituées constitue ainsi une contamination morale doublée d’une potentielle contamination biologique. La sexualité du célibataire qui a recours aux prostituées porte le sceau de l’infamie, de la maladie et de la mort. En effet, le célibataire, qui incarne une forme de dégénérescence de par son rejet des valeurs bourgeoises et

14 Norberg 45 15 See Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in 19th Century France, Duke UP (1997), 234. 16 Bernheimer, 312. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 sa quête des plaisirs en dehors du mariage, ne peut avoir qu’une sexualité déviante, et cette perversion se paie par la maladie dont la prostituée se fait le véhicule. La syphilis est ainsi perçue comme le châtiment imposé à la débauche célibataire.

Break 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Friday 6 November Session 7 – 3:30 pm - 5:15 pm

Panel 7.A: La littérature à l’épreuve du réel: censures, contaminations, contagions Chair: Alain Pagès, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

“« Une charogne » : Flaubert et Baudelaire” Jacques Neefs, Johns Hopkins University Alors qu’il rédige dans le chapitre VIII de Bouvard et Pécuchet, le passage où les deux bonshommes rencontrent « la charogne d’un chien », ce qui les conduira à une méditation sur la mort et la vie, puis à la décision du suicide (auquel finalement ils renoncent par une sorte de miracle), Flaubert note dans son manuscrit « éviter Baudelaire ». Pourtant la prose de Flaubert est elle aussi une méditation (ironique et métaphysique) sur la portée esthétique et philosophique d’une « charogne ». L’exposé propose d’interroger, en lisant très précisément les deux textes, le rapport spécifique que la modernité esthétique entretient avec la « contemplation » et l’interrogation de la limite de la vie et de la mort, de la « charognerie » dans sa substance élémentaire, celle de la corruption et de la contamination infinies, de la violence du vivant, et leur conversion en forme d’art.

“La contamination par le rire: la représentation du personnage du président dans deux vaudevilles sous la Deuxième République” Janice Best, Acadia University Lorsqu’on rétablit la censure en France en 1850, après une courte période de liberté d’expression, les directives données aux censeurs furent claires : il fallait éliminer des planches « l’antagonisme entre les classes inférieures et des hautes classes […], les attaques contre les principes d’autorité, contre la religion, contre la famille, la magistrature, l’armée, […] en un mot contre les institutions sur lesquelles repose la société » afin de faire du théâtre « un lieu de repos et de distraction et non pas une arène ouverte aux passions politiques » (Archives Nationales, F/21/4635). Les censeurs veillaient à contrôler l’image donnée des personnalités politiques, et en particulier du chef de l’état. Comme le fait d’avoir un président était une nouveauté sous la Deuxième République, nombreux étaient les auteurs à vouloir en parler dans leurs pièces. Dans la plupart des cas, les censeurs prirent le parti de tout simplement supprimer ces allusions. Comme ils l’expliquèrent dans un rapport : « En général, il peut y avoir inconvénient à appeler ainsi en plein théâtre l’attention sur la personne ou sur les actes du chef de l’état, parce que de mauvais esprits pourraient y trouver l’occasion d’une manifestation fâcheuse » (A.N. F/21/989). Dans cette communication, je compte explorer la représentation du président dans deux vaudevilles datant de 1850 et de 1851, La Maison du Carrousel ou l’Hôtel de de Henry de Kock et Martial ou le Vol à la fleur d’orange de Bayard et Verner. Selon les censeurs, les références au président dans ces pièces ne pouvaient être tolérées parce qu’elles donnaient lieu à des incidents et à des détails comiques. Comme il s’agissait de comédies, cependant, les censeurs accordaient une plus grande latitude aux auteurs dans les sujets et les situations à aborder. Plusieurs censeurs firent référence à cette liberté comme étant le « privilège de la parodie ». J’espère démontrer que les techniques employées par les auteurs pour créer des effets comiques NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 leur permettaient de garder certaines allusions au chef de l’état, malgré l’interdiction des censeurs.

“Pour une littérature expérimentale : la contagion en action” Kristen Cook-Gailloud, Johns Hopkins University Prise dans un sens général, la contagion a ceci d’intéressant qu‘elle dérange et change. Guerrière invisible et acharnée, elle s’insinue dans son hôte à son insu, le trouble, le saisit, l’agresse, pour le laisser vainqueur ou vaincu. Contemporain de savants qui, par le biais de la méthode expérimentale, ont cherché à battre en brèche la théorie arriérée des miasmes et à s‘interroger sur les spécificités de l’action contagieuse (Filippo Pacini, Louis Pasteur et Robert Koch parmi d‘autres), Émile Zola rédige en 1879 un article qui reproduit le même questionnement: “Le Roman expérimental“. Visant à prescrire un paradigme de pensée mieux adapté aux changements rapides de la nouvelle société industrielle, son texte opère toutefois selon une logique double qui n’a pas toujours été comprise par ses lecteurs: sur un plan concret, Zola y souligne la nécessité de savoir quitter un mode de pensée devenu désuet afin de pouvoir entrer dans un régime de pensée nouveau; sur le plan moins manifeste de l‘expression métaphorique, et dans l‘intention de provoquer et de véritablement remuer l’esprit de son interlocuteur, l‘article imite le fonctionnement invisible et puissant du phénomène contagieux situé au coeur des interrogations scientifiques de son époque. Cette présentation analysera les deux modalités selon lesquelles le projet expérimental de Zola s’intéresse à l’action contagieuse. En partant des modulations textuelles du projet expérimental (publié sous forme d’article en 1879, de recueil en 1880, puis de roman dans Les Trois villes, 1892-1898), je montrerai comment Zola fait de la contagion un outil littéraire destiné à contaminer l‘analogie établie entre maladie et péché catholique, et, de manière plus générale, à éradiquer le dangereux dogme de la convention et de la présomption.

Panel 7.B: Between Nations: Fictions of Frenchness Chair: Nicholas White, University of Cambridge

“Fictions of Jewish Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century France” Maurice Samuels, Yale University In the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, reports indicate that increasing numbers of French Jews are immigrating to Israel, calling the future of French Jewry into question. This reverses what many have seen as a tradition if not of indifference then at least of ambivalence on the part of French Jews to the Zionist project. In this paper, I want to probe the history of this ambivalence by examining how French Jewish fiction viewed the question of Jewish nationalism in the nineteenth century. Whereas most historians have characterized the ethos of Franco-Judaism as being opposed to Jewish nationalism, I will show that in the period before the creation of the modern Zionist movement, French Jewish writers imagined multiple models of Jewish collective identity. How, I want to ask, did the specific features of Jewish emancipation in the French context allow for an idea of Jewish nationalism to take shape alongside expressions of loyalty to France and to the ideal of French universalism? How did literature contribute to the formation of these complex ideologies?

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“Axes of Otherness: The Jew Between Empire and Nation in Maupassant's Bel-Ami” Dorian Bell, University of California, Santa Cruz The German-sounding name of Walter, the conspiratorial Jew pulling political and economic levers in Maupassant's Bel-Ami, belies his supposed "méridional" status as a Jew from the Midi. Southern French Jews had arrived from many places in many different ways. They generally were not, however, Ashkenazim from Germany and Eastern Europe, as Walter's name suggests him to be. What to make of this incongruence? The answer, I offer in this paper, has to do with the unique capacity of Jews-or at least their nineteenth-century representation-to translate between national and imperial scales. By giving Walter the onomastic trappings of German identity, Maupassant inscribes him in a grand French literary tradition of German- Jewish villainy. The national "axis of otherness," to borrow a phrase from Fredric Jameson, here appears firmly oriented along eastern and European lines, at least with regard to German Jews. But as I argue, the fact of these Germanic bugbears' Jewishness also aligned them with an axis of otherness rapidly extending in the southern, African direction followed by French imperial expansion. This is particularly the case for Walter, whose Moroccan speculations in the novel recall the scandal surrounding France's invasion of Tunisia in 1881, and whose southernness therefore rejoins the creeping new threat he incarnates. The result invites us to reconsider the displacement that occurred when, according to Jameson, nineteenth-century colonial powers substituted European national rivalries for a more fundamentally unsettling axis of otherness produced in the encounter by Europeans with their imperial subjects. The displacement was never absolute, and traces of uncontained colonial otherness explain how frequently European imperial nation-states figured differences among them by means of the Jewish national other. Thus, I conclude, might anti-Semitic ire manifest an anxiety about the nation's increasing inhabitation of a world system marked by impenetrable complexity and racial alterity-something feasible because of the Jews' understood racial or conspiratorial association with colonized subalterns-while recoding that anxiety into a more tolerable encounter playing out at a national scale as a matter of national rivalry-something feasible, in turn, because of the same overdetermined Jew's continued association with the German or British or any other national enemy.

“On Political Annihilation: Targets and ‘Halos’ of Collateral Damage in Political Fiction” Emily Apter, New York University Grégoire Chamayou writes about drone targets as carrying force-fields of vulnerability inclusive of and surpassing their discrete bodies. Around the epidermal envelope is an apocalyptic halo, a "perimeter of destruction," a zone of potential harm where collateral damage happens. Chamayou (and Eyal Weizman) consider this halo of potential annihilation as a key component of the forensics of drone warfare. I'd like to extend the concept to social warfare, as depicted in the nineteenth-century political novel. The drone-effect becomes perceptible when the subject is suddenly annihilated and those under its halo collaterally destroyed as a result of political maneuvers or targeting by a sovereign body (the state, the police, political opponents). The comparison of the social/political field to a warzone is a well-worn , but I would be giving new weight to social forensics, to the calculated ratios of return on damages that turn the pursuit of power into a truly deadly business. The drone model of warfare might also be used to analyze the post-revolutionary technological model of sovereignty that characterized the Napoleonic state, its domestic policing and military campaigns abroad. It is a state that tracks the NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 citizen like prey, and strategically exploits that invisible "perimeter of destruction" that makes of each targeted citizen an unwitting accomplice to collateral damage.

“Zola's Alsace and the Franco-German ‘Translation Zone’” Nicholas White, University of Cambridge Notoriously, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was triggered by a willful act of mistranslation, in Bismarck's manipulation of the Ems Dispatch. "Mistranslation in the art of diplomacy," as Emily Apter explains, "comes to signal an intractable non-translatability between nations, a condition of catastrophic blocage that inspires paranoid projection and the moral calculus of the zero-sum game (in which whatever benefits one side is assumed to hurt the other)." In this context, this paper aims to study the territorial, linguistic and cultural play of war, and the interplay between the Gallic and the Germanic in what was the most famous Third Republic novel on 1870, Zola's La Débâcle (1892). Indeed, by the 1890s, Zola was an international celebrity, immediately translated into numerous , including German. I would therefore like to consider this particular novel as a cultural object on the international stage, instantly crossing the border that the French army had failed to cross in 1870, and inviting responses from reviewers in Germany, as Zola was well aware. Germans also engaged in the subsequent polemical debate on the accuracy of Zola's account. This paper will in particular explore the fictional, and sometimes fictitious, interactions between French and German characters (from Napoleon III and Bismarck downwards) in a novel that was criticized for focusing on the French experience to the exclusion of the German one, whilst remaining - as the history of defeat demanded - within the geographical limits of France. The novel begins on a non-descript and unprepossessing spot just outside Mulhouse, and Alsace provides, I shall suggest, a complex way for Zola to rethink the Franco-German relationship, filtered through relationships of family, friendship and romance which cut across the cultural and military boundaries between the Gallic and the Germanic.

Panel 7.C: Dirty Sisters: Censoring Contaminated Word and Image Chair: Lauren S. Weingarden, Florida State University

“‘Contamination through the Eyes’: The Censorship of Illustrated Posters in Fin-de-siècle Paris” Karen L. Carter, Kendall College of Art & Design In the early 1890s, the Parisian police, under orders from the Minister of the Interior, seized and destroyed hundreds of examples of publicity posters while the posters’ artists and printers were charged with outrage aux bonnes moeurs, or violation of public decency. According to press accounts, the principal reason for this censorship was the posters’ images of sexualized female figures and their public display. The palpable sense of sexuality in this group of publicity posters was perceived by the Parisian authorities as not only challenging delicate sensibilities but also as posing a real threat to public . Moreover, the experience of viewing these images was expressed in the popular press as unleashing an unbridled, treacherous sexuality in the public sphere that was threatening precisely because it could not be sequestered, but controlled only through its removal and destruction. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

This paper will analyze the critical discourse of the 1890s that described the illustrated publicity poster in contradictory terms: both lauding its modernity and aesthetic potential and simultaneously condemning it as a source of suspicion and worry. In addition, my paper will analyze, through a text-image comparison, specific examples of censored posters in relation to the journalistic accounts that discussed them and the laws that defined their transgressive status. Ultimately, this paper seeks to illuminate the contested terrain between press freedom and moral censorship that was enacted in order to protect urban populations, in particular bourgeois females, who were deemed vulnerable to visual “contamination” and corruption.

“Dodging the Censors: Daumier’s Haussmannization Prints” Jennifer S. Pride, Florida State University Honoré Daumier’s prints from 1852-1870 have not received adequate scholarly attention due to long-held beliefs that strict censorship laws prevented artists from satirizing and caricaturing political and social issues. Yet, a close examination of Daumier’s satirical caricatures in Le Charivari reveal that the artist documents the confusion and anxiety inherent in the ongoing erasure and remarking of the city’s physiognomy and, consequently, social and cultural traditions. I argue that Daumier used satire and irony as strategies to dodge the censors and provide social critique during this period of urban transformation known as Haussmannization. Rather than producing overtly critical images, Daumier’s prints represent the reality of Haussmannization in coded terms. In Le Charivari, caricatures combine image and text to reveal social anxieties regarding the loss of old Paris, the irony of new problems such as, dirt, sewage, traffic congestion, and accidents in the evolving city. Daumier also poked fun at modern life with images of Parisians dancing on the newly paved macadam boulevards, navigating the new phenomenon of the crowds, and self-reflecting on their roles in modern Paris. Such satirical images are a paradox of modernity itself in that they comprise irresolvable binaries regarding the positive/negative impact of Haussmannization. The character and conduct of Haussmann, himself is likewise satirized and forms part of the verbal-visual web of controversy that leads to his dismissal just before the end of Empire. Despite press censorship, these caricatures generate a discourse on Haussmannization and, implicitly, the Second Empire, with regard to disrupting, corrupting, and complicating life in the modern metropolis.

“Cross-Contaminated Bodies: Constructing Obscenity in the Public Imaginary” Lauren S. Weingarden, Florida State University This paper examines how textual and illustrated obscenities challenged the efficacy of the Second Empire censorship laws, while the laws made more vivid the efficacy of the obscene. To illustrate the dynamics of cross-contaminations between word and image and between fine art and popular culture, I argue that Edouard Manet signified in his 1863/65 Salon paintings, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, the slippage between legal (academic) and illegal (erotic) photography of female nudity within the context of the censorship laws formulated during the 1850s. I extend this visual dynamic to the literary by viewing Manet’s paintings and pornographic photography with the earlier 1857 censorship trials of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Here I show that the prosecutorial discourse shaped the critical reception of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia and extended the repertoire of the obscene. While the judicial discourse on literary censorship was replete with pictorial allusions to both illicit photography and the unidealized Realist nude, the critical discourse was replete with NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 allusions to the moral contamination of both the actual models and painted figures. This intersection of the judiciary and artistic spheres demonstrates multiple cross-contaminations through which the legal construction of obscenity contaminated the public imaginary and then exceeded the law’s repeal in 1870. The display of Manet’s 1877 painting of Nana illustrates the enduring public fear of moral contamination. Nana was rejected from the official salon because of its lewdness. This condemnation was again compounded by Manet’s references to erotic photography and Zola’s 15-year-old prostitute Nana who had just emerged from L’Assommoir. As Huysmans recounts, when Nana was prominently exhibited in a storefront window on a busy Parisian boulevard crowds gather with “screams of indignation.” Yet, Huysmans’ praise for Manet’s representation of “the quintessential fille” registers the enduring efficacy of artistic cross-contaminations to challenge the public imaginary on the obscene.

Panel 7.D: Crowds, Spectacles, and Contagious Affects

“Sur quelques décapitées de jadis” Claudie Bernard, New York University Le motif de la décapitation a contaminé la littérature postrévolutionnaire, qui, friande de fiction historique, le projette volontiers dans le passé. On s’intéressera ici au fantasme de la décapitation de la femme, telle qu’il se présente dans trois nouvelles situées aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles : Hélène Gillet de Nodier (1832), Les Cenci de Stendhal (1837), et Une page d’histoire de Barbey d’Aurevilly (1887). On montrera comment la culpabilité féminine (infanticide d’Hélène, parricide de Béatrix, inceste adelphique de Marguerite de Ravalet), liée à une souillure sexuelle, tient au détournement (chez Nodier), au retournement (chez Stendhal) ou à la contagion de la faute masculine (chez Barbey). On analysera ensuite la dissémination de la violence érotique et de la violence meurtrière du supplice, de la condamnée (coupable ou innocente) sur ses proches (complices), sur le bourreau (détaché et maudit), sur le peuple spectateur (mué en objet ou sujet de la mise à mort), et sur la figure royale ou papale. On examinera comment les narrateurs, séduits par leurs héroïnes, et impliqués en première personne dans les horrifiques anecdotes, mettent en place, sous divers alibis, des stratégies de séduction et de brutalisation du lecteur. Et on se demandera en quoi l’« histoire fantastique vraie » de Nodier, la « chronique italienne » de Stendhal, la « page d’histoire » de Barbey tout à la fois convoquent et conjurent une violence historique qui, par-delà le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle, pointe vers le XIXe.

“« Il fallait rire » : Le rire contagieux au service de la tyrannie dans L’Homme qui rit, de Victor Hugo” Julie Hugonny, New York University L’Homme qui rit, de Victor Hugo met en scène un paradoxe : son héros éponyme, dont le visage est figé en un rire silencieux, suscite l’hilarité des foules qui payent pour le voir, mais lui- même ne rit jamais. Gwynplaine, personnage « dénué d’humour » selon Joe Friedmann, est donc le porteur contagieux, mais sain, d’un virus auquel il est lui-même immunisé. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

En effet, si Gwynplaine fait rire tous les hommes, c’est par contact direct : ce rire ne se propage pas d’homme à homme, il est un phénomène dont il faut faire l’expérience à la source. Ce rire est donc contagieux, transmis par Gwynplaine exclusivement, et non épidémique, propagé par l’air. En revanche, si ce rire exige la présence de Gwynplaine, il est irrésistible et affecte tous les hommes : du Peuple aux Lords, personne n’y échappe. Grâce à lui les uns se distraient de leur ennui et les autres oublient leur pauvreté. Le visage figé en rire de Gwynplaine pervertit ainsi son message personnel, un message révolutionnaire d’égalité, qu’il délivre dans un discours vite noyé sous les rires provoqués par son apparition. En effet, pour Marie-Hélène Huet, si l’épidémie est propice aux idées révolutionnaires, qui sont portées par l’air du temps, la contagion, elle, correspond à un mode de pensée conservateur : on peut la contenir, et confiner les cas dangereux afin de l’étouffer. Et c’est bien un effet antirévolutionnaire qu’a ce rire sur le peuple : leur permettant d’oublier leur misère le temps d’un spectacle, il retarde d’autant un vrai soulèvement populaire. C’est ainsi que le rire de Gwynplaine, ce rire tyrannique et contagieux, trahit son message en entérinant malgré lui le status quo.

“Contagion in/of French Cinema: Cinephobia, Spectators, and the Role of Emotion” Rae Beth Gordon, University of Connecticut The paper examines representations of contagion in early cinema in relation to the very frequent presence of the theme of contagion in articles on the new medium. I propose that these articles can best be understood in the context of late-19th theories of emotion, as well as in the context of late-19th-century psycho-physiological theories of unconscious imitation, namely the internal reproduction of what one sees17. Fears surrounding the ability of the action and characters on screen to exert a negative influence on spectators were expressed in the 1910's in books, film magazines, and in newspapers. The anti-cinema discourse of a number of sociologists, criminologists and specialists in public hygiene, espoused also by a number of psychiatrists, psychologists and the clergy, spread alarm regarding the propensity of spectators to imitate the actions seen on screen. The medical use of hypnotic suggestion in the last third of the 19th century, as well as its use by itinerant magnetizers, set the stage for the immediate perception of the power of suggestion exercised by the cinematograph. In addition to the practice of hypnosis in hospitals, theaters and fairgrounds, the fear of contagion through suggestion obviously harkens back to Gustave Le Bon's 1895 Psychologie des foules. However, I believe that its basis also lies in the far less sensationalist notions surrounding the unconscious internal mirroring of the other's gestures, and the new theory of the emotions. In 1884-85, William James and Carl Lange proposed the thesis that emotions are a physiological reaction originating in the vasomotor systems; this reaction then triggers the outward corporeal expression of anger, joy, fear, and only then do we consciously feel the emotion. (Note that the spectator's body is affected by the emotion even if s/he does not become conscious of it.) These psycho-physiological notions found fertile ground in the scenarios of many films from 1908-

17 I have related the latter to the dynamics of imitation in film spectatorship in previous work, and will focus here on the emotions. Note that the recent theory in neuroscience of "mirror neurons" is nearly identical to the psychophysical and psychophysiological theories on the automatic internal reproduction of what one perceives which were published in France between 1880 and 1900.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

1913 where a character's gestures, facial expressions and emotions are transmitted to another character. After considering several texts that proffer warnings about contagion, followed by excerpts of films that illustrate this phenomenon, we will see how automatic motor response is intimately interwoven with emotional response, and why the two --alongside the menace of hypnotic suggestion-- underlie fear of the contagion propagated by film.

Panel 7.E: Poisons, vermines, contagions – vers une poétique de la contamination chez Baudelaire Chair: Robert St. Clair, Dartmouth College

“Contaminated Flowers: Gautier on Baudelaire and Hawthorne” Joseph Acquisto, University of Vermont Théophile Gautier’s four essays on Baudelaire reveal a struggle to find the right way to introduce him to the reading public. One of Gautier’s most frequently used tools is simile; his comparisons of Baudelaire to soda water, Epsom salts, and cats, to cite just a few, illustrate the difficulty of naming who the poet is and what he does in his poetry. Despite Gautier’s assertion of the harmlessness of Baudelaire’s poetry, I claim that there is an element of danger in the new reading practices inspired by Baudelaire that Gautier does not fully acknowledge but that is revealed, intriguingly, in a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappacini’s Daughter,” which Gautier mentions in three of his four articles on Baudelaire and which concerns a young woman who tends her father’s garden of poisonous plants without herself becoming contaminated. I suggest that the processes of reading and writing as they are portrayed and performed in Hawthorne’s story reveal important aspects of Gautier’s own approach to Baudelaire, in both the possibilities it opens up and the limitations it suggests. Gautier’s attempts to get a handle on Baudelaire’s newness via comparative descriptions risk cancelling the newness of the poetry by reappropriating it within the familiar. By contrast, the specific comparison to “Rappaccini’s Daughter” invites reflection on the full complexity of Baudelaire’s poetry, but in ways that Gautier did not identify and which he probably did not foresee, focusing as he did on a single aspect of the story, choosing what he wanted us to see in it and thus preserving coherence and sanity at the price of full acknowledgement of the richness of the text of Hawthorne’s story and, by extension, Baudelaire’s poetry as well.

“Vers, vermines, vermisseaux et autres bestioles contaminantes dans l'œuvre poétique de Baudelaire” Dominique Rincé, École Polytechnique On connaît bien le bestiaire de Baudelaire pour ses grands oiseaux chargés de symboles (hiboux songeurs, cygnes égarés ou albatros spleenétiques), ses « bons » chiens ou « toutous » frétillants, et surtout ses « chats » tout empreints d'une mystérieuse et fascinante félinité. On connaît moins en revanche la petite faune rampante qui semble avoir élu domicile, pour l'infester et le vivifier tout à la fois, dans le poème baudelairien. Vers, vermines, vermisseaux, mais aussi mouches, punaises, araignées, fourmis, chrysalides et autres insolites « helminthes », grouillent et prolifèrent dans les alvéoles des « vers » homonymes puisqu'aussi bien c'est dans ceux des Fleurs du mal, bien davantage que dans les proses du Spleen de Paris (en dépit de la reptilienne dédicace à Arsène Houssaye!), que ce grouillement infectieux et contaminatoire paraît s'exercer. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Notre présente communication, après avoir dressé rapidement l'inventaire de ce micro bestiaire vénéneux, s'attachera à en dégager la portée symbolique et surtout poétique si l'on veut bien considérer que des Memento mori comme « Une Charogne » ou « Le Flacon » sont aussi d'authentiques arts poétiques où s'opère, dans le terreau du texte, l'oxymorique travail de décomposition / recréation porté par ces « infâmes » petites bestioles... « De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est là », proclamera le premier fragment de Mon cœur mis à nu. Rien de tel en effet que de « noirs bataillons de larves » pour effectuer ce paradigmatique retournement de l'organique putréfié et pulvérisé au poétique reconfiguré et sublimé!

“Étranges contagions” Éric Trudel, Bard College On sait comment Baudelaire, dans ses Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, ouvrait grandes les portes du Beau à la morbidité, en évoquant « l’Esthétique classique » sous la figure d’une « matrone rustique, répugnante de santé et de vertu. » Personne ne doute d’ailleurs que ses Fleurs malades, véritable « floraison de monstruosité » aient elles-mêmes été source majeure de l’infection parmi ses lecteurs. Devant quelques images tirées du « capharnaüm diabolique […] de Breughel le Drôle », le poète s’exclamait avec joie qu’il s’en « répand[ait] une contagion » pour ajouter ensuite ce commentaire, comme pour en tirer une leçon pratique : « souvent nous trouvons dans l’histoire, même dans plus d’une partie moderne de l’histoire, la preuve de l’immense puissance des contagions ». De la même manière, dans le Salon de 1846, il invitait son lecteur à le suivre « dans l’hôpital de la peinture » où il lui serait loisible de toucher « aux plaies et aux maladies » et ainsi s’intéresser à « toutes les affections morbides. » Considérant avec horreur « l’invasion » de la photographie dans l’art, Baudelaire évoquait pourtant au contraire une « maladie » par laquelle l’industrie venait corrompre l’art. Enfin, la chose est bien connue, il n’hésita pas à décrire l’esprit républicain de 1848, dominant, comme une « vérole dans les os » qui n’épargnait rien ni personne : « Nous sommes, affirmait-il, Démocratisés et Syphilisés ». C’est donc à cet imaginaire multiple et contradictoire de la contagion que cette contribution voudrait s’intéresser, en repérant et interrogeant ses différentes valeurs, à la fois vecteur d’un effet de trouble ou de nouveau qui « va toujours son chemin » (qu’on pense à la contagion du mal, du rire, de l’ironie, de la poésie par la prose) ou risque hygiénique qu’il faudrait pouvoir tenter, en vain, de contenir.

“Verse-nous ton poison – l’altération poétique chez Baudelaire” Catherine Witt, Reed College Outre sa valeur de métaphore désignant l’expression poétique – Baudelaire, dans un projet de préface, parle « d’extraire la beauté du Mal » (OCI, 181), le poison est un motif repris dans une dizaine de poèmes des Fleurs du Mal qui lie et organise le recueil. Dans l’édition de 1861, il figure tout aussi bien dans l’inventaire des crimes dont ne peuvent s’enorgueillir les craintives âmes qu’interpelle « Au Lecteur » que dans la dernière strophe de l’ultime poème « Le Voyage », où le poison devient une réconfortante liqueur pour le poète qui veut sonder le gouffre de l’Inconnu. La présente communication s’intéressera de près au poème « Le Poison » que Baudelaire inscrit au centre du recueil dans le cycle de compositions dédiées à Marie Daubrun. Dans ce poème, le poison compte avec le vin et l’opium parmi les substances dont les vertus évocatoires poétisent le monde, mais c’est aussi, comme l’indique le sous-titre des Paradis artificiels, l’un des « moyens de multiplication de l’individualité » sur laquelle est fondée la NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 poétique baudelairienne. L’essai poético-pharmaceutique que sont Les Paradis artificiels (1860) orientera notre lecture de la pénultième strophe du « Poison », où l’absorption du liquide vénéneux qui s’écoule des yeux de la femme aimée ne fait pas que désaltérer « les songes » du sujet poétique « en foule », mais entraîne aussi une altération radicale du langage poétique conventionnel. Oscillant entre désaltération et altération, cette strophe ouvre un lieu abyssal dans lequel se joue la poétique contaminatoire des Fleurs du Mal.

Panel 7.F: Epidemiology of the Feuilleton Chair: Judith Lyon-Caen, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales

“Contamination, souillure et mutation : l’épidémie feuilletonesque” Nicolas Gauthier, University of Waterloo Avec le recul historique, l’émergence du roman-feuilleton sous la monarchie de Juillet peut sembler être la marche triomphale d’une innovation que tous s’empressent d’imiter. Cependant, plusieurs commentateurs y ont plutôt vu une implacable « maladie littéraire » (Alfred Nettement, Études sur le feuilleton-roman, 1845) contaminant tout ce qu’elle touche. Le thème de la contamination est crucial parce que, plus qu'un simple mode de publication, ce sont une poétique, une esthétique et une conception du littéraire qui sont attaquées parce qu’elles « souillent » un idéal de la Littérature, y multiplient les impuretés et en corrompent les fondements. Notre communication se propose de lever le voile sur ce pan moins connu de l'histoire littéraire pour mieux cerner la méfiance initiale envers ce genre, laquelle a longtemps cadré et biaisé la critique des œuvres feuilletonesques. Nous examinerons comment le roman- feuilleton a « contaminé » le journal Le Constitutionnel, second quotidien parisien en importance en 1836. Initialement opposé à cette innovation (ce qui explique notre choix), il a finalement cédé et a même posé un jalon de l’histoire du roman-feuilleton en offrant à Eugène Sue la colossale de 100 000 francs pour son Juif errant en 1843. Nous constaterons ainsi que, plus encore que ceux d’une marche triomphale ou d’une invasion, le motif de la contamination s’avère particulièrement approprié pour comprendre la façon dont le roman-feuilleton s’impose dans les journaux lorsque se répand ce que les contemporains auraient bien pu nommer l'épidémie feuilletonesque.

“‘Matière de librairie’: Defining the Literary Marketplace in the Feuilleton” Anne O’Neil-Henry, Georgetown University In his 1839 essay “De la littérature industrielle,” Sainte-Beuve famously railed against what he saw as the contamination of the contemporary literary field, concluding that “deux littératures coexistent dans une proportion bien inégale et coexisteront de plus en plus, mêlées entre elles comme le bien et le mal en ce monde, confondues jusqu’au jour du jugement” (691). The rise of commercially driven literature threatened the purity of artistic production for this critic who found authors’ preoccupation with the material conditions of their works lamentable “pour les lettres en général” (687). This paper explores these “contaminating” material conditions in the Bibliographie de la France ou le Journal général de l’imprimerie et de la librairie (established in 1811), a publication that both catalogued the rise of popular literature that concerned Sainte-Beuve, and also served as a site for the making of the professional knowledge of the modern commercial book trade. In particular, I study excerpts from a NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 supplement to this journal known as the Feuilleton ou Journal de la librairie (created in 1825) that functioned as a « bulletin board for the book trade » (Haynes, 98). Throughout the July Monarchy, the abundant legal cases pertaining to counterfeiting, property rights and printing practices lead to the development in the Feuilleton of a regular feature (the Décisions judiciaires en matière de librairie, as it was most frequently called) that chronicled these cases and their outcomes and, eventually, established for its professional readers the general practices of the nascent literary marketplace, sometimes in a question and answer format. Through my analysis of these understudied Décisions from the 1830s and 40s, I show the professionals who wrote in and subscribed to the Feuilleton exploring and defining the boundaries of the literary marketplace in this early moment of mass culture.

“Marked by the Fold: Materialization of Newspapers and Formatting of Roles” Cary Hollinshead-Strick, American University of Paris In an article published in response to Le Play’s 1864 La Réforme Sociale en France, Sainte-Beuve describes the ouvrier littéraire: “...on est journaliste ; on l'est, fût-on romancier, car c'est en feuilletons que paraissent vos livres même, et l'on s'en aperçoit ; ils se ressentent des coupures, des attentes et des suspensions d'intérêt du feuilleton ; ils en portent la marque et le pli.” Sainte-Beuve’s critique of serial publication refers indirectly to the enlargement of newspapers to accommodate more advertising, and even perhaps to the participation of women in the distribution of such newspapers. For, in the very masculine world of print-shop culture, plieuses were mostly women, whose work folding newspapers became essential with the advent of the large format newspapers in which serial novels were published. Stallybrass suggests that owners’ need for pawned clothing, and the wear which left devaluing folds in its cloth, may have shaped Marx’s ideas about use value. Although newspaper production was industrial, Sainte- Beuve’s insistence that the readerly experience of serial fiction defined authors who published it as journalists suggests that a person’s social category is determined by the bound or folded status of his prose. Material memory of having been in a newspaper keeps a novel and its author from respectability, not quite that way that pawning his overcoat kept Marx from the library, but nearly. Sainte-Beuve’s sometime correspondent, Vallès, also used “la marque et le pli” to characterize the lasting effects of seminary on a fellow revolutionary. For both writers, the shaping of the social is named with terms from the packaging of newspapers, suggesting that the newsprint Sainte-Beuve imagined as a contaminated medium in his 1839 “De la littérature industrielle” had become formative, for better or worse, by 1864.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 7.G: Table ronde: Des femmes en littérature et de leur place dans le discours critique Organizer & Chair: Martine Reid (Université de Lille-3)

“Des raisons d'être de cette table ronde et de quelques questions toujours d'actualité” Martine Reid, Université de Lille-3

“Sur l'intérêt théorique des traitements numériques des écrits de femmes pour l'historiographie littéraire” Bénédicte Monicat, The Pennsylvania State University

“Women in French : Point d'étape” Cecilia Beach, Alfred University

“Feminist Criticism: A Cross-Atlantic Narrative” Evelyne Ender, Johns Hopkins University

Plenary 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Sabine Barles, Université Paris 1 « La faim sortant du sillon et la maladie sortant du fleuve » : les excreta urbains au XIXe siècle, entre pollution et valorisation

Reception – Chancellor Green Rotunda, 7:00 pm - 8:15 pm

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Saturday 7 November Session 8 – 8:30 am - 10:00 am

Panel 8.A: Contaminated by Silence Chair: Lisa Algazi Marcus, Hood College

“La « contamination » du mutisme: stratégies narratives dans Anatole de Sophie Gay” Ying Wang, Pace University Anatole, publié en 1815, un « best-seller » de l’année de sa parution, est le chef-d’œuvre de Sophie Gay, romancière et salonnière reconnue de l’époque qui nous a laissé de nombreux ouvrages littéraires. L’histoire d’Anatole qui se développe autour de l’identité mystérieuse du héros sourd-muet, se voit rangée par Sainte-Beuve dans l’espèce de romans anecdotes qui traitent « une infirmité ou une bizarrerie de la nature » (XIII)18. L’instance de la surdité et du mutisme masculins qui déstabilise le modèle des rapports amoureux entre les deux sexes, pose également des problèmes au niveau de la narration qui demandent des efforts textuels pour répondre au besoin de l’évocation de la sentimentalité. De fait, l’originalité du texte consiste à la « contamination » du mutisme —une série de stratégies narratives qui privilégient le silence en favorisant l’existence du héros sourd-muet dans la diégèse. Le roman qui a connu beaucoup de succès en son temps est si habilement construit que la déficience physique du personnage reste un secret jusqu’à une cinquantaine de pages avant la fin du texte. Comment ces stratégies narratives sont-elles mises en œuvre ? De quelle manière l’infirmité du héros complique-t-elle le processus de sentimentalisation et contribue-t-elle aux facteurs transgressifs de l’écriture féminine ? Mon essai tend à réfléchir à ces questions. Qui plus est, malgré l’éloge des critiques et la réaction favorable des lecteurs aux ouvrages de Sophie Gay au XIXième siècle, les œuvres de l’écrivaine restent encore trop « muettes » dans les études littéraires d’aujourd’hui. Ce « mutisme » m’encourage à croire qu’une lecture serrée d’Anatole deviendra un point de départ pour continuer à rendre visibles les ouvrages de cette femme auteur dont l’importance comme celle de nombreuses consœurs brillantes de Staël et de Sand, mérite une attention sérieuse et continuelle.

“Contaminated with Meaning: The Rhetoric of Shadows in Hugo’s Poetry” Tim Raser, University of Georgia The paper will compare Hugos use of shadow-imagery from early (1839) to late (1856), opposing “L’Ombre” to “Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre,” and will trace the tendency of his figural language to become ever more abstract: how Hugo, having named names and imposed sentences on history’s most famous malefactors comes to posit images such as “la fleur implacable et féroce” where it is anybody’s guess whose name corresponds to the figure. He abandons a rigid allegorical structure in favor of one where meaning is implicit, but if that is the case, where does the meaning come from?

18 Selon Sainte-Beuve, Ourika de Duras, Aloïs de M. de Cusine et le Mutilé de M. Saintine appartiennent aussi à cette catégorie de romans.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“From Silence to Preterition: Stendhal’s and Méry’s Queer Characters David Powell, Hofstra University French narratives in the last two decades of the 18th century merrily included a variety of queer characters and activities. Other than the publication of a couple of Sade’s works during the decade following the Revolution, queers all but disappeared from French narratives, and this despite the removal of criminal status of acts of sodomy as early as 1791. Queers were, of course, not gone from France, but their representations in literature seem to have gone into hiding and for almost three decades, depictions of queers remained silent. During the Restoration and into the July Monarchy, queer characters surreptitiously reappeared; but, they did not speak their own queer selves, they were not usually main characters, and there was never any discussion of their sexuality, their desires, or their activities. How can we explain the apparent disappearance followed by the timid resurfacing of queer characters in early 19th-century French narratives. My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate how queer characters can be pulled out of the recesses of a narrative and to describe how the narrator surreptitiously suggests them to the reader. Through close reading in conjunction with queer theory (J. Binnie, D. Fuss, A. Jagose, D. Hall, D.M. Halperin, C. Nigianni, E.K. Sedgwick, N. Sullivan, M. Warner, et al.), I identify and explicate instances of queerness and interpret the nature of these queer moments and their significance. Whether a quasi-silent discourse or an abundant use of preterition, authors communicate, willingly or not, a gender anxiety that relates to anxieties about republican citizenry. In Armance (1827), Stendhal interjects numerous indications of Octave’s moods, which his mother considers to be an illness and which, on occasion, he himself, as well as his fiancée and later his wife, Armance, also consider to be abnormal behavior. Thirty years later, in Monsieur Auguste (1858), Joseph Méry constructs a love triangle, much like those Eve Sedgwick details, in which one man’s love for a woman incurs the apparent displeasure of another man, whose friendship with the first one is peculiarly intimate. Both authors seem to use similar narrative techniques to present their queer characters: they wrestle with articulating their feelings and desires; they withdraw into the background notwithstanding their prominent position in the narrative; both end the novel unhappy or relegated to the cult of . On closer reading, however, important differences emerge: differences in social class; differences in their commitment to some purposeful goal; differences in the nature of their devotion to another. In my paper, I will why and how the two narratives introduce queerness and then paradoxically dissociate the queer characters from those narratives. The repercussions of these findings helps to explain the dissatisfaction regarding equality and universalism one finds texts of the period, not to mention in debates raging in France today over race, religion, and sexual orientation, including marriage, adoption, and medically-assisted procreation.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 8.B: Social Mobility Chair: Melanie Conroy, University of Memphis

“Armance: Contamination et beylisme dans l'invention du roman stendhalien” William Paulson, University of Michigan Avec Armance, peut-on dire, Henri Beyle invente le discours romanesque stendhalien. Le conflit idéologique (ou de classe) que met en scène ce discours se complique d’une évocation récurrente de la contamination: les valeurs nobles sont entachées par l’intérêt et la cupidité. Or cette impureté tant décriée s’avère être un ressort non seulement de l’action et de l’analyse sociale, mais d’une réussite possible dans cette recherche raisonnée du bonheur qui a déjà tant préoccupé l’auteur, et à laquelle la tradition critique a donné le nom de beylisme. La contamination, ou si vous voulez l’impur, relie donc le dynamisme du conflit idéologique à la quête d’une manière d’être et d’agir qui convienne au dix-neuvième siècle.

“Felicitous Contamination: Recipes for a Happy Mésalliance” Cecilia Beach, Alfred College Far from the 19th-century norm of homogamy, the protagonists in André Léo’s novels often choose unconventional marriages based not on socio-economic proximity, but rather intellectual and emotional compatibility. André Léo herself, bourgeois daughter of a provincial notaire, married a political journalist who had first trained as a typographer and later lived with a political activist and writer seventeen years younger than her who had peasant origins and had been working in a factory at the time they met. André Léo deconstructs the myth of the ideal bourgeois marriage in various ways. In both Une Vieille fille (1859) and Les Deux filles de M. Plichon (1864), a young suitor gradually shifts his attentions from the younger, prettier sister to her more intelligent older sister, thus challenging conventional notions of attractiveness and marriageability. The female in Un Mariage scandaleux (1860) marries an enlightened peasant and in Le Drame du cerveau (1992), while the vain protagonist suffers through two unhappy marriages of ambition, an enlightened secondary character, a model of the feminine ideal for André Léo—intelligent, generous, active, useful—marries an artisan sculptor. Similarly, in Le Père Brafort (1872-3), André Léo juxtaposes the loveless marriage of convenience of Jean with his brother’s happy mésalliance with a woman he loves and with whom he shares a revolutionary bond. In La Grande Illusion des petits bourgeois (1874-5), after years of restless ambition in his professional and private life, the protagonist abandons his grand illusions and returns home to the working-class woman he loves. In this paper, we will explore these relationships among others in order to understand the ingredients that lead to a happy marriage in the works of André Léo. Through this analysis, we will show how the personal is political, how the representation of marriage in these novels relates to André Léo’s political and feminist theory.

“Gestural Gentry and Performing Pedigree at the Bal blanc” Erica C. Schauer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln The French bal blanc, or “debutante ball,” originated in court society as an exclusive practice of the aristocracy. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the ball had evolved into an elite, exclusive ceremonial event of the leisure classes at which daughters were showcased and officially introduced to their social peers. Finding appropriate matches for the NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 girls of marriageable age—the filles à marier of the event—was, indeed, one of its primary goals. However, the bal blanc also provided a space for families to prove that they possessed the requisite elegance expected of their social milieu. After years spent guaranteeing the proper education of their daughters—both in formal classrooms and in the families’ living rooms— parents nervously presented their daughters to society at this leisure class confirmation ceremony. These closed rituals were traditional, prescriptive, and highly detailed. They marked the young hostesses, and, in turn, their families, as certified members of the French elite or, alternatively, unmasked them as frauds who did not possess the innate qualities of the upper classes. Widespread fears of class-contamination produced barriers through which aspiring leisure-class families needed to pass, including the acquisition of wealth, a respectable reputation, a sense of appropriate fashion, and—perhaps the most important and most difficult trait to acquire—gestural grace. Social belonging in the Belle Epoque was not simply sartorial— it was somatic. It was not a mask, but rather a personification, an embodiment, and a state of physicality that reached much further into the corporal awareness of the self and of the situation at hand. In this paper, I ask how bona fide members of the leisure class sought out impostors in their ranks at the bal blanc, paying close attention to the physical gestures that unmasked newcomers as poseurs and arrivistes.

Panel 8.C: Corrupt Cities / Tainted Texts Chair: Masha Belenky, George Washington University

“The Father, Son, and Unholy Ghost: Tainted Trinities in Le ” Paul Young, Georgetown University In Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, the Pension Vauquer seems a hotbed of contagion; its façade bears a syphilitic cupid, and its rooms are infested by its lodgers’ “catarrhal exhalations.” Even the furnishings seem ill, perhaps because of their close contact with the pensioners, who display a gamut of maladies. Mlle. Michonneau’s skeletal appearance suggests a libertine past, while Poiret’s jaundice has a more ambiguous source. Mlle. Taillefer is the victim of a “blancheur maladive,” and the novel’s title character, Goriot, has a perpetually runny eye. Sylvie, Mme. Vauquer’s cook, must scrub the pension’s courtyard to prevent against “pestilence,” a task as necessary as it is futile. It is hardly surprising that Rastignac dreams of leaving this fetid milieu to enter the elegant drawing rooms of Mme. de Restaud, Mme. de Nucingen and Mme. de Beauséant. However, Rastignac’s social ascension is also fraught with filth; his Paris is a “bourbier,” in which he cannot advance (literally or figuratively) without becoming tainted. Indeed, contamination permeates Le Père Goriot. In the present paper, I would argue that in this novel, Balzac, through a vocabulary of contamination and contagion, expresses a nostalgia for a largely fictive ancien régime, and his of a French monarchy not encumbered by the bourgeois stain of “La Charte.” This world, which exemplifies the kind of “noblesse immaculée” that his narrator mentions, stands in contrast with the “gangrened” and “degenerate” society that Balzac’s narrator evokes during Vautrin’s arrest. Through a close reading of Le Père Goriot, and relying on psychoanalytic theory, as well as the work of social historians, I would like to examine Balzac’s use of images of contagion and contamination to discuss the role of history, the past, and Balzac’s depiction of changing social NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 norms and roles in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Although Le Père Goriot takes place in 1819, I would argue that here, Balzac suggests that the events following the revolution of 1830 have created a social order in which contamination is the inevitable norm. Looking at Balzac’s depiction of the reader who holds this book “d’une main blanche,” I will also examine Balzac’s notion that literature might serve as a panacea or a poison, a contaminant or a cure, for his period.

“Alphonse Daudet : un poète de la fange” Pierre-Jean Dufief, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre Naturaliste en mode mineur, Alphonse Daudet veut découvrir la beauté dans la laideur et esthétiser la saleté omniprésente dans son œuvre. L’écrivain se fait subtil alchimiste de la boue urbaine qui s’enkyste au coeur de la ville ou dans ses marges ; chez Daudet tout est boue, glisse à la boue, redevient boue. Le romancier apparaît hanté par le retour à l’informe, dans une liquéfaction infâme. Il s’intéresse à la physiologie, aux sécrétions, aux excrétions, à la scatologie, aux glaires, aux vomissements. La saleté devient volontiers synonyme d’une souillure essentiellement liée à la sexualité car le désir est toujours vécu chez lui comme dégradant. La saleté et la pollution sont politisées et mises au service d’une pensée conservatrice. Daudet dénonce les excès de l’urbanisation, les révolutions et les mouvements populaires tout comme il s’en prendra dans Soutien de Famille aux corruptions et aux miasmes délétères du parlementarisme.

“Branding Naturalism: The Ecology of Vice in Zola” Jessica Tanner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill In Le Mal propre (2008), Michel Serres reorients Mary Douglas’s notion of dirt as “matter out of place” by suggesting that dirt serves to make place, to appropriate territory: “la pollution signe la volonté de puissance, le désir de l’expansion spatiale. […] Ceux qui laissent là traces et marques, horrifiantes, s’approprient les lieux, non en les hantant, mais en excluant toute autre personne de là.” With the publication of Thérèse Raquin in 1867, a novel famously “trait[é] de flaque de bout et de sang, d’égout, d’immondice” by critics, Émile Zola marked out his place on France’s literary landscape by contaminating the realist novel. The vice-laden atmospheres and characters that both sullied and made the author’s name in the press likewise engendered fears about contagion beyond the bounds of the book, as the consumption of Zola’s “putrid” fictions threatened material transmission of their constitutive vice to the reader – a contamination we might understand, following Serres, as a form of branding. In this paper, I theorize Zola’s brand of vice as a self-corroding site of mimetic inscription, one that engages the reader “dans le vice” (a favored Zolian expression) of naturalist literature. In Zola, “vice” denotes several related concepts: notably, hereditary corruption or lack (e.g., Tante Dide’s originary fêlure) and the adopted behaviors (e.g., drinking, prostitution) that stem from it and aim to restore homeostasis between subject and environment. Both reductive and additive, mimetic and aesthetic, vice disorients perception, becoming a privileged site of expression for the oft-cited “saut dans les étoiles sur le tremplin de l’observation exacte” that constitutes Zola’s mature aesthetics. Through an analysis of Thérèse Raquin and La Terre (1887), I argue that Zola cultivates what we might read as a naturalist terroir of vice, crafting a space for literature on the degraded grounds of his textual landscapes. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 8.D: Nature et santé au futur : hantises de la contamination Chair: Kathryn Miner (Emory University)

“Prévoir/prévenir la contamination : récit d'anticipation et hygiénisme” Valérie Stiénon, Université Paris 13 Au croisement de la médecine, de l’urbanisme et du réformisme social, les théories hygiénistes influencent profondément les conceptions du vivre-ensemble au XIXe siècle en France. Au même moment, les romans d’anticipation développent des préoccupations similaires à travers leurs visions de la communauté : conditions fragiles de la santé publique, mesures prophylactiques contre l’épidémie, mises à l’épreuve du corps social et des infrastructures urbaines. Émile Souvestre envisage l’allaitement des enfants à la vapeur (Le Monde tel qu’il sera, 1846), Jules Verne conçoit France-Ville comme la « cité du bien-être » centrée sur la propreté (Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum, 1879), Léon Daudet satirise une autocratie médicale devenue meurtrière par l’application outrancière des lois d’hygiène (Les Morticoles, 1894) et Paul Adam présente l’organisation des villes selon les cycles de la reproduction, favorisant la femme enceinte mais rendant stérile le soldat (Les Lettres de Malaisie, 1898). Les convergences entre les théories hygiénistes et les récits d’anticipation reposent non seulement sur un discours social et idéologique privilégiant certaines topiques comme la contamination, mais aussi sur des formes d’expression spécifiques, l’hygiénisme ayant généré nombre d’écrits – du traité à l’essai – caractérisés par leur propre poétique. Poser des principes, édicter des lois, recenser les composantes du corps social, réformer les mœurs, cartographier la ville et catégoriser ses habitants : ces démarches cognitives et les rhétoriques qui leur sont associées transitent aussi par la fiction romanesque, qui les fait siennes. On propose d’examiner ce double aspect : entre théorie et application, entre discours social et roman, comment la fiction d’anticipation s’approprie-t-elle l’hygiénisme pour en confirmer les principes, les critiquer ou les réinventer ? Quelles sont les modalités de ce dialogue à la fois prédictif et prescriptif (intégration, citation, transposition) ? Enfin, une évolution est-elle perceptible au long de la seconde moitié du siècle ?

“Nature, souillure : topologie de la contamination dans les romans de Jules Verne” Laurent Bazin, Université Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Née d’un souci de transmission morale et religieuse au tournant du Moyen-Age et de la Renaissance, puis confortée dans sa finalité éducative par les pédagogues des Lumières, la littérature de jeunesse du XIXe siècle prolonge l’effort de transmission lui conférant sa légitimité en multipliant les intrigues porteuses de valeurs politiques et philosophiques en phase avec la vision positiviste du monde qui organise à la même époque le progrès de la civilisation. La fiction se met au service de l’instruction voire de l’édification, objectifs avoués d’une production chargée de garantir dans l’espace diégétique un ordre social érigé en idéal d’harmonie ; il en résulte un recours fréquent aux formes génériques de l’utopie ou du roman de formation, censées garantir mieux que d’autres la mise en évidence des idéaux désignés en modèles auprès des jeunes lecteurs. C’est le cas par exemple dans Le Robinson suisse (Wyss, Der Schweizerische Robinson, 1812) ou L’Ile de corail (Ballantyne, The Coral Island, 1858), où l’insularité utopique garantit une homothétie entre la pureté de l’environnement et la bonté postulée de la nature humaine, de même que dans Les Aventures de Huckleberry Finn (Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884) ou Heidi (Spyri, Heidis Lehr-und Wanderjahre, 1880) où le NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 cheminement de l’apprentissage se fait dans le sens d’une réconciliation entre vie naturelle et vie sociale. Aussi est-il intéressant de constater qu’une œuvre aussi ostensiblement pédagogique que celle de Jules Verne puisse, à la même époque, s’inscrire dans une configuration similaire tout en déployant des univers plus équivoques qu’on aurait pu l’attendre d’une littérature aussi résolument inféodée à la fonction éducative. Implicitement présente dès la mise en place de l’intrigue (les romans ne sont pas pour rien publiés dans la Librairie d’éducation et de récréation), la dimension propédeutique s’aventure sur des chemins imprévus qui contaminent les présupposés initiaux ; du moins est-ce ce que semblent mettre en œuvre ces avatars de l’utopie que sont, par cristallisation, la robinsonnade (L’Ile mystérieuse, 1875, L’Ecole des robinsons, 1882, Deux ans de vacances, 1888…), par translation, le récit de pérégrination (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869, La Maison à vapeur, 1880, La Jangada, 1881…) et, par inversion, la dystopie (Le Chancellor, 1874, Les Cinq cent millions de la Begum, 1879, L’Ile à hélice, 1895…). Dans tous ces textes en effet, l’environnement extérieur exerce une influence pernicieuse sur le comportement des héros dont il mine subrepticement le système de valeurs à force de maladies, intoxications et autres empoisonnements. L’objet de cette présentation sera ainsi d’étudier la façon dont de tels récits subvertissent la fonction didactique qu’ils étaient censés assumer en adjoignant aux schèmes organisateurs de la protection insulaire et de l’errance initiatique une dimension ambiguë qui pervertit la foi dans le bien naturel (qu’il s’agisse d’écosystème ou de comportement humain).

“Un monde sans humains : l’altérité vectrice d’une contagion ontologique chez J.-H. Rosny aîné” Simon Bréan, Université Paris-Sorbonne L’une des manifestations les plus effrayantes de l’invasion martienne imaginée par H. G. Wells dans La Guerre des mondes (paru en France en 1900) est l’invasion d’une étrange végétation remplaçant les plantes terrestres par un biotope approprié aux envahisseurs. Même s’ils s’inspirent de Wells pour développer un paradigme d’altérité conflictuelle, les anticipateurs français du premier XXe siècle ne reprennent guère cette modalité, qui s’accorde mal avec un autre principe de leur écriture, la poétique de l’anomalie : en règle générale, les créatures ne doivent laisser aucune trace de leur passage à la fin du récit. De ce fait, la thématique de la rencontre avec des êtres nouveaux se manifeste dans d’autres textes que celle, au demeurant assez peu représentée, de la contamination bactériologique, guerrière ou accidentelle. Une exception notable, et d’interprétation complexe, est la série formée par trois récits de Rosny, dont le premier, « Les Xipéhuz », est antérieur à la parution de La Guerre des mondes (signé J.-H. Rosny, 1888), et s’inscrit dans la veine préhistorique de l’auteur, malgré le caractère singulier des créatures imaginées dans un lointain passé : les Xipéhuz appartiennent à une mystérieuse espèce minérale se développant en concurrence directe avec l’humanité, sans qu’il soit possible d’envisager une coexistence pacifique. Dans deux romans bien ultérieurs, La Mort de la Terre et Les Navigateurs de l’infini (signés du seul J.-H. Rosny aîné, 1910 et 1925), Rosny lie plus nettement encore ce schéma d’opposition à une forme d’incompatibilité biologique. Dans le lointain avenir de La Mort de la Terre, les ferromagnétaux, créatures nées des déchets métalliques, altèrent leur environnement par rayonnement magnétique, provoquant une anémie fatale chez les êtres organiques, dont les humains. Ils propagent par leur seule présence une sorte de contagion ontologique, qui adapte la Terre à leurs besoins. Un schéma similaire se retrouve NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 sur Mars, lorsque les Navigateurs sont confrontés à des êtres qu’ils dénomment des zoomorphes, dont la présence provoque chez eux de dangereux malaises : plus qu’une simple espèce invasive, les zoomorphes forment un écosystème total, transformant de manière durable le sol, la végétation et l’atmosphère au fur et à mesure que s’étend leur nouveau règne. Il s’agira ici d’étudier comment Rosny, dans un dialogue implicite avec les théories de Darwin, investit la thématique de l’altérité conflictuelle pour fonder une réflexion sur l’évolution des espèces, en détaillant selon quelles conditions de possibilité pourrait naître une forme de vie radicalement autre, à partir d’un processus de contamination progressive de l’environnement, susceptible de faire de l’être humain une anomalie ayant fait son temps.

Panel 8.E: Moral and Literary Contaminations Chair: Clive Thomson, University of Guelph

“Novels of Love and Tuberculosis: Marcelle Tinayre’s L’Ombre de l’amour (1910) and Louis de Robert’s Le Roman du malade (1911)” Margot Irvine, University of Guelph Although her biographer rejects the idea that the affair between Marcelle Tinayre and Louis de Robert originated with the writing of their novels, L’Ombre de l’amour (1910) and Le Roman du malade (1911), he recognizes that Tinayre’s family held that the relationship began with these works (Quella-Villéger, 314). It is not hard to see why: the resemblance between the two novels is striking; each describes the last love of a tubercular patient with a young woman who is his . The novels are telling for the consistent portrait they paint of the consumptive patient. They differ, however, in the representation of his nurse. While Javotte in Le Roman du malade was described as « faible et facile » in a letter from Tinayre to de Robert, her own Denise Cayrol is a model of Belle-Époque literary feminism (see Mesch 2013): she is active, thoughtful, and provides valuable semi-professional assistance to her father, a doctor. De Robert’s novel was the literary sensation of 1911 and won the prix Vie heureuse (former prix Femina) that year, with the backing of his friends Pierre Loti and Marcel Proust, but surely also with the support of Tinayre, an influential member of prix Vie heureuse jury. This paper compares the portraits of the tubercular patient and his nurse that seem to have spread like the “bacille de Koch” from one novel to the other. It also re-examines their composition and reception. If Michel Forrier can write in 2011 that de Robert’s novel is “un livre à découvrir” (Revue française d’histoire du livre, 432), Tinayre’s answer to it, with its remarkable female protagonist, also deserves to be better known.

“From the Smutty to the Naughty: Marc de Montifaud, Jeanne Thilda, and Shades of Literary Dirt” Cheryl Morgan, Hamilton College In the years immediately following 1880, which Jules Clarétie dubbed « l’année pornographique, » a host of critics noted a newly visible erotic print and visual culture. Albert Wolff implored the government to clean up the Paris streets, polluted by a proliferation of pornographic images and texts. Jules Latour claimed that pornography had become the sole preoccupation of Republican readers and fingered Marc de Montifaud (Marie-Amélie de Chartroule 1845-1912) as a trailblazer for the popular slim volumes of illustrated racy tales NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 shamelessly displayed for public viewing. Whether the series of stories Montifaud wrote between 1880 and 1884 were “pornographic” or not mattered little given her previous condemnations for other works that outraged public decency. During the years when Montifaud published her bawdy tales, the daily newspaper Gil Blas and a flurry of “Parisian” stories and novels promoted an “art polisson” that sought to titillate without crossing the (censors’) line. Authors such as Armand Silvestre, Catulle Mendès, and René Maizeroy were notable agents in the vogue for what Michèle Dottin-Orsini and Daniel Grojnowski have called a “galanterie déculpabilisée,” a “monde libertin de la noce plus amusant et jovial que vénal .” So, too, was Jeanne Thilda (Mathilde Stevens, née Kindt 1833-1886), whose chroniques and stories in Gil Blas made her the paper’s darling. She possessed the “grand art d’effleurer des sujets brûlants sans se laisser tomber dans le grivois” (Le Livre, 1883) and was praised for her elegant yet spicy style. Her first collection of stories Pour se damner, illustrated by Henriot (who illustrated a number of Montifaud’s story volumes), appeared as the 12th and final volume of Rouveyre and Blond’s series, “Contes gaillards et nouvelles parisiennes” series (1883). She soon followed with another collection, Péchés capiteux, in 1884. While Rachilde stands out in 1884 for the scandal of her Monsieur Vénus , this paper explores other shades in the spectrum of women’s literary dirt in the early Third Republic to measure anew the distance from Montifaud’s “smutty” tales to Jeanne Thilda’s “naughty” but nice stories and to elucidate how and why the politics and poetics of their respective tales delighted or outraged.

“Hygiene and Morality: The Proust Family Practice” Michael Finn, Ryerson University In what way or ways do the moral rules and values of a family translate into the literature of one of its members? What is the portion of acceptance, opposition or outright rebellion that might characterize an offspring’s literature as she or he imagines and structures a fictional world? With such questions in mind this paper will interrogate the parallels and collisions of points of view between the home values of the family of Dr. Adrien Proust and the rather complex moral system that Marcel Proust develops in his novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust family biographers have begun to shine a light on the infidelities of Dr Proust, whose position as official doctor assigned to the Opéra-Comique allowed him to develop intimate friendships with female performers. Marcel’s brother Robert maintained a mistress after his marriage and Marcel sometimes acted as a courier between the two. The sex-related activities of these three men remained closeted, if not always from the others, at least from Madame Proust. Marcel is reported to have said about his father’s lovers, “Maman n’a jamais rien su.” The paper will examine some of Dr Proust’s moral and educational principles as laid out in works such as his Traité d’hygiène and L’Hygiène du neurasthénique. Is the duplicity necessary for the smooth functioning of the Proust family somehow present in the structures of La Recherche? Certainly, as critics such as Levinas have pointed out, there is a dynamic of “duplicity”, of hiddenness and revelation at work in the novel. But this paper will conclude on a different note. It will explore how rule-making and rule-breaking are treated in the novel. Frequently, what the reader discovers is that a violation of moral taboos – such as, for example, the “sadism” that is part of the lesbian episode at Montjouvain – may contain a compensation that reads as a moral redemption.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 8.F: Jeunes filles et parfums, parfums de jeunes filles : usages, savoirs, prescriptions Chairs: Andrea Oberhuber, Université de Montréal & Érika Wicky, Université de Liège

“La véritable « Reine des Roses » : Césarine Birotteau et la transmission des valeurs bourgeoises” Jean-Alexandre Perras, University of Oxford C’est en 1837, quelques années après l’épidémie de choléra qui a frappé la France et suscité la croissance de l’industrie de la parfumerie, que Balzac publie son roman Grandeur et décadence de César Birotteau, marchand parfumeur adjoint au maire du deuxième arrondissement de Paris, chevalier de la légion d’honneur, etc. Il est significatif que ce parangon de la vertu bourgeoise commerçante exerce le métier de parfumeur et soit par là associé à des pratiques hygiéniques désormais synonymes de propreté, voire de probité et de décence. En articulant l’honnêteté du commerce et le commerce de la propreté, Balzac met en évidence non seulement l’avènement de la bourgeoisie, mais aussi ses aspirations de pureté sanitaire et de distinction sociale. Or, cet idéal de pureté et d’élégance est particulièrement incarné, à la même époque, par la figure de la jeune fille, quintessence de l’idylle familiale rêvée par la bourgeoisie montante. Il est donc également significatif que le seul enfant du couple de parfumeurs soit une jeune fille et que le récit se déroule au moment précis où celle-ci est en âge de se marier. La présence de Césarine apporte au foyer des Birotteau un subtil parfum de délicatesse et de bon goût, dont il s’agit d’étudier la composition. Celle-ci répète au piano des sonates de Steinbelt et chante des romances, elle écrit correctement la langue française, lit Racine père et fils et sait en expliquer les beautés, elle dessine des paysages, peint des sépias ; voilà une fleur nouvelle qui n’a pas encore quitté la tige maternelle, un ange aux grâces naissantes, une fille unique adorée, incapable de mépriser son père ou de se moquer de son défaut d’éducation, tant elle est « vraiment jeune fille. » C’est dans ces termes qu’est décrite la fille unique du probe parfumeur, dont elle porte le nom ; surnommée la « Reine des Roses » comme l’enseigne du parfumeur, Césarine est la figure métonymique des vertus attribuées à ce commerce. En-deçà de son vernis d’agréments, le véritable savoir de la jeune fille est essentiellement commercial et matrimonial et concourt à la reproduction des vertus sociales qu’elle incarne. Dans le cadre de cette communication, il s’agira d’une part, de prendre la mesure de ce savoir spécifique de la jeune fille et d’autre part de déterminer ce que les valeurs véhiculées par le commerce de la parfumerie au cours de la première moitié du XIXe siècle peuvent nous apprendre sur la construction de cette figure sociale.

“Du mauvais usage des parfums : Chérie contaminée par le musc et l’héliotrope” Andrea Oberhuber, Université de Montréal & Érika Wicky, Université de Haute Bretagne - Rennes 2 Si, dans la préface à son dernier roman, Chérie (1884), conçu comme « testament littéraire », Édmond de Goncourt prend soin de préciser qu’il s’agit d’une « monographie de jeune fille, observée dans le milieu des élégances de la Richesse, du Pouvoir, de la suprême bonne compagnie », d’un « livre d’histoire » sur « l’intime féminilité », il omet le détail du savoir que possède (et à la fois ignore) la jeune protagoniste en matière de langage des fleurs et d’olfaction. Avant chaque visite du secrétaire de son grand-père, Chérie parfume en effet sa NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 main, grâce au savon au benjoin de la bonne, afin de rendre agréable le bref instant du baise- main quotidien ; et elle voue une passion particulière aux parfums du musc et de l’héliotrope dont les effets lui seront néfastes. La jeune fille semble pourtant avoir lu tous les manuels de savoir-vivre et essais pédagogiques destinés au sexe féminin car elle s’applique en tout à « plaire » et à « savoir se faire aimer » dans le but de trouver mari et d’être (enfin) heureuse (Louise d’Alq, Essais pour l’éducation du sens moral). Elle a aussi pu lire les conseils dispensés aux jeunes filles dont on rencontrera une synthèse, quelques années plus tard, dans Le bagage scientifique de la jeune fille de Clarisse Juranville et Pauline Berger, qui consacre un chapitre aux parfums (l’, le musc, le benjoin, la myrrhe et le patchouli, entre autres). Se transformant de jeune fille modèle en vieille fille au fil du récit, la protagoniste devient la démonstration de ce que l’auteur énonce comme idée au milieu du roman, à savoir que les parfums offrent aux jeunes filles un succédané mortifère des plaisirs charnels. Nous testerions l’hypothèse selon laquelle Édmond de Goncourt aurait lu à peu près tous les textes de son temps sur le parfum, en particulier les traités médicaux qui mettent en garde contre les parfums produits par l’industrie chimique (dont une des plus récentes réussites, au moment de la rédaction de Chérie, était la synthèse de l’héliotrope) ou encore les ouvrages d’histoire qui attribuent en partie aux parfums musqués la décadence de la société de Louis XV. Le parfum nous permettra ainsi d’observer l’articulation, voire la contamination, non seulement entre le roman et les ouvrages distillant des savoirs sur le parfums (traités médicaux, guides de convenances, presse féminine, etc.), mais aussi entre le savoir livresque de la jeune fille et ses expériences physiques du parfum.

“Parfums de Décadence : Effluves Miasmatiques dans Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre et Le Calvaire d’Octave Mirbeau” Johann Le Guelte, The Pennsylvania State University “Ce n’est pas de ma faute si les âmes, dont on arrache les voiles et qu’on montre à nu, exhalent une si forte odeur de pourriture.” Octave Mirbeau, Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (1900) Espace grouillant de contaminations (qu’elles soient morales, sociales, politiques, ou corporelles) auquel on oppose souvent la campagne, naturelle et purificatrice, le Paris du dix- neuvième siècle fascine et repousse l’imaginaire. La saleté et la crasse qui lui sont associées firent d’ailleurs l’objet d’un véritable rejet à travers l’établissement de discours hygiénistes dont le but annoncé était la purification urbaine. Cependant, si beaucoup de chercheurs ont abordé ces discours et leur influence sur la création littéraire19, peu s’en sont approchés à travers l’étude des odeurs, la vision ayant constamment primauté d’analyse. À l’intersection de l’histoire des mentalités, de l’histoire sociale et de l’histoire des sensibilités, mon analyse s’attachera à dessiner l’évolution complexe de ces discours et à les mettre en relation avec les écrits d’Octave Mirbeau. Sous l’influence d’Alain Corbin20, mon point d’ancrage sera donc olfactif. Les odeurs suaves et putrides, le parfum et la puanteur, se rencontrent chez Mirbeau et répondent à l’essor d’une volonté de purification qu’il m’importera de mettre au jour. Pour cela, les espaces urbains et provinciaux, les corps bourgeois et populaires, lieux d’émanations bien distinctes, seront

19 Voir, par exemple: Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989). 20 Alain Corbin, Le Miasme et la Jonquille: l'Odorat et l’Imaginaire Social: XVIIIe-XIXe Siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1986). NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 centraux à mon approche et informeront mon exploration de l’imaginaire des senteurs à la Belle Époque. C’est donc à travers une analyse des sensibilités olfactives au sein de deux romans de Mirbeau que cette étude s’attachera à déceler en quoi celles-ci s’ancrent (ou non) au sein d’un discours global de l’odeur à la Belle Époque. Ainsi, romans, critiques littéraires, traités d’hygiène, correspondances, seront mis en dialogue afin de déterminer en quoi Octave Mirbeau respecte ou s’éloigne du discours entourant la nécessaire « désodorisation des corps et de l’espace » (Corbin, 123) et l’évolution du seuil de tolérance olfactif à la Belle Époque.

Break 10:00 am - 10:30 am

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Saturday 7 November Session 9 – 10:30 am - 12:15 pm

Panel 9.A: Contaminations génériques : le roman d’anticipation scientifique Chair: Bridget Behrmann, Princeton University

“« Une simple expérience de laboratoire » ? Fiction hybride et mélange des genres dans le roman d’anticipation scientifique Les Secrets de monsieur Synthèse par Louis Boussenard (1888-1889)” Stéphanie Dord-Crouslé, CNRS Si le dessein explicite du savant Synthèse est de reproduire en laboratoire et en accéléré les différentes étapes ayant conduit à l'apparition de l'homme sur la terre, le lecteur se rend rapidement compte que le projet n'est pas aussi intégralement scientifique que le riche vieillard suédois, qui ressemble tant à Darwin, l’a d’abord prétendu. Rejouer le processus évolutif en partant d’un terrain vierge (un îlot madréporique perdu au milieu de la mer de Corail) et de microorganismes récupérés au fond de l’océan doit aussi lui permettre d’obtenir un homme parfait, pur de tout vice moral ou physique, seul époux envisageable pour sa petite-fille Anna. La contamination de l’expérience scientifique par le projet personnel et les affects de l’expérimentateur est l’un des éléments qui expliquent l’échec de monsieur Synthèse, bien que le roman se termine avec l’apparition soudaine et inattendue d’un enfant noir à qui la fiction n’alloue pas d’origine bien définie… Cette contamination intrafictionnelle est portée et complexifiée par le mélange des genres à l’œuvre dans un roman d’anticipation ambigu censé se dérouler quelques années avant sa parution : le roman scientifique s’y pare de merveilleux (Synthèse fait une utilisation extensive de la suggestion et de l’auto-hypnotisme ; son ami le pundit Krishna se déplace à volonté d’un lieu dans un autre), tandis que les dimensions très présentes propres au roman policier, au roman d’aventures voire au drame, s’ingénient à défaire ce merveilleux et à tirer l’intrigue du côté de la simple machination. On essayera de montrer comment ces différentes modalités de la contamination s’articulent tant dans la fiction qu’entre les genres dans lesquels celle-ci s’inscrit.

“La contamination du fantastique et du scientifique. Le magnétisme dans les romans fin- de-siècle” Emilie Pezard, ENS Lyon La diffusion des théories du magnétisme animal, lancée par les travaux de Mesmer à la fin du xviiie siècle, connaît un nouvel essor à la fin du siècle suivant, avec les recherches de Charcot sur l’hypnose. « Un homme, un être a le pouvoir, effrayant et incompréhensible, d’endormir, par la force de sa volonté, un autre être, et, pendant qu’il dort, de lui sa pensée comme on volerait une bourse » (Maupassant) : ce phénomène qu’on dit avéré et qu’on cherche à expliquer fascine le public comme les écrivains. Cette contagion de la pensée d’un homme à un autre forme la matière principale de nombreux récits dans les années 1880 et 1890 : en 1891, le sous-titre de La Prise du regard d’André Valdès, « roman d’hypnotisme », confirme l’existence d’une vogue littéraire, et pourrait de fait s’appliquer aussi bien à Jean Mornas de Jules Claretie (1885) ou Alphonsine d’Adolphe Belot (1887). La contamination de la pensée à l’œuvre dans le phénomène hypnotique conduit à une autre contamination, sur le plan esthétique. Extraordinaire et effrayant à la fois, le magnétisme NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 est souvent comparé aux phénomènes surnaturels qui forment la matière de la littérature fantastique ; cependant, il s’agit d’un objet de recherche scientifique, qui appelle une approche rationnelle. Le magnétisme suscite ainsi la contamination de deux domaines a priori distincts, voire incompatibles, le fantastique surnaturel et la rationalité scientifique. Cette ambivalence scientifique et idéologique fait du magnétisme un cas exemplaire pour l’étude de deux problématiques : il permet d’interroger les critères de la scientificité en vigueur à la fin du siècle ; il offre l’opportunité d’étudier les interprétations diverses qu’on donne alors de l’inconnu – extension de la réalité rationnelle ou écart vers le surnaturel – et les valeurs esthétiques que celui-ci revêt.

“Merveilleux scientifique, communication sérielle et contamination des imaginaires” Matthieu Letourneux, Université Paris Ouest La fin du XIXe siècle voit la sérialisation des imaginaires s’organiser autour de genres populaires de plus en plus clairement identifiés. Ce processus est lié aux transformations culturelles et médiatiques que subit l’époque. La presse, les livraisons, les livres pour la jeunesse diffusent ainsi ces imaginaires fictionnels selon des logiques qui ne peuvent être envisagées dans la clôture de la fiction, mais à travers les usages des supports et dans la mixité de leurs discours (texte et image, textes fictifs et documentaires, etc.). Les genres populaires ne peuvent être compris indépendamment de cette contamination constante des discours. Pour le montrer, nous voudrions prendre l’exemple du genre du merveilleux scientifique (chez Jules Verne, Paul d’Ivoi, Léo Dex, Louis Forest et quelques autres). En effet, à travers sa façon de mettre en scène régulièrement des dynamiques de contamination de l’espace social (peurs et violences collectives, guerres futures, emballements médiatiques, invasions) celui-ci révèle en filigrane l’importance de la circulation médiatique propre à la littérature sérielle de la fin du XIXe siècle dans la constitution d’un discours social. Ces mouvements de foule fantasmatiques qu’imaginent les récits nous renseignent autant sur la constitution des imaginaires que sur leur façon de mettre en discours le monde moderne.

“Le prix « Jules Verne » : circulation des thèmes, dissémination des influences, contamination des stéréotypes” Claire Barel-Moisan, CNRS La revue destinée à la jeunesse Lectures pour tous décerna de 1927 à 1933 un prix annuel destiné à promouvoir, dans la lignée des Voyages extraordinaires de Jules Verne, « le roman scientifique où l’imagination dépasse les connaissances humaines de l’heure présente, mais où l’inspiration est guidée par une documentation sûre et un esprit averti, sinon des certitudes, du moins des possibilités de l’invention. » De façon tout à fait explicite, les éditeurs de la revue marquaient ainsi la dissémination de l’influence du projet vernien dans le champ de la littérature de jeunesse du début du XXe siècle, avec des romans s’appropriant non seulement les thèmes, mais aussi les procédés d’écriture et parfois jusqu’aux personnages de l’auteur de Vingt-mille lieues sous les mers, comme dans le cas du prix décerné à Octave Béliard pour La Petite-fille de Michel Strogoff (1927). Le projet de cette communication est d’étudier la manière dont l’imaginaire vernien typique de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle se diffuse dans l’ensemble de la société du tournant du siècle, jusqu’aux années 1930. L’influence vernienne s’exerce ainsi à travers un modèle de rapport au savoir, d’intégration des discours sociaux, de circulation d’objets et de machines, ainsi NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 que par la contamination de stéréotypes qui s’imposent progressivement dans le champ du « roman d’aventures scientifiques ».

Panel 9.B: Zola's Cities: Contamination and Cure Chair: Nicholas White, University of Cambridge

“Burning Babylon: Urban Achronies in the Paris of Emile Zola and Charles Marville” Alexandra Tranca, Trinity College Cambridge This paper discusses spatial and temporal contamination in representations of urban ruins in Zola's La Curée (1871) and Charles Marville's photography album Percement de l'avenue de l'Opéra (1862). In textual and visual discourses responding to the Second Empire's urban projects, images of half-demolished buildings and unfinished structures blur the line between construction and destruction, muddling linear temporality. Written after the cycle of demolitions and constructions cycle has transformed Paris into the 'Capital of the world', Zola's urban scenes and panoramas no longer pertain to an ongoing transformation: soon-to-be eviscerated districts or demolition sites are long gone. Saccard anticipates evisceration retrospectively, instilling a sense of circularity and fatality in the refashioning of Paris. The fragmentary and mutating landscape becomes fixated, first in an overarching Haussmannian/Imperial plan, and second, as rubble from streets or buildings is reused on different working sites. Zola's retrospective manipulation of the urban transformations' time-frame (1853-62) produces a synthesis: ruins acquire the unity imposed in the novel through a symbolic structure bringing them together across time. In Marville, however, the overarching project coexists with the uncertain topography: captions point towards the constructive goal implicit in this dismembering, while the album form holds together fragments that have lost the identity bestowed by space and time. Construction and demolition become contaminated as fragmentary and ruinous edifices produce temporal and spatial distortions; the whole and the ruinous appear interchangeable, with new avenues and neighbourhoods erected on and with the rubble of demolition. Temporal and spatial disruptions in La Curée verge on achronie, imposing a continuous, closed narrative onto a ruinous landscape, whereas Marville rejects atemporal unity: the shattered topography privileges discontinuity, in disjunction with the proleptic captions. Paris shelled and burning in 1870-1 would further complicate the ideas of progress and urbanization already problematized by these discourses.

“Zola’s Wild Child: Recuperation or Contamination?” Jennifer Yee, University of Oxford By the last third of the nineteenth century the threat posed by the 'classes dangereuses' is increasingly evoked in terms borrowed from the new field of physical anthropology, that is, through the discourse of racial difference. These classes are also displaced geographically: whereas Balzac shows us the danger lurking in the seedy Paris of the quartier du Doyenné, right at the royal heart of the city, in Zola's L'Argent the threat surfaces in the diseased slums to the North of Paris. This menace to the order of bourgeois life is embodied by Zola in the figure of Saccard's illegitimate son Victor, in a neglected sub-plot of L'Argent. The child/youth Victor represents an un-controlled threat, contributing a particularly significant element to the novel's refusal of closure. He is described in animalistic or primitivistic terms; and yet Zola shows us a NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 contamination that cannot be neatly categorized as a one-way process moving from the slum to the centre, or from the sub-proletariat to the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, this is a tale of degeneration moving the other way - from the bourgeoisie to the slums - and then returning to haunt its procreator. Zola also draws on an older, more Gothic inspiration, and in particular on Edgar Allan Poe and the beginnings of the detective tradition. Despite this clash of genres, the Victor sub-plot does fit within the questions raised by the novel as a whole, in particular the possible role of amoral financial speculation in driving positive social change. In fact it revisits an old debate concerning the benefits of education and the possibility of social recuperation: 'Victor' is the urban equivalent of 'Victor de l'Aveyron', the wild boy found in 1797 whose education was used as an experimental test of the capacity of civilisation to recuperate and improve the 'sauvage'.

“Zola’s Lourdes, or ‘la contagion du miracle’” Claire White, University of Cambridge As an instance of pure illogicality, or impossibility, the miracle can be understood as the anti-naturalist phenomenon par excellence. Zola's staging in Lourdes (1894) of the conditions in which the miraculous emerges seeks, in one respect, to re-establish the connection between cause and effect that such divine intervention appears to break. Indeed, Zola's pathologisation of belief is doubly rooted in discourses of contamination: contemporaneous theories of crowd psychology and Charcot's account of contagious suggestion. The promiscuous foule, subject to a miasmic 'contagion de folie', is figured as a breeding ground - literalised in the image of the communal baths: the excretions of the ailing body make of these a cesspool of abjection - the real miracle, the narrator wryly remarks, being that any patient should make it out alive... Alongside these psychological and hygienic discourses of infection, this paper explores the iconography of the miracle in Lourdes as another mode of contamination, tracking the cult of the image that underpins a communal religious vision. The circulation of the icon is brought full term, I argue, in those extended passages devoted to the exponential proliferation, or 'débordement', of souvenir shop merchandise: from 'les milles clichés de l'imagerie dévote' to bargain-bin napkin rings, pipes and egg-cups, emblazoned with the beaming apparition of Notre-Dame de Lourdes. In the endlessly-reproduced kitsch object - the gaudy to the sacred relic -, Zola brings his insistence on the inauthenticity of the miraculous to its parodic extreme. But in this economy of the infinite copy, there is, Zola notes, one image missing: that of Bernadette herself. Part of the 'oubli systématique' enforced by both city and Church, how does the iconographic absence of their founding individual frame a wider investigation into the relationship between original and fake? And what might Zola's fascination with the bondieuserie tell us about the operations of the miracle in the age of mass reproduction?

“‘Lourdes’ Liquifying Bodies’ (or ‘Zola Contamined by Baudelaire’)” Susanna Lee, Georgetown University In Zola’s 1894 novel Lourdes, biology trumps miracle. Whether as medical restorative (cures that pass as incredible are explained as natural phenomena) or as narrative mover (organic inevitabilities determine medical successes and failures), biological forces overshadow the power of faith. Indeed, the narrator implies there is as much to treat in religion – “la contagion du mystère” (144), “la contagion de folie” (290), “une contagion gagna la foule” (210) – as in NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 disease - “Les vieilles plaies qu' on y trempe… n' offrent aucun risque de contagion. Je vous assure que sur ce point, la Sainte Vierge n' a pas même besoin d' intervenir” (259). And yet alongside this epistemological tension, this novel sets up another more subtle dichotomy, this time between the explanatory power of medical logic and an aesthetics of the grotesque and incurable. Much as the strengthening of antibiotics has in recent decades made bacterial more wily and resistant, so too in Lourdes has the growing capacity of biomedical explanations and interventions gone together with – and perhaps produced – a quasi- Baudelairean poetics of the shapeless. The provocatively named Mme Dieulafay, for instance, dissolves before one’s eyes: “Diminuée, comme fondue, elle était devenue une loque humaine, une chose fluide et sans nom qu'on ne pouvait mettre debout, qu' on transportait avec mille soins, de crainte de la voir fuir entre les doigts” (80). Upon her departure from Lourdes, we see her “face morte et imbécile de momie, qui se liquéfiait” (688). In this paper, I read these liquescent forms as soft-tissue counterparts to the bony horrors that Baudelaire described in “Le squelette laboureur” and “Danse macabre.” I read them also as counterpoints to the novel’s own medical framework. Zola’s suppurating and dissolving malades bring the pliability of the body to bear on the novel’s infrastructure and encourage the Baudelairean grotesque to rupture the clean lines of naturalism.

Panel 9.C: French Infections Chair: Ed Kaplan, Brandeis University

“L’irrésistible attrait du virus George Sand aux États-Unis au XIXe siècle” Catherine Masson, Wellesley College Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Caroline Matilda Kirkland, et Sara Clarke Lippincott, membres féminins du groupe new-yorkais Botta qui se réunissaient dans le salon d’Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta, écrivirent toutes sur George Sand. Bien que « Lydia Maria Child appelât George Sand sa sœur jumelle à cause de la similarité de leurs idées21 », elle écrivit aussi que Sand avait eu « le malheur d’être éduquée en France et qu’elle décrivait cette chose malade, la société française22 ». Julia Ward Howe dans son livre consacré à Paris, Is Polite Society Polite ?(1885), montre aussi son ambiguïté vis-à-vis de Sand : « Nous entendions avec horreur le nom de George Sand, la femme diabolique […], et nous imaginions le plaisir pervers de lire ses livres23 ». En novembre 1861, dans un article consacré à Histoire de ma Vie dans l’Atlantlic Monthly, elle évoque ce que Sand avait représenté pour les femmes de sa génération : « N’était-elle pas pour nous toutes, dans nos jeunes années, un nom douteux et enchanteur ? » Je propose donc de revenir d’abord sur l’ambiguïté américaine vis-à-vis de « cette chose malade, la société française » et ensuite sur le risque de contagion que représentait l’œuvre sandienne pour les jeunes Américaines du XIXe siècle. Contagion suffisamment redoutée par les

21 Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy. The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth- Century Feminism, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991, pp. 79-81. 22 Lydia Maria Child, Selected Letters, 1817-1880, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1982, p. 481. 23 Julia Ward Howe, Is Polite Society Polite?, Boston, Lamson, 1985, pp. 39-40. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 parents de Julia Ward Howe, puisqu’ils ne voulaient pas qu’elle lise l’œuvre de Sand ; et que, elle aussi, plus tard, allait d’ailleurs l’interdire à ses enfants, quitte à les priver de « la noble langue française24 ».

“La « contagion » et la « contamination » du naturalisme : un discours transatlantique” Geneviève De Viveiros, University of Western Ontario Après le grand succès de L’Assommoir en 1877, Émile Zola devient une véritable vedette littéraire. La réputation d’auteur « pornographique » attribuée au nom de Zola et la valeur littéraire contestée du naturalisme, jugé en France, comme étant de la littérature « putride » feront du romancier une figure controversée de la scène littéraire. De fait, l’originalité de son style descriptif et les thèmes souvent jugés tabous explorés dans ses romans, seront constamment à l’origine d’innombrables publications critiques dans la presse de grande diffusion comme dans les organes spécialisés dans la littérature et ce, en France, comme à l’échelle internationale. Ce sera le cas notamment de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, au Canada, où l’œuvre de Zola est alors bien connue des lecteurs de la presse canadienne tant francophone qu’anglophone comme en témoignent la panoplie d’articles publiés alors sur le romancier et son esthétique littéraire dans The Illustrated Canadian News, Le Réveil, La Revue canadienne ou L’Album des familles. Zola et ses théories esthétiques seront alors à la source de nombreuses polémiques sur des questions comme la famille, l’éducation et la religion. Perçues comme de la littérature dangereuse, les œuvres de Zola seront victimes de sévères critiques et seront à l’origine d’une campagne de censure qui cherchera à empêcher la dissémination de ce qui est alors considéré comme de la littérature immorale. De nombreux articles publiés dans la presse mettront en garde les lecteurs canadiens contre la contagion du naturalisme. À une époque où les publications périodiques sont sous l’influence du clergé, l’œuvre de Zola apparaîtra comme une oeuvre subversive remettant en cause les valeurs associées à l’identité canadienne. En analysant les articles parus sur Zola dans la presse canadienne de la fin du XIXe siècle, notre communication cherchera à mettre en lumière le discours entourant la diffusion du naturalisme en Amérique du Nord, vue comme une véritable contamination de « mauvaise » littérature.

“Contamination or Complementarity? Mallarmé and the Aesthetics of the East” Pamela Genova, University of Oklahoma The presence of East-Asian cultural motifs, aesthetic styles, and philosophical concerns represents a compelling in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed, often his work shows the impact of artistic elements from the East, such as the preference for mobility over stasis, the tension between the notions of crisis and resolution, an iconographical representation of nature, and the economy of discursive suggestion. Certainly, critics have noted an Eastern influence in Mallarmé’s poetry, as well, as with the synthesis of poetic genres, the compositional principles of calligraphy, and the syntactical possibilities and philosophical echoes of haiku. In Mallarmé’s essays addressing dramatic art, specifically the 1887 Crayonné au théâtre, we also uncover the infiltration of Japanese aesthetics, from the dramatic forms of Nō and Kabuki, to the thought systems of Zen and Buddhism, as Mallarmé interprets the stage as a mystical locus for the ritualized expression of the human soul, a space in which music, dance, visual images, and language create a multidimensional artistic event reminiscent of Wagner’s

24 Howe dans l’Atlantic Monthly, novembre 1861, p. 513. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“total artwork”. Mallarmé’s writings on theatre ground his assertions in a theoretical stance in many ways colored by Eastern aesthetics, yet at the same time he foreshadows some of the most influential Western theatrical theory to come. Does this turn towards the East represent then a form of corruption or contamination in the work of one of the most eminent poets of French literary history, an ideological a move to be understood as a rejection of Western aesthetics? Clearly, through an exploration of the metaphysical and the physical grids of the dramatic stage, his work incorporates (or is overtaken by?) an Eastern conception of theatre as a locus for highly-stylized gesture, as Mallarmé envisions a purified dramatic space where he hoped one day to realize the beguiling dream of his impossibly intangible Livre.

“‘Un véritable choléra de l’âme’: the reception of Buddhism in late nineteenth-century France” Sam Bootle, Durham University This paper will explore late nineteenth-century French literature’s encounter with Buddhist thought: in particular, it will analyse how contemporary discourses pathologised Buddhism as a disease-like force, and how French writers were fascinated by Buddhist ideas despite - or, perhaps, because of - this vision of spiritual contamination. Buddhist studies in Europe were pioneered by philologist Eugène Burnouf, who translated Buddhist texts and published seminal reference works on Buddhism in the 1830s and 1840s. His interpretations were hugely influential on the reception of Buddhism by French thinkers like Victor Cousin, although their subtleties were not always heeded. In particular, his nuanced view of the crucial Buddhist term ‘nirvana’ was ignored, and it came to be seen as equivalent to ‘nothingness’; Buddhism, by consequence, was seen as a nihilistic religion. This led to polemical attacks on Buddhism, with several commentators describing it as a corrupting, miasmatic influence on French minds or even as a kind of ‘choléra de l’âme’ (cholera, like Buddhism, having originated in India). However, for many writers - such as Charles Marie René , Louis Ménard, , and Henri-Frédéric Amiel - this ‘culte du néant’ (Roger- Pol Droit) was a source of fascination. In the post-Romantic age, its quietistic vision of withdrawal from active engagement in the world offered a welcome challenge to the secular cult of progress. Moreover, for some the ‘néant’ seemed to offer creative potential, superseding the ‘idéal’ of the Romantics. But for others there remained a profound concern about the threat that Buddhist doctrine apparently posed to individual identity, and hence to the very act of writing itself.

Panel 9.D: The Optical Contamination of Literature Chair: Helen Abbott, University of Sheffield

“Generic Contamination: Photography and the Travel Narrative in 1839” Michèle Hannoosh, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Within the two months following the demonstration of the daguerreotype in Paris on August 19th, 1839, the Swiss seigneur Gustave Joly de Lotbinière and the French painter Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet independently learned the process, equipped themselves with daguerreotype apparatuses and set off separately for Greece, Egypt, and the Near East. Theirs NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 were the first daguerreotypes made of these regions and nearly every history of photography commences with a mention of them. Virtually no attention has been paid, however, to the fact that both men composed texts to accompany the publication of some of their daguerreotypes as engravings in what was arguably the first photographic travel album, Noel Paymal Lerebours’ Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe of 1840-1844. A consideration of these texts and images together is revealing of the effects of generic “contamination,” the ways in which the one nuances, and even debunks, the standard attributes of the other. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which text and image interacted to expose and overturn the conventions of the travel album — the romantic exaggeration and fabulation of the writing, the endlessly repeated views of sites in the images — which make each alone an unreliable guide to the experience it purports to present. I will also consider how, once the old conventions were laid bare, text and image were free to do other things: through the same kind of generic contamination and interaction, they opened up travel writing and travel imagery to a new kind of freedom, plunging the armchair traveller into the unknown and unexpected experience of the journey itself.

“Baudelaire’s Artificial Hell: ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’s’ Photographic Poetics” Elissa Marder, Emory University Although Charles Baudelaire is well known for his influential diatribe against photography in the brief section of “Le Salon de 1859” titled “Le public moderne et la photographie,” his relationship to photography is arguably more complex than has hitherto been recognized. In that text, Baudelaire casts himself in the role of a doctor whose mission is to diagnose how painting has become sick because painters have become contaminated by a photographic way of looking at the world. Photography only becomes a problem for painting because painting has already become too photographic: photography merely executes, confirms, and countersigns painting’s alienation from itself and its own specific art of seeing. If, therefore, as Baudelaire famously puts it in this essay, a vengeful god gives photography to the multitude so that it can bask in its own trivial reflection engraved upon a metal plate, the god’s poison gift is designed as a counter-measure, a retribution, for a sin that has already been committed. It is precisely because the multitude has already forfeited its capacity to see and has, in a sense, already adopted a photographic relation to the world, that it deserves to receive photography as its appropriate punishment. By giving the multitude the sensational images it thinks it wants, photography is like a particularly potent bad drug that destroys the very desire that it appears to satisfy. Significantly however, on one—and only one—occasion in his entire poetic corpus, Baudelaire actually uses the word “photographiques” in one of his prose poems. This unique instance of an explicit reference to photography appears in “Mademoiselle Bistouri.” This strange, enigmatic and very violent prose poem is devoted to a marginal feminine figure (often described as a crazy prostitute) who is fixated on doctors and collects images—including photographic images—of them. But photography is anything but a merely contingent textual detail in this text. Instead, it is both the very name for the illness that afflicts the main character and the allegory for the contaminating and contaminated poetic form in which the text is written. In this paper, by reading Baudelaire’s writings about photography together with the explicit inscription of photography in “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” I shall argue that if, for him, photography poses a threat to art, it is not, as he perhaps wishfully argues in the final paragraph NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 of the Salon article, due to the fact that it is too far removed from art, but rather that it comes too dangerously close to something fundamental about his own relation to poetic images.

“Champfleury and New Optical Contamination” Brett Brehm, Northwestern University In Jules Champfleury's short story "La Légende du daguerréotype" (1863), the narrator poses this question: "N'était-il pas dangereux d'être exposé en face d'une machine mystérieuse qui froidement, de son grand oeil sombre, regardait l'homme assis?" Indeed the man sitting for his portrait, the ill-fated M. Balandard, finds himself the victim of the comically inept daguerreotypist , whose use of violent chemicals, in repeated failed attempts to produce an image, ends up obliterating M. Balandard's body. As critics have noted, this story illustrates a period anxiety, one shared by the likes of Balzac among others, that daguerreotypy interacted with the human as a kind of contamination, that this new process of representation could strip away layers of the human body or soul. While engaging with this interpretation, I propose an alternate reading of the story. Often cited in the early history of relations between literature and photography, the story, as I argue, can also be read in the context of the prehistory of phonography. Champfleury's story ends with a ghost who haunts with his voice alone, a singularly acoustic specter. Hence I situate the story in the context of ideas such as French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott's "spectre sonore"(1857) and Félix Nadar's "daguerréotype acoustique"(1856 and 1864), which both entertain the question of what mechanical sound recording might be like in the future. Ultimately, as I contend, the chemicals that contaminate and render M. Balandard's body invisible by the story's end at the same time render his voice forever audible. The story thus can be read as a tale of both contamination or destruction of the visible and a mechanical preservation of the human voice.

“Une image « parasite » de la Décadence: Les Diaboliques (1874) illustrées par Félicien Rops” Loïc Lerme, Indiana University, Bloomington Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé... Voici quelques noms illustres du paysage littéraire français du XIXe siècle dont les œuvres furent associées au travail du peintre, graveur et illustrateur belge Félicien Rops. Si celui qui fut surnommé le « peintre-littérateur25 » se nourrit effectivement de la matière littéraire dans l’élaboration de ses modes d’expression, il n’en subvertit pas moins le ut pictura poesis d’Horace qui sacralisait la primauté de la lettre sur l’image. S’érigeant paradoxalement contre la contamination de son iconographie par la littérature, Rops rejeta foncièrement l’illustration comme terminus ad quem dans la tension qui anime la coprésence du texte et de l’image. Cette rébellion au profit du génie artistique ouvre la voie à une psychologisation de ce qui est seulement suggéré dans le support écrit originel. À travers une grille de lecture psychanalytique, nous étudierons la manière par laquelle Félicien Rops acquiert une indépendance esthétique vis-à-vis du recueil les Diaboliques (1874) de Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly via sa représentation du corps féminin. Le vice luxurieux du « beau sexe » apparaît comme une véritable allégorie de la mort syphilitique dans l’art de Rops. Dans ce contexte, nous verrons comment l’exploration d’une psyché humaine déliquescente rime avec

25 Vittorio Pica, « Félicien Rops à l’étranger. Italie », La Plume 172 (1896) : 463.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 adaptation, absorption et mutabilité – à l’image d’une maladie vénérienne – face à la substance littéraire avec laquelle l’artiste se doit de composer. Fustigé par Barbey pour avoir créé une œuvre iconographique affranchie du texte, Rops rompt non seulement le pacte illustratif traditionnel mais, par la conception de gravures « lisibles », infecte également selon nous l’acte de lecture lui-même.

Panel 9.E: Fantastic Diagnoses Chair: Stéphane Pillet, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Mayaguëz

“Réintroduction à la littérature fantastique: Théophile Gautier, Immanuel Kant, and Object Oriented Ontology” Corry Cropper, Brigham Young University Studies of the fantastic and attempts to define the fantastic as a genre have always presupposed a human-centered ontology. But the anthropocentric hierarchies of Enlightenment thought, embodied by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, are precisely what the fantastic seeks to undermine. The fantastic posits a flat ontology where humans and objects stand on equal ground, where objects act, and where human subjects are objectified. After showing connections from Kant to Théophile Gautier through E. T. A. Hoffmann, I argue that Gautier's fantastic undermines a human-centered worldview while theorizing the hidden life of things. This reading leads us to tentatively redefine the fantastic as a form “speculative realism,” as a genre that takes the presence and perspective of objects seriously, and that embeds this object-oriented ontology into fantastic texts in ways that trouble the reader’s subject-centered consciousness.

“The Parasite Within: Erckmann-Chatrian and Cultural Hybridity” Warren Johnson, Arkansas State University A recurrent topos of fantastic narrative situates the intrusion of an alien, parasitic agent, such as a ghost or vampire, as the source of evil. Erckmann-Chatrian’s fantastic tales tend to reinscribe the parasitic agency within the host victim, such as the moribund count Nideck in “Hughes-le-Loup,” who is condemned to a compulsive re-enactment of the murder committed by his ancestor. This internalization of the contaminating parasitic outside forms the underlying structural principle of much of the writers’ non-fantastic regionalist texts as well. While apparent binary oppositions abound in Erckmann-Chatrian—Prussian vs. French, Republican values vs. , the orderly and rhythmical vs. the disruptive—the setting of their novels and tales in the liminal space of Alsace-Lorraine resists the stability of a pure ethnic identity. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the region has been not only subject to shifting political boundaries, it is a cultural hybrid that, by its very immixture, can serve as a model for the French Republic as a whole. Like the fantastic parasitic element, Germanic cultural influences inhabit the people of the region, an internalization that problematizes, as Michel Serres describes, the boundaries between parasite and host. At the same time as the region struggles against Prussian control, it cannot, Erckmann-Chatrian make clear in “Daniel Roch” and elsewhere, succumb to the allure of a hypothesized national identity based on nostalgic attachment to traditional forms that inevitably reflect its own cultural hybridity, since the inexorable movement of change relies on circulation and exchange, processes that always necessitate an Other that is both external and inherent. The optimal balance for Erckmann- NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Chatrian is a tension between resistance to the invasive while allowing for an evolution that strives toward social justice, demonstrating the necessity as well as the destructiveness of parasitic contamination.

“Seeing Double in Jean Lorrain’s ‘La Lanterne Magique’” Sherri Rose, Hillsdale College Like an epidemic detailed in a fait divers or in one of Charcot’s medical case studies, tales of sexual deviance and criminal pathology run rampant across Jean Lorrain’s short stories of the 1890s. Lorrain’s neurotic narratives exposed the complexities of the individual’s relation to modern life, a relation both of attraction and of repulsion towards its seediness. Writing during what Jean-Pierre Aubrit has termed “l’âge d’or du récit bref,” Lorrain shrewdly turned to this ‘lower’ genre as a means of leveling scathing social critiques while evading censure. The concise structure of his narratives served to mirror the fleeting encounters that characterized more and more the individual’s experience of an often sordid urban life. In this paper, I show how Jean Lorrain’s short story “La Lanterne Magique” dramatizes the unsettling effects of the cross-contamination between realist and fantastic discourses in fin- de-siècle scientific and artistic communities. During an intermission at the Opera house, a physicist and the unnamed narrator quarrel over the presence of the fantastic in the modern world. Lamenting the death of the imagination at the calculating hands of science, the narrator bemoans: “La science moderne a tué le Fantastique […]: la dernière Fée est bel et bien enterrée et séchée, comme un brin d’herbe rare, entre deux feuillets de M. de Balzac.” Yet, is it perhaps the dead fairy rotting within the Balzac novel who poses the greater threat of contamination? The physicist, himself playing the role of the magic lantern, projects images for the jaded narrator of the ghoulish double identities of the respectable opera-goers. As the curtain rises and cuts short the debate, the residue of those phantasmagoria, I argue, calls into question positivist contributions to society in order to illustrate the ability of the fantastic to disrupt and destabilize the individual’s perception of the real.

“Contamination through Containment in Guy de Maupassant’s Le Horla” Irina Markina, Princeton University Louis Pasteur’s research demonstrated the ability of science to transform inexplicable illnesses into curable microbes enclosed within glass flasks. In his 1874 short story Le Horla, Guy de Maupassant explores this containment of the unknown, threatening illness within the bounds of modern science and human reason. This paper argues that the protagonist’s attempt to logically comprehend the Horla, an illness-causing agent, within the binding of his journal leads only to further contamination by madness. In other words, the more he tries to hermetically seal the unknown within a logically examinable framework, the more “hermetic” it becomes. The protagonist seeks to explain the uncanny using the scientific method, designing experiments and describing his observations. However, this constrictive effort to understand through writing and naming is precisely what leads the protagonist to madness. The name itself mirrors the protagonist’s failure to define the being, who is hors human understanding, but nevertheless present, là. The protagonist’s trip to Mont Saint-Michel illustrates the hors/la problematic, which is responsible for driving him to madness. The extensive description of the setting presents a clearly delineated, compact silhouette of the mount contrasted against the limitless sky, set atop a boundless bay and assaulted by the invisible wind. All the elements are present (là) but they are NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 outside (hors) the mount and cannot be totally comprehended by the senses. The delimited and delimitating human is thus surrounded with a boundless yet perceptible world. Any attempt to contain this exterior within the borders of human reason is destined to produce even more ambiguity, as did the protagonist’s effort to destroy the Horla in his hermetic bedroom. The episode of Mont Saint-Michel is a symbolic diagram of the human relation to the uncertain and the diary in which it is contained, although unable to scientifically classify the Horla, itself becomes a boundless, ambiguous tale.

Panel 9.F: Somatic Thresholds: Some Ways of Looking at the Body Chair: Constance Sherak (Yale University)

Anne-Marie Baron (Société des Amis d’Honoré de Balzac et de la ), “La pensée qui tue. Balzac précurseur du psychosomatique.” Pour le matérialiste qu’est Balzac, la mort est inscrite en l’homme dès la formation de son caractère et de ses passions et la pensée est le moyen le plus sûr de l’atteindre. Elle est plus un mal qu’un bien. La pensée est plus puissante que ne l'est le corps, elle le mange, l'absorbe et le détruit ; la pensée est le plus violent de tous les agents de destruction, elle est le véritable ange exterminateur de l'humanité qu'elle tue et vivifie, car elle vivifie et tue. Balzac devait intituler Ecce homo un roman, « terrible contrepartie de » (Lettres à Mme Hanska, t. I, p. 296). Au martyr de la pensée qu’est Louis, il aurait opposé un crétin centenaire. C’est aussi le thème de la pensée tueuse qui était au centre d’un texte, publié le 9 juin 1836 dans La Chronique de Paris, qui relatait sous ce même titre une conversation de l’auteur avec un vieux médecin tourangeau ami de son père. Il est réutilisé dans Les Martyrs ignorés, ébauche dialoguée qui reprend les exemples et les théories du médecin sur la nature et les effets de la pensée La longévité surnaturelle est donc soit un mythe comme pour le Comte de Saint-Germain, soit une hypothèse de travail, mais rarement une réalité. Le père de Balzac, obsédé par l’objectif de devenir centenaire, en est la preuve. Et l’ami de son père à qui il rend visite, ce médecin « nonagénaire décrépit, desséché », en est la triste démonstration. Il ne sait plus que converser avec les morts, car il a compris « la nature vénéneuse de la pensée ».

Walid Romani (Université du Québec à Montréal), “Stéréotypies subversives du corps chez Maupassant” Le Code Napoléon a sans conteste renforcé le pouvoir de la médecine et de l’État sur l’individu en s’emparant de son corps, dès sa naissance, par le biais de son nom et de son identité sexuelle. Le nom propre intervient pour brandir la force de la Loi, tout d’abord celle du père puis celle de l’État. C’est à ce niveau que le langage agit pour configurer l’individu, comme le soulignent Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) et Michel Foucault (Histoire de la sexualité, 1976). Dans La Volonté de savoir, ce dernier montre comment la bourgeoisie du dix-neuvième siècle considère que la sexualité doit être recensée jusque dans ses moindres détails pour être contrôlée. Dans ce contexte, le féminin est dépeint par la médecine comme une pâle copie du masculin, laquelle doit être corrigée (Patrick Wald Lasowski, Syphilis, 1982). Ainsi, la NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 psychiatrisation des rapports pervers et l’hystérisation du corps de la femme s’affirment comme des moyens de contrôle. Cependant, les rapports de pouvoir n’existent que s’ils offrent des points de résistance, des lieux de rencontre, des saillies pour une prise, des possibilités de renversement, car, pour se maintenir, le pouvoir doit accorder une certaine liberté au corps. Cette subversion se manifeste dans l’écriture de plusieurs auteurs du dix-neuvième siècle dont Baudelaire qui, dans sa critique de Madame Bovary, écrit: L'hystérie! pourquoi ce mystère physiologique ne ferait-il pas le fond et le tuf d'une œuvre littéraire, ce mystère que l'Académie de médecine n'a pas encore résolu, et qui, s'exprimant dans les femmes par la sensation d'une boule ascendante et asphyxiante [--…] se traduit chez les hommes nerveux par toutes les impuissances et aussi par l'aptitude à tous les excès26. L’homme «nerveux» se confond avec la femme «hystérique», un portrait du masculin qu’on trouve de façon récurrente chez Musset, Rachilde, Colette, Proust, etc. Le «genre» n’étant qu’une «répétition stylisée» (Butler, 1990), les auteurs réalistes confortent le lecteur dans ses automatismes par l’intermédiaire de stéréotypes et d’enthymèmes et lui procurent un assemblage narratif dont la cohérence n’est jamais vraiment mise en doute. Cette représentation littéraire du jeune homme au dix-neuvième siècle fait écho à une conception de l’identité qui insiste sur le caractère ambigu de celle-ci. Chez Balzac et Maupassant, par exemple, les pronoms et les substantifs employés dans Sarrasine (1830) et dans Rose (1875) ne renvoient à aucun «genre», mais simplement à un nom propre programmatique dont l’assonance trouble l’identité sexuelle du personnage principal. Cet ensemble produit un effet de brouillage par lequel l’écriture sépare le langage du corps, laissant un vide, un espace de liberté qui montre, comme le souligne Barthes, que «toute subversion […] commence par le Nom propre» (S/Z, 1970). C’est à partir de cette conception que la présente communication se propose d’étudier l’ambiguïté dans la représentation du jeune homme dans À la feuille de rose, maison turque (1875), Rose (1884), et Bel-Ami (1885).

Ana Oancea (Ohio Wesleyan University), “Experimentum in corpore vili: Literature and Human Experimentation” The expression long used in French medicine to refer to human experimentation or dissection, “experimentum in corpore vili,” carries an explicit value judgement on the subjects: they possess vile bodies. In practice, they are found to be of little importance due to their origin, being marginal figures such as criminals, prostitutes and the indigent. In 19th century French literature, the same characters populate naturalist fiction. In Zola’s formulation, moreover, these texts rely on medicine for their analytical perspective. Notably, this is stressed in Le Roman Experimental (1880), where Zola also models the author on Claude Bernard, while in the preface to Thérèse Raquin (1868) he portrays writing as equivalent to “le travail analytique que font les chirurgiens sur les cadavres.” This paper places Zola’s novel in the context of 19th century reflection on the purpose and ethics of human experimentation. The naturalist’s allusion to medicine is meant positively and is limited in scope to writerly practice, but it implies a certain contamination of life by death. Inspection of the vile later proves fundamental to the novel’s analysis of temperament as a medical experiment. J.P. Bongrand’s De l’experimentation sur l’homme, sa valeur scientifique et

26Baudelaire, Charles (1968 [1858]),« Madame Bovary, la tentation de saint Antoine», Baudelaire: Oeuvres complétes, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, p. 452. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 sa legitimité (1905), acknowledged as the first text to propose norms for human experimentation, reflects on the same issues. Read with Thérèse Raquin, Bongrand’s exploration of the perceived and demonstrated scientific value of human experiments, their legality, and morality offers a productive opportunity to study the intersections of medicine and literature in the 19th century. In both domains, the construction of the experimental subject attests to an unresolved tension between its vile nature and its being uniquely suited to provide insight into the human condition.

Lunch 12:15 pm - 1:45 pm

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Saturday 7 November Session 10 – 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm

Panel 10.A: ‘Contagion intellectuelle’: Criminality, the Press and the Invasion of Littérature industrielle Chair & Respondent: Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Columbia University

“The querelle de la langue criminelle: Argot and the Polemics of the Serial Novel” Eliza Smith, University of California, Santa Barbara The popularity of the roman-feuilleton in France starting in the late 1830s not only supported growing newspaper subscriptions but also inspired controversy surrounding both the format and content of these novels. Compared to authors of the eighteenth century and earlier, post-Revolution novelists were more likely to profit from literary topics deemed "seedy". They inserted characters from criminal backgrounds (which were often conflated with the working classes) and, in order to make their novels seem more realistic and to maintain readers' curiosity, authors such as Eugène Sue and Honoré de Balzac attempted to imitate the criminal argot used by real-life deviants. In the 1840s the unsavory subject matter coupled with the linguistic portrayal of criminal types launched a public debate amongst literary critics and politicians alike, such as Alfred Nettement, baron Chapuys-Montlaville and Louis Desnoyers. The arguments for and against the use of argot in serial novels introduced issues dealing with personal and national morality. How could the translation of an oral language into a written one render argot synonymous with a certain class of people and thus, reflect a certain level of moral integrity? In what ways did the mass production of literature catalyze the circulation of bourgeois fears and reinforce stereotypes regarding argot and the argot speaker? Focusing on the arguments that surfaced in the public domain, I argue that writers and critics alike made argot indexical of the criminal classes and of a dying morality that threatened the strength and power of France.

“Viralités: Le feuilleton-roman ou la dissémination des bas-fonds” Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara Dès la fin des années 1830, l’industrialisation, la démocratisation et la médiatisation de la littérature ont suscité de vifs débats entre les tenants d’une littérature réservée aux élites lettrées et celle qui, publiée dans le bas de page des quotidiens, se diffuse non plus par le livre (onéreux et accessible aux seules classes privilégiées) et la librairie, mais par le biais du roman-feuilleton et des journaux. Dans les années 1840, la publication des Mystères de Paris d’Eugène Sue, dans le respectable rez-de-chaussée du conservateur Journal des Débats, provoque un “scandale esthétique et moral,” selon la juste formulation de Judith Lyon-Caen. La diffusion et la réception massive du best-seller entraînent alors des réactions critiques passionnées sur la désacralisation, voire la dégradation, de la littérature et la démoralisation des masses. L’affirmation de Sainte- Beuve fera ainsi mouche et sera reprise par d’autres critiques d’horizons politiques divers : “De nos jours le bas fond remonte sans cesse, et devient vite le niveau commun, le reste s’écroulant ou s’abaissant” (Sainte-Beuve). Les critiques et les défenses du roman-feuilleton mettent en place les lignes de force d’un débat annonçant celui de nos sociétés hypermédiatisées où les barrières entre privé et public sont de plus en plus étanches et les normes morales traditionnelles sont en perpétuelle recomposition. Cette communication portera ainsi sur l’imaginaire de la NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 pollution morale qu’engendre une représentation par le bas et par les nouveaux médias, lesquels orchestrent la « viralité » du feuilleton et la contamination fantasmée de l’espace public.

“Contagious Criminality? Reporters Without Borders and the Sensationalist Fait Divers in the Fin-de-siècle Press” Kathryne Adair-Corbin, Haverford College As the private secretary of journalist and writer 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 reporting on difficult topics. The rapid modernization of the capital city and the daily press, and the development of a mass press with the creation of popular dailies such as Le Petit Journal (launched in 1863) had ushered in a more unified protocol for the reportage, which sent journalists out into the streets to gather urban news items of interest for a growing daily news readership. In this paper Adair-Corbin examines two criminal affairs of the 1890s in which Séverine confesses that she actively participated in the escapes of two accused murderers. Rather than conceal her actions, the reporteresse instead flaunted her “acte de reportage” as one of humanitarian value and social (or poetic) justice. The Padlewski and Gouffé Affairs earned her much publicity and increased readership, but also much criticism for having acted above the law, as she first used the accused to create a sensationalized news story and then published what had been done, thereby endangering the accused. This mix of the “chose vue” and the “chose dite,” when the reporter initiates the events and reports on the results, leads to what Marc Martin calls a “confusion of roles”: “Une aventure rocambolesque qui mène le journaliste au-delà des frontières, une grande affaire criminelle mêlée aux questions internationales, sans omettre ce qui pose toujours question dans un reportage, car un reportage n’est jamais qu’un témoignage: l’assaisonnement mêlé au vrai” (Martin 28). What was the journalist’s intention in justifying these stunts as “actes de reportage”? Were these “actes,” as she claimed, to correct social evils or purely for the sake of publicity and sensation? By her “confusion des rôles,” Séverine herself transgressed the traditional role held by most nineteenth- century women journalists and instead inserted herself squarely into the public eye, a move that ultimately affected the evolution of crime reporting.

Panel 10.B: Doing Things With Vampires Chair: Céline Brossillon, Ursinus College

“A Nineteenth-Century Plague: Vampirism” Maxime Foerster, Southern Methodist University In the chapter devoted to the concept of “becoming animal” in Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari specify that while humans perpetuate their species by sexual reproduction, vampires reproduce their own species by contamination. French nineteenth century literature can be seen as a catalogue of such contaminations since cases of vampirism have inspired authors such as Gautier, Dumas, Mérimée, Baudelaire, Maupassant, and Verne. In his Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire, who was appalled by the success of Dom Calmet’s treatise on vampires, wrote an entry on vampires in which he can only justify the existence of vampires as the unfortunate consequence of ignorance and superstition among the NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 masses. If it is not serious to believe in vampires in the age of the enlightenment, then one may wonder why vampires go on to contaminate the imaginations of so many writers in the next century. In this paper I will explore this question by interpreting vampirism from a metaphorical point of view and by distinguishing three kinds of metaphor. In Gautier’s tale, La Morte amoureuse, Romuald’s contamination by Clarimonde can be read as a critical update of the book of Job; in Baudelaire’s poem, “Les Métamorphoses du vampire,” vampirism is used to describe love as the experience of corruption; and in Maupassant’s Le Horla, vampirism becomes a way of probing the dialectics between reason and madness. These three variations explain partly why, in spite of Voltaire’s sarcasm, vampirism became a literary plague in French nineteenth century literature.

“Contamination and Purity in Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse: Tracing the Contagious Vampire Myth to the femme fatale” Anne Linton, San Francisco State University Although the first nineteenth-century literary vampires were men, by the end of the century, vampirism in France had become synonymous with the femme fatale, perhaps most iconically associated with “Musidora” and her slinky black leotard in the early twentieth-century serial Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade. This paper investigates the first French lady vamp, Clarimonde, in Théophile Gautier’s 1836 masterpiece, La Morte Amoureuse. Critics have often analyzed Clarimonde either as one of Gautier’s inaccessible women in relation to his aesthetic beliefs, or to the tale’s influence on the increasingly popular fantastic genre, but this paper instead argues that Gautier’s text serves a foundational role in the creation of the vampire myth in France—one that offers insight into the theme’s enduring appeal throughout the century, long before the fear of contagion would become inextricably bound up with vampirism. If Clarimonde is one of the earliest female vampires, she is also a most unusual femme fatale, for in Gautier’s tale it is the vampire’s very love that prevents the living dead from inflicting death on the living. Neither is female sexuality cast as purely demonic, as will be the case for those fin-de-siècle femmes fatales like Zola’s Nana. Instead, in Gautier’s early rendition, Clarimonde’s radiant love scandalously eclipses that of Christ Himself, and Sérapion, the supposed moral compass of the text is compared to Satan in the final scene. Clarimonde’s power spreads even after her death both within the tale, and in literature for decades to come, allowing us to move past readings that have tended to equate her demise with the inevitable punishment of female sexuality in nineteenth-century France. Clarimonde invites us to rethink the figure of the femme fatale since her love is generative in aesthetic if not religious terms whereas female sexuality will become purely demonic in many fin-de-siècle representations.

“Of Vampires and Pale Ladies – Barbey d’Aurevilly, Une histoire sans nom ; A. Dumas, Histoire de la dame pale ; and Gautier, La Morte amoureuse” Elisabeth-Christine Muelsch, Angelo State University In the mid-1960s, the physician Jean Bernard sought to entertain himself on a boring train ride by reading Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1882 text Une histoire sans nom, a text mostly classified as a novel, but sometimes also as a very long novella. Jean Bernard, however, read this text as a medical case study that portrayed one of the protagonists, Lasthénie de Ferjol, afflicted by a behavioral disorder, which Bernard later on labeled the Lasthénie de Ferjol syndrome. To this NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 day, the syndrome is considered a clinical anomaly that does not fit into any nosographic framework. The patient suffers anemia from voluntarily induced hemorrhages. It is a disease that afflicts primarily young women close to the medical profession and/or in religious orders. In her essay “L’Inter- dans Une histoire sans nom, “ Claudie Bernard has pointed to the enigmatic nature of the title of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s text. Despite the fact that the title says Une histoire sans nom, the story does have a name, namely Une histoire sans nom, describing distinctly, as Bernard has underscored, the quality of both the narrative act/genre and the content of the narration. “Histoire” in this title can refer to two things: either to the act of narrating, or to the narrated world. That the narration does not lend itself to a clear classification, that it is not supposed to lend itself to a clear classification, can be deduced from the epigraph “ Ni diabolique, ni céleste ….mais sans nom.” Claudie Bernard sees this as an invitation to read between, not only the lines, but also between what is said and what remains unsaid, the reader is thus invited to name the unnamable, although ultimately, the reader’s labeling will remain but an approximation. The physician Jean Bernard names the unnamable by identifying the story as a medical case study, and its content as the story of a traumatized female adolescent afflicted by a psychological disorder; I would like to read this text as a vampire story written in the tradition of earlier French nineteenth-century vampire stories, whose authors, just like Barbey d’Aurevilly, had to come to terms with the changes brought on by the French Revolution. I will be referring to two texts in particular: the first one is Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte amoureuse,” a novella published in La Chronique de Paris in 1836. The second story is Alexandre Dumas’s Histoire de la dame pale, which covers the last four chapters of Les Mille et un fantômes first published in 1849.

“Contaminated Dreams: Baudelaire Vampirizes Racine” Roderick Cooke, Florida Atlantic University In a 1905 article, Rémy de Gourmont suggested that Baudelaire's poem 'Les Métamorphoses du Vampire' is a rewriting of the famous 'Songe d'Athalie' from Act II, Scene V of Racine's last tragedy. In an incisive découpage, the critic illustrated the texts’ shared tripartite and oneiric nature, along with the turn anchored by the character/poet's desire to embrace the apparition. Yet Gourmont's short piece downplays the significance of this discovery, declaring that "il suffit d'avoir conté cette anecdote littéraire. Ce n'est qu'une curiosité." In contrast, this paper will build on Gourmont's insight by performing a parallel reading of Baudelaire and Racine's texts. It will emerge from this that Baudelaire profoundly modifies the meaning of Racine's original on the axes of gender, theology, agency, and the subject- position of the reader or spectator. The poet plays a triple game in 'Les Métamorphoses du Vampire,' operating not only vertical references to Athalie but also horizontal ones to other poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, together with the use of prosodic operations specific to the poem. I will situate the text's meaning in the synthesis of these three operations, arguing that Baudelaire splits the gory fate met by Jezebel in the 'Songe d'Athalie' into two different (wet and dry) forms taken by his vampire and explaining this split. A further, crucial difference lies in the respective discourses of the two apparitions, Racine's Jezebel and Baudelaire's vampire. Where the former stresses her kinship to Athalie and their equal powerlessness before divine wrath, the NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 vampire boasts of her command over both man and the divine. By these means, Baudelaire unravels Racine's religious didacticism, creating a depiction of transgressive, voracious evil that connects 'Les Métamorphoses du Vampire' to the wider thematics of Les Fleurs du Mal.

Panel 10.C: Les charognes littéraires Chair: Gisèle Séginger, Université Paris-Est

“Salammbô et la logique du vivant” Gisèle Séginger, Université Paris-Est Cadavres broyés par les éléphants, déchiquetés par les lions, décharnés par la faim et la soif, décomposés par la maladie, les corps représentés dans Salammbô permettent à Flaubert de mettre en scène ce passage de la vie à la mort, de l’organique à l’inorganique qui le fascine depuis ses années de jeunesse, probablement parce qu’il a lu très tôt non seulement Sade mais aussi Bichat et Lamarck, peut-être grâce à l’enseignement de Félix Pouchet (fondateur du Muséum d’histoire naturelle de et défenseur de l’hétérogénie contre Pasteur). Flaubert a consolidé sa culture scientifique dans les années 1850, tout en réfléchissant sur une conception naturaliste du monde et de l’histoire à la fois et paradoxalement cyclique et transformiste. La représentation des corps en décomposition dans Salammbô mobilise des savoirs physiologiques, médicaux mais aussi une réflexion philosophique qui remonte parfois à l’antiquité, à Lucrèce, et à Héraclite (cité dans le manuscrit) qui suggère une pensée générale des oppositions et du dynamisme vie/mort. Il s’agira dans cette communication de mettre au jour le processus de condensation et de symbolisation interdisciplinaires et inter-épistémiques (du matérialisme antique au transformisme moderne) qui conjoint science, philosophie et mythologie et de montrer que les charognes de Salammbô ne sont pas de simples corps morts, mais engagent en fait par le biais d’une représentation de la mort une pensée générale du vivant (qui a un impact sur les représentations sociales et historiques du roman) ainsi qu’une esthétique dont la « force » (terme flaubertien et vitaliste) est l’une des principales valeurs.

“La « contagion » par la « mouche d’or ». Les fonctions métaphoriques de la mort dans Nana de Zola” Thomas Klinkert, Universität Zürich Nana s’achève sur une célèbre scène qui met en parallèle la mort de l’héroïne et le début de la fin du Second Empire, marquée par les cris d’une foule parisienne enragée saluant la déclaration de guerre contre la Prusse en 1870. Cette mise en parallèle de la mort de Nana causée par la petite vérole, maladie contagieuse, et d’un événement politique caractérisé par la contagion d’un délire menant une collectivité vers sa destruction consentie, implique que la mort de l’héroïne transcende le niveau purement physiologique. On cherchera à montrer que dans le roman de Zola cette fonctionnalisation métaphorique de la mort est préparée de longue halène. Il convient notamment de penser à un article de journal intitulé « La mouche d’or », dans lequel l’histoire de Nana est comparée à celle d’une mouche « qui prenait la mort sur les charognes tolérées le long des chemins, et qui, bourdonnante, dansante, jetant un éclat de pierreries, empoisonnait les hommes rien qu’à se poser sur eux ». Cette analyse des métaphores employées NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 par Zola afin de représenter la mort tiendra compte de l’importance croissante des discours scientifiques dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle.

“Le dessous du marbre : la chair des Parnassiens et sa dissolution de Baudelaire à Rimbaud et Laforgue” Henning Hufnagel, Universität Freiburg La poésie des Parnassiens abonde en corps –beaux corps, corps de marbre ou de chair. Toutefois marbre et chair ne sont pas des contraires. Souvent la chair parnassienne est, pour ainsi dire, de marbre : monumentale, impérissable, éternisée par le mythe, l’art et la poésie. Mais l’effort de pérennisation présuppose la présence d’une matière périssable. Toute la « gloire » – proclamée par le titre Trophées – de Heredia consiste notamment dans le fait de sauver un objet de l’oubli, de la décomposition. Souvent, les poésies parnassiennes présentent une suspension entre le vivant et l’inerte : la chair « palpite » encore sous le marbre. C’est sur cette matière périssable « cachée » que Baudelaire, Rimbaud et Laforgue mettent le doigt quand ils affrontent les Parnassiens, soit sur un mode parodique, soit sur un mode tragique. Ils tirent, pour ainsi dire, la chair de dessous le marbre pour exposer le corps maladif, en dissolution. La communication abordera cette problématique, à partir d’une esquisse de l’esthétique du corps parnassien, dans les poésies « La Charogne », « Vénus anadyomène » et « L’Oubli », en tenant particulièrement compte de l’influence des discours scientifiques contemporains sur la mort. Dans un deuxième temps, on étudiera les implications métaphoriques dans un contexte poétologique. Si les statues se dressent contre la désintégration biologique, les Parnassiens pensent par ailleurs les genres et formes poétiques eux-mêmes d’une façon « organique ». Ils se rattachent à une tradition d’esthétique philosophique antérieure au XIXe siècle qui conçoit l’œuvre d’art comme un tout organique, tradition, qui sera mise en cause au XXe siècle et avant cela par les poètes de Baudelaire à Laforgue, grâce aux genres hybrides et des vers irréguliers. La « charogne littéraire » est peut-être, en dernière analyse, la forme poétique même.

“Les charognes esthétiques de Lautréamont” Frank Jäger, Universität Zürich Depuis que Victor Hugo a reconnu, dans la Préface de Cromwell, la valeur esthétique du laid et du grotesque, beaucoup d’écrivains du XIXe siècle ont suivi, d'une façon ou d'une autre, cette voie. C'est à partir de ces fondements du romantisme qu'une esthétique du morbide se développe dans la littérature, surtout dans l'œuvre de « poètes maudits », comme Baudelaire, Rimbaud et Verlaine. Si de telles réflexions poétologiques et artistiques constituent le premier pilier central des « charognes littéraires », c’est l'essor des sciences du vivant qui forme le second. La connaissance scientifique de plus en plus approfondie de l’anatomie et de la biologie a contribué à consolider une telle esthétique et a nourri l'imagination des écrivains. L'œuvre de Lautréamont en donne un exemple frappant. Dans Les chants de Maldoror, le protagoniste, homme-animal hybride, plonge dans les gouffres de la vie. Il rencontre des parasites infiniment petits, il tombe sur des charognards et réels (des vautours) et fictifs (des vampires), il fait l'expérience de la désintégration du corps, et il décrit tout cela avec un regard médico- scientifique. Lautréamont explore un espace poétique intermédiaire entre la plénitude vitale débordante d'un côté et, de l'autre, l'expérience d'une volonté destructrice, expérience due à la prise de conscience de la synergie des forces vitales naturelles. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Cette communication vise à éclairer l’esthétisation du morbide, la description d'une nature destructrice et ses implications morales. C’est le décalage entre instinct et intellect, entre force vitale et réflexion poétique qui se manifeste dans le texte de Lautréamont et qui nécessite qu’on analyse l'exploitation et la transformation esthétiques des connaissances scientifiques répandues au XIXe siècle, notamment celles qui sont liées aux sciences du vivant comme la vivisection ou l’anatomie.

Panel 10.D: Frontiers of the Secular Republic Chair: Philip Nord, Princeton University

“Expéditions scolaires et diplomatiques au XIXème siècle : la France comme utopie et dystopie dans le récit francophone” Ramla Bedoui, Yale University Lorsqu’au XIXème siècle, les pays arabo-musulmans sont confrontés à un nouvel ordre de domination européenne technologique, économique et militaire, ils se tournent vers Paris, la « capitale du XIXème siècle », pour comprendre puis combler ce retard. Les politiciens, les professeurs et les étudiants tunisiens et égyptiens les plus brillants sont choisis pour des expéditions d’études de plusieurs années qui ont donné naissance à des œuvres telles que Le Plus sûr moyen de connaître l’état des nations de Kheireddine Pacha et L’Or de Paris de Tahtawi. Des écrits, parfois rédigés en français, conçus par exemple pendant la Révolution de 1830 ou durant le Second Empire baudelairien ont largement contribué à un mouvement de réformes appelé « Ennahdha » ou les « Lumières arabes ». Pour ce dernier, la France fait simultanément figure d’utopie et de dystopie : un idéal politique, économique, éducatif et sanitaire, mais aussi l’incarnation d’un pouvoir qui capitalisera sur la domination européenne. En conséquence, bien qu’elle échoue à détourner le projet colonial, la modernisation initiée dans les pays arabo- musulmans adaptera les réformes survenues en France depuis 1789 à la lutte locale contre la corruption endémique, à la justice sociale et à l’épuration des institutions de l’emprise religieuse, ce qui aboutit à une laïcisation partielle de l’Etat et l’éducation. Les récits des voyageurs susmentionnés verront aussi un grand succès dans la postérité et serviront même de modèle pour un lieu commun majeur de la littérature francophone : le séjour de jeunesse en France, un rite de passage formateur où Paris devient autant l’instrument pour mesurer les retards du pays d’origine que la voix de la dérive, de l’exil et du déplacement. L’auteur doit alors faire face à une utopie dystopique qui prend la forme du double héritage intellectuel français : celui qui a aussi bien engendré l’humanisme et les Lumières que le racisme et la colonisation.

“No Place Like Home: Military Life & Social Contamination in French Antimilitarist Novels, 1887-1890” Michael Clinton, Gwynedd Mercy University This paper analyzes three novels controversial for their critical portrayal of military life that appeared between 1887 and 1890: Le Cavalier Miserey (1887), by Abel Hermant; Les Sous- Offs (1889), by Lucien Descaves; and Biribi (1890), by Georges Darien. While the novels have received some attention by scholars who see them as examples of shifting attitudes about the relationship between the army and the Republic in the years immediately preceding the Dreyfus Affair, few have considered in detail the stories they told and how these connected themes about NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 military service, family and social life, and republican values. Delving into the novels reveals portraits of barracks life as an artificial society where attachments are temporary and rupture in personal relationships the norm, where soldiers lack compelling reasons for developing any sense of duty, responsibility, or respect for the institutions and morals that a healthy republican society demanded. Leaving their family homes behind them, conscripts entered a world of moral contamination and social alienation, where they find themselves at the mercy of an unsympathetic and unjust system. Reformers had argued since the 1870s that there was no place like home to bridge the gap between military spirit and republican culture; as more of the Third Republic’s male citizens experienced military life directly by the late 1880s, these novelists— who themselves had completed their own military service—compelled outraged and sympathetic readers alike to consider the barracks as no place like home.

“‘La Révolution Morale’: Dreyfus and Laïcité” Lisa Bromberg, University of Pennsylvania When Alfred Dreyfus accepted amnesty in 1899 without clearing his name, many supporters were outraged. Zola summed up, “Dreyfus est libre, mais notre France reste malade.” This illness was a moral one, and healing could only come from the enactment of truth, justice, and, importantly, laïcisation.27 For Dreyfusards, the army, politics, and clergy were contaminating the Republic, whose otherwise “pure” state was characterized by the absolutist notions of equality and freedom. An innocent martyr, Dreyfus became a symbol of this new state, and for some his death was preferable to France’s loss at the Rennes trial. For these Dreyfusards, Dreyfus was a disposable limb of the body politic, like the medieval crusaders who died for king and patrie.28 In this context, secularism became religiously inflected as its advocates relied on the Christian notion of martyrdom to sustain their mission. Indeed, many today would describe French laïcité as a “sacred” national value in which the “Republic” simply replaces the “Church.” While France’s law separating church and state is considered one outcome of the Dreyfus Affair, few scholars acknowledge the role that Dreyfus played in laying the groundwork for public approval of laïcisation. Although in writing from exile he referred repeatedly to his “martyrdom,” he did not consider death an option. Rather, I argue that his nationalism secularized the ideas of martyrdom and the body politic to redefine French Republicanism. His secularism supported a hybrid French-Jewish identity that was at once political, patriotic, and religious. What was at stake was not the presence or absence of religion in the public sphere, but the conception of the nation as a unified body of which each citizen was both limb and head, mortal body, and immortal “Diginitas.” This reading paves the way for a reappraisal of French nationhood in the age of laïcité.

“Contaminating Narratives: Grotesque Messianism in Marcel Schwob’s Plagues” Gayle Zachmann, University of Florida Describing post–Sedan (and post-Commune) France, in The Culture of Defeat, Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that while the fear of being overrun or destroyed can be seen in images of desertification and ruins, in vanquished nations cultural production aspires to revanche. A term most often associated with revenge for Alsace-Lorraine, Schivelbusch insists that post-1870s

27 Quote and explanation drawn from Joseph Reinach, Histoire de l’Affaire Dreyfus. Paris: Laffont, 2006, 898-89. 28 My theoretical lens for this paper is inspired by Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

French culture invokes a more generalized national and cultural revanche: an honorable and even messianic future, with defeat no longer narrated as a , but as a liberation with a missionary aspect: the responsibility to share for the good and regeneration of humanity. Although I was at first a bit suspicious of the master narrative in The Culture of Defeat, Marcel Schwob’s corpus seems, at the very least, to be in dialogue with the models Schivelbusch would propose. Indeed, it would even seem to parody them. Looking back from this perspective, ruins and freewheeling golden ages, , and nightmarish distinctively mark Schwob’s work, and I would add, so does contamination. Figuring endemic and epidemic maladies, from leprosy and the plague, to cholera and even mass suicide, Marcel Schwob’s narratives mobilize apocalyptic visions of disfigurement and individual and social terror. With “Le Roi au masque d’or,” where the king’s mask conceals the marks of his infected face, to the fetid bodies littering the streets of “La Peste,” and the looming threat of cholera that links the real and the fantastic in “Le train 081,” corruption of physical and social bodies menacingly taint the narratives with fin de siècle visions. And yet, Schwob’s foul play with the literary and socially “bienséant,” does not only indicate artistic dissidence. Indeed, post-revolutionary discourses of aesthetic and social transformation might help us to read his tales as grotesque adventures in cultural activism that take on issues as fraught as xenophobia, religious fanaticism, and racism.

Panel 10.E: Ecologies of Contamination : Money, Poison, and Corruption Chair: Jena Whitaker, Johns Hopkins University

“La Corruption comme pratique néfaste contagieuse dans la société française du XIXe siècle, à travers La Curée d’Emile Zola” Wabiy Salawu, University of Kent Si le devenir d’une société dépend de l’aspiration globale du peuple et de la vision des tenants du pouvoir, elle est également symptomatique de l’orientation que chaque individu donne à la vie dans son environnement. Ainsi, la corruption au XIXe siècle se manifeste en France comme un virus contagieux qui s’impose désormais comme une vision culturelle. Dans cet article, il s’agira de montrer à travers La Curée d’Emile Zola, comment les nouveaux tenants du pouvoir ont fait de la corruption la pratique la mieux partagée pour qu’elle devienne le principal fondement du fonctionnement de la société française. Ce roman, peinture qui intègre à la fois l’injustice, la duperie et la gabegie, dévoile les stratégies des milieux financiers du Second Empire, baignant dans une corruption sans précédent, en mettant en relief les nouveaux affairistes de cette société. Alors, cette étude critique du roman de Zola, qui se fera à l’aide de L’Evénement Interdiscursif de Jürgen Link et Ursula Link-Heer qui privilégie le système synchrone des symboles collectifs, permettra de dévoiler les manifestations contagieuses de ce cancer de société qu’est la corruption. L’application du système des symboles ici ne se limitera pas au caractère fluctuant des mots et expressions mais pourrait quelques fois s’étendre à une partie ou à l’entièreté d’une phrase. Il s’agira donc d’opérer une extraction naturelle ou contre nature au sein des idées qui se manifestent dans le texte pour y dégager, de façon claire, les contours multiformes et pernicieux d’une vision sociale cancéreuse et contagieuse qui est celle de la corruption économique passive.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“L’argent propre : imaginaire social du confinement et de la circulation” Florence Fix, Université de Lorraine La seconde partie du xixe siècle français découvre l’argent virtuel : les actions en bourse, les spéculations sur données intangibles, les fortunes colossales mais invisibles installent un nouvel imaginaire de l’argent qui se déplace tout le temps, passe d’individu en individu, tout en restant invisible. Inauguré en 1826, le Palais Brongniart, siège de de Paris, emblématise ce point central de la ville moderne qui pour être spectaculaire n’en est pourtant pas moins énigmatique. Eugène de Mirecourt, en 1858, lui consacre un essai au titre évocateur : La Bourse, ses abus et ses mystères. Ce nouveau rapport à l’argent installe un espace fantasmatique qui autorise, d’une part, la circulation, tout en, d’autre part, évacuant la contamination. L’imaginaire de la spéculation en effet s’empare volontiers du vocabulaire de la microbiologie et de l’intérêt général pour les premiers vaccins : on parle ainsi du « virus de la Bourse » pour les agioteurs, de la « fièvre » des affaires pour les investisseurs. Mais aucun objet matériel sale ne passe plus de mains en mains, l’argent virtuel est fluide, propre, éthéré. La façon dont est abordé cet argent a beaucoup de schèmes discursifs communs avec la propagation d’une maladie, mais sans la saleté : la fortune est virale, l’affairisme financier cherche à contaminer le plus grand nombre de clients, le déplacement de l’argent est épanchement, déplacement, propagation – tous ces schèmes se trouvent réemployés dans un registre positif. Dans sa Physiologie du floueur, Charles Philippon établit un portrait ironique de ce voleur moderne : la flouerie, la capacité à déplacer de l’argent invisible voire inexistant serait « le progrès, le perfectionnement scientifique » de ce qui n’était auparavant que vol. En « odeur de probité », le grand entrepreneur, le « tripoteur d’affaires » qui s’est multiplié sur les travaux du Paris haussmannien et sur les scandales financiers comme Panama, le capitaliste moderne sait manier un argent qui enfin n’a pas d’odeur et ainsi se soustraire au rapport avec l’ouvrier manuel ou le paysan. Car l’argent propre, virtuel réalise ce double fantasme : il circule, se répand, se multiplie (comme un virus) mais aussi confine, clôture les classes sociales élevées qui n’ont plus besoin de frayer avec les classes populaires pour des tractations laborieuses et tangibles. En utilisant notamment des œuvres théâtrales (La Question d’argent de Dumas fils, L’Epidémie et Les Affaires sont les affaires, d’Octave Mirbeau), en tant qu’articulation visible entre les représentations scéniques de la circulation de l’argent et l’imaginaire social de l’époque, cette contribution se propose d’étudier l’anxiété de l’épidémie telle que retravaillée de façon positive par l’imaginaire de la finance moderne.

“Spreading Sensations in Maupassant” Michal P. Ginsburg, Northwestern University Most studies of smell in nineteenth-century French literature link the intensification of collective sensitivity to odors of all kinds to the growing importance of privacy and the individual and to “the bourgeois aim of both keeping away from and protecting himself against the masses” (Corbin, 162). This new sensitivity to smells is most obvious in discussions of hygiene and public health in the first half of the century, before the Haussmannization of Paris and the Pasteurian revolution changed both material conditions and the understanding of the causes of disease. This raises the question of how to interpret the representation of smell in the latter part of the century, in authors such as Zola and Maupassant. In this paper I argue that though Maupassant’s preoccupation with smell has an undisputable link to issues of class and to NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 the fear of “social contagion,” the specificity of his treatment of smell lies in seeing its “spreading” or “invading” capacity as leading to the abolition of the separation between subject and object in the experience of both art and madness.

“Revenge Contamination: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Toxicology” Natalie Berkman, Princeton University In a pivotal moment of Alexandre Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844), Gérard de Villefort returns home after the most devastating trial of his career, during which the accused turned out to be Villefort’s illegitimate son. Such a revelation comes at a particularly inopportune moment, as Villefort has just ordered his young wife’s suicide as punishment for poisoning his entire family. Rushing home, Villefort muses on forgiveness, but when he returns, it is too late. The poison was doubly effective, as Mme de Villefort has also administered the drug on her infant child. Poison is an apt murder weapon, chosen precisely by the titular Count of Monte Cristo. Indeed, much earlier he had instructed Mme de Villefort precisely in such matters. In fact, poison seems to pervade the entire novel: infected by the initial crime (the wrongful accusation of Edmond Dantès), the perpetrators and their progeny suffer from the ramifications of their own hubris, set in motion by the Count himself. As he mutters to himself after instructing Mme de Villefort in the toxicology lesson that would dismantle her family, “…voilà une bonne terre, je suis convaincu que le grain qu’on y laisse tomber n’y avorte pas.” This paper seeks to examine poison in Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, both in its literal manifestations and as a metaphor for the book itself. The initial crime permeates the novel on a number of levels: the motivations organically create the plan of revenge; various chemicals demonstrate their potent capacities to heal, destroy, and obscure; and behind it all, the changing political regimes of 19th century France and the absent figure of Napoléon reign supreme, their ramifications serving as the fertile soil for three guilty parties to benefit from a wrongful accusation in disguised handwriting.

Panel 10.F: Corrupting the Code: Class and Gender in Women’s Writing Chair: Anne McCall, Binghamton University

“Robes souillées et gilets magnifiques: Sand Turns the Fictional World on its Head” Isabelle Hoog Naginski, Tufts University Readers of Pavel’s La Pensée du roman may remember that its epigraph is a quote by Sand : « L’art n’est pas une étude de la réalité positive ; c’est une recherche de la vérité idéale. » In her novels of the 1840s – the period of her « romantisme rouge » – Sand expands her search for « ideal truth. » Among her numerous literary devices the strategy of inversion stands out, taking the fictional world of Balzac and others and setting it on its head. Sand takes Balzac’s deformed social pyramid, over-populated by aristocrats and high bourgeois, and flips it, giving greater emphasis to the proletariat and the peasantry. In so doing, she turns the pyramid back to a more “realistic” configuration, opening up a space for the voices of workers and peasants. In Horace, she laments the lack of esprit in aristocratic circles, claiming that there are more intellectual discussions in one day in a Paris mansarde than in one month in a salon: « … il y a de plus grandes idées et de plus grands sentiments dans les ateliers que dans les NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 salons », she writes. Sand exploits the adjective “noble” to designate, not the dullards of the nobility, but her heroes who consist of revolutionary students and grisettes: “Il y a des cœurs purs sous des robes souillées et des cœurs corrrompus sous des gilets magnifiques. » This is a sample of Sand’s « ideal truth. » Sand justifies her use of ideal characters with the claim that they exist and that she herself has met some of them. She claims:« J’ai rencontré trop de belles âmes dans la vie réelle ». In fact such noble souls are what keeps the world from disintegrating : “Il y a encore des âmes fortes comme je les imagine, car s’il n’y en avait plus, le monde périrait.” Sand’s turning the literary standards of her day on their head subverts the idées reçues of the noble gentleman and the dangerous proletariat. Her literary strategies construct a fictional world replete with veracious ideals.

“Undoing Beauty : the Aesthetics of Seeing in Consuelo” Tuo Liu, Harvard University George Sand’s Consuelo, first published in 1842-1843, occupies an intriguing position in the Sandian corpus as one of the very few works which feature an artist as heroine. As such, Consuelo presents an obvious parallel to George Sand herself, especially at a time when female identity and authorship were greatly debated. Indeed, just a year later Daumier would publish his (in)famous caricatures on the bas-bleu, where he portrayed female writers as ugly spinsters and old hags. Such a vitriolic response betrayed the anxieties engendered by the emergence of female creative pursuits outside of a strictly domestic sphere, and the ensuing fears of contamination. While Consuelo needs to don male clothing during her journey to Vienna, George Sand also engages in a form of symbolic cross-dressing as she engages with a realist mode of representation that has traditionally been coded as “masculine”. As Christopher Prendergast has argued, realism can be understood as “an economy of positions and drives based on the relations of actual or imaginary looking, an economy where there is typically or stereotypically a male looker, and one of the privileged objects of vision is the body of a woman.” Though Consuelo has often been read in terms of voice and hearing, I propose a reading centered on a visual paradigm of gazes and mirrors (an integral part of the 19th century metalanguage of realism). I contend that Consuelo’s quest to find her true artistic voice is inextricably linked to her continuous negotiation with the dynamics of seeing, both as active gazer and object of others’ gaze. Through the figure of Consuelo, Sand questions the aesthetic and ethical values of categories such as beauty and ugliness while embracing the possibility of a non-mimetic mode of representation. Nonetheless, if Consuelo achieves a radically different way of seeing, the writer herself struggles to free herself of realist poetics.

“Writing under the Influence: Suzanne Voilquin’s Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple; ou la Saint-Simonienne en Egypte” Bettina Lerner, CUNY Graduate Center In Les Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple, Suzanne Voilquin gives a gripping account of her experiences as a working-class Parisian who joins the Saint-Simonians and finds her voice as a journalist, midwife, intrepid traveler and leading feminist thinker of the 1830s and 40s. Voilquin situates her memoir squarely in the tradition of Romantic autobiographers from Rousseau, to Chateaubriand and George Sand. In this sense, her writing might seem to fall prey to the kind of influence that nineteenth-century critic Cuvillier-Fleury termed a "contagion d'exemple," or what NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Maurice Crubellier writing in the 1970s expressed as the contamination of popular culture by elite interests. Instead, this paper argues that Voilquin establishes herself as a full-fledged subject by writing her way into a series of complicit and competing discourses. Rather than simply imitate bourgeois codes and forms, Voilquin carefully negotiates boundaries of class and gender in France as well as in the early colonial landscape of North . In so doing, she attempts to carve out a space for self-expression for other working-class writers as well, albeit not without troubling consequences for the colonial space in which she seeks her own freedom. As Claire Moses Goldberg and Leslie Rabine have shown, Voilquin's sharply politicized portrayal of the 1820s and 30s manages to outline the principles of feminist theory out of the radical yet essentially patriarchal practices of saint-simonianism. This paper builds on their seminal study in order to consider how Voilquin's text elicits and reinforces what in the 1860s was still a new reading culture created for and by working-class women, one which still today offers up numerous paradoxes for feminist critique. I thus conclude my analysis of Voilquin's memoir with a reconsideration of Jacques Rancière's open debate with Lydia Elhadad and Geneviève Fraisse on Voilquin's complex position as a writer, worker and feminist.

“Plagiarism, Maupassant and Jane de la Vaudère’s Les Demi-sexes” Sharon Larson, Christopher Newport University In October of 1897, the literary periodical La Province nouvelle invited readers to compare selected passages from Jane de la Vaudère’s recent novel Les Demi-sexes against excerpts from Maupassant’s 1890 novel, Notre cœur. Though this anonymous piece did not go so far as to outright denounce La Vaudère as a plagiarist, the unequivocal stylistic similarities between the highlighted passages suggested that she liberally borrowed from her confrère’s previous work. What La Province nouvelle overlooked, however, was that Notre cœur was not the only novel by Maupassant that inspired Les Demi-sexes. Indeed, a comparative analysis reveals that many of La Vaudère’s descriptions of her protagonist’s travels in Sicily are undeniable reproductions of Maupassant’s legendary travel memoirs, “La Sicile” (1886) and “La côte italienne” (1890). Les Demi-sexes is a novel about clandestine ovariectomies in fin-de-siècle Paris. With an ostensibly feminist preoccupation with female sexual emancipation and reproductive agency, its final chapters nonetheless remain faithful to conventional doctrines that advocate marriage and maternity. Given this context, Maupassant’s presence in the novel offers a new perspective on these contradictory discourses about femininity. In fact, many of the novel’s pivotal portrayals of female sexuality and its ensuing endorsement of procreation are actually “copied” passages from Maupassant’s texts. La Vaudère’s alleged plagiarism, therefore, suggests a textual intrusion— and contamination—of male-authored constructions of femininity that has implications well beyond the ethics of textual reproduction. This paper will explore these gendered trends in “plagiarism” (a term that also needs contextualizing) and what this apparent reliance on male perspective reveals about discursive representations of female sexuality at the fin de siècle.

Break 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Saturday 7 November Session 11 – 4:00 pm - 5:45 pm

Panel 11.A: Mixologies: Mixings, Miasmas, Impurities Chair: Janet Beizer, Harvard University

“Disturbing Formal Purity: Agency, Intersubjectivity, and Gender in the Sculptural Encounter” Nigel Harkness, Newcastle University While sculpture in the nineteenth century is frequently associated with purity, perfection and the ideal, recent critical work on the encounter between the viewer and the sculptural object has highlighted the ambiguity and hybridity of that interaction. Naomi Segal, for instance, has framed the sculptural gaze as midway between touching and seeing, and foregrounded the sensual and sexual ambiguities of the sculptural encounter. The art critic David J Getsy’s has posited the immobility and passivity of the statue not as a lack, but as a performed stillness and confrontational inertness. This work provides a framework for re-reading a number of nineteenth-century representations of the woman-statue, in works by Balzac, Sand and Gautier in particular. Shifting the focus from the way in which this figure mixes the animate and the inanimate, sameness and difference, I propose to explore representations of the dynamics of the sculptural encounter, and re-examine the ethical and intersubjective issues which arise within the unsettling space of that encounter. My paper will consider the way in which the association of sculpture with formal purity and inertness gives way to something more troubling, less pure, potentially contaminating, performative in its stillness, and certainly disturbing, and from there will explore the questions of agency, intersubjectivity and gender which these representations of the sculptural encounter highlight.

“Mixed Up: Colonial Food and Imperial Identity at the Exposition universelle of 1889” Kylie Sago, Harvard University A series of unsettling mixes were staged at the colonial section of the Exposition universelle of 1889 in Paris: between France and her overseas territories, their respective cultures and culinary traditions, and between desire and various kinds of disgust (i.e., physiological and aesthetic) in reactions elicited by these mélanges. Consumption of colonial food products and dishes available at markets and restaurants of the exhibition provided European visitors with a taste of the colonies and presented a medium for cultural evaluation. Like other spectacles of the colonial exposition at the Esplanade des Invalides, its culinary encounters prompted a flurry of writing in contemporary publications recounting visitors’ experiences of the World’s Fair. Expressions of disgust appear in these texts as frequently as indications of fascination with the exoticism of colonial cuisines. These publications gesture to the delicate line separating the experiences of disgust and desire; food at the exposition needed to be exotic enough to justify anthropological interest, but too-exotic dishes triggered unease over contamination. For European visitors, articulating disgust represented a discursive strategy to fortify an identity challenged by its encounter with colonial alterity; disgust not only indicated a sense of unsettlement, but more importantly insisted on the body’s capacity to reject whatever substances or practices proved ultimately too strange to stomach. This paper will consider these expressions NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 of disgust as indications of larger anxieties over French identity in the self-reflexively imperial context of the Exposition universelle.

“Sillage is the New Miasma: Three Signature Scents” Cheryl Krueger, University of Virginia By the mid-nineteenth century, research on microorganisms and germ theory had discredited the belief that epidemic disease was spread by contaminated air, vapors and earth. Nonetheless, popular etiologies of miasmic contagion persisted throughout the century. Pollution, putrefaction, effluvia and miasma had been associated with corrupted air and its attendant smells for so long that it must have been difficult let go of the concern that odor itself was a vehicle for contagion. Perfume and other fragrant accessories, on the other hand, were generally seen if not as an antidote, at least as a physical shield from the assault of mephitic air. The golden age of osphresiolgy (as Alain Corbin dubbed it) unfolded in tandem with the birth of modern French perfumery. Yet as the pleasures and virtues of perfume were depicted in print advertising and product labels, the perils of perfume abuse became a topic of increasing concern in newspaper articles, hygiene manuals and medical treatises. In works of nineteenth-century fiction as well, evocations of fragrance suggest a perceived danger associated with the smell of something in the air, even when that smell is perfume. In this paper I will focus specifically on three novelistic evocations of the perfumed letter, a well-known and ostensibly innocuous vehicle for the writer’s signature scent. In Balzac’s Béatrix, as well as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Education sentimentale, the fragrant letter contributes to a narrative network of physical, psychological and moral contamination. In these works, fragrant letters function metonymically as an extension of its writer’s body and mind, and also metaphorically, the ink and page like blood and skin, contaminated by and contaminating with their signature scent.

“The Devil’s Stew : Exercises in Gastro-anomie” Janet Beizer, Harvard University Throughout the Middle Ages, the prostitute, the buffoon, the criminal, and the insane were consigned to clothes that were striped, streaked, patchworked, gaudily hued, spotted, or otherwise variegated to represent the idea of disorder, disruption, and impurity they were assumed to visit upon the social order. Modern occidental culture is in fact still permeated by the scandal of variegation, contends Michel Pastoureau, still touched by the association of the solid with the godly, and the mottled with the diabolical. In my paper I’ll explore the phenomenon of recomposed leftovers sold at Les Halles and other venues in the long nineteenth century, to which the alimentary idiom l’arlequin was assigned, as an avatar of the persistent fears and anxieties that mixing, streaking and hybridity invoke. If the alimentary arlequin was ignoble and disgusting in its incarnation of decomposition and indistinction—an example of “gastro- anomie,” in Madeleine Ferrière’s choice phrasing—it existed in a broader context of identity loss. Reading accounts of patchworked table scraps together with descriptions of their similarly stitched-together consumers suggests that the plate of reassembled dinner vestiges did not directly inherit the Commedia dell’arte character’s name, but was mediated by the aspect of indigent customers, society’s sundry castoffs as well. The garbage stew and the human stew present parallel constructs, analogous scenes whose separate elements (patched trousers and NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 asymmetrical collars, motley crowds and clashing colors, gnawed remains of multiple dinners re- plated together) all push mixing to the extreme of promiscuity. Following the commentary of contemporaries (sometimes echoed today), I will explore the arlequin as devil’s food—impure, contaminated, and contaminating by its hybridity, intermittently seductive by its socioeconomic exoticism—in a framework grounded in anthropological, sociological, and esthetic theory.

Panel 11.B: Pureté, perversion et nostalgie : la tentation du voyage au XIXe siècle Chair: Margot Irvine, University of Guelph Respondent: Clive Thomson, University of Guelph

“Le voyage dénaturé ou comment pervertir son bel héritage” Nathalie Solomon, Université de Perpignan Si on considère que le voyage originel du siècle romantique est celui de Chateaubriand, on constate que ses successeurs pervertissent le modèle en l’entachant d’obscénité (Flaubert), de trivialité (Gautier, Dumas), de provocation (Custine), d’humour (Nerval) et surtout en faisant du corps du voyageur une régie essentielle du récit, qui permet d’en refuser la nature poétique. Ces œuvres laissent percer la nostalgie d’un voyage heureux mais désormais impossible, à la fois géographique et temporel. Le regard sur le lieu est contaminé 1) par les autres récits, par une pratique littéraire qu’on ne peut ignorer 2) par une réalité encombrante qui vient déranger le fantasme et empêcher de se livrer à la rêverie sur les lieux. D’où l’importance du corps du voyageur qui incarne la contamination du voyage idéal par une contingence un peu suspecte. On tentera ainsi de réfléchir à la manière dont les héritiers de Chateaubriand réinventent le récit de voyage littéraire comme un défi au voyage parfait de 1811. La faim, le froid, la chaleur, la fatigue, la saleté, le danger, confèrent au corps du voyageur une épaisseur qui modifie la nature du récit devenu une forme de manuel de survie exprimé en termes impeccables, qui méritent l’admiration littéraire sans renoncer à dire le monde tel qu’il est. C’est cette mise à distance qu’il faudra examiner, en montrant comment l’altération du modèle, et la tentation de s’y référer, produisent un voyage inquiet et ambigu chez certains des plus grands représentants de la génération romantique, chez lesquels on sent percer le regret d’une écriture désormais impossible.

“La nostalgie : de la maladie «contagieuse» à l’expression esthétique” Jelena Jovicic, University of British Columbia Dans Le Normal et le pathologique, Georges Canguilhem note que la ligne de partage entre ces deux états est toujours floue et, par là même, contestable : cette observation de Canguilhem, bien qu’elle ne soit pas si récente, s’avère encore inspiratrice et offre un solide point de départ pour l’étude des concepts appartenant à des zones turbulentes, telle la nostalgie qui s’est vue basculer, au cours du dix-neuvième siècle, entre les deux pôles. Dans ma communication, je me propose donc d’examiner l’évolution épistémologique et esthétique du concept de nostalgie dans la France de la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Conçue d’abord comme une maladie « contagieuse » et « mortelle » avec un diagnostic médical minutieusement élaboré, la nostalgie se transformera graduellement en sentiment, sens qui nous est encore connu aujourd’hui. Dans un premier temps, j’examinerai un ensemble représentatif de textes médicaux sur la nostalgie (1800-1850) dont les systèmes de représentation et les schémas d’explication ont NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 contribué à la construction d’une maladie originale autant qu’à sa disparition consécutive des tableaux nosologiques. Dans un deuxième temps, j’explorerai la « migration » de la nostalgie de la pratique exclusivement clinique vers un usage esthétique. Plus précisément, j’analyserai le rôle qu’avait la nostalgie médicale dans la création des Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1820-1878), ouvrage monumental qui diffusait l’esthétique et la sensibilité des romantiques.

“Respirer un air plus pur : les vertus curatives de l’Italie dans les Lettres à Alexandrine, d’Émile Zola” Sophie Guermès, Université de Brest Les voyages d’Alexandrine Zola en Italie ont fourni l’occasion d’une riche correspondance, qui vient d’être éditée (dir. A. Pagès et B. Émile-Zola, Gallimard, octobre 2014). Avant 1895, Alexandrine n’était jamais partie seule à l’étranger. Elle fait donc acte d’indépendance en s’éloignant de son mari plusieurs semaines. Le prétexte est fourni par sa santé (elle souffre de crises d’asthme) ; mais si son corps est malade, ses souffrances psychologiques sont bien plus importantes. En effet, quatre ans auparavant, elle a appris par une lettre anonyme que son mari avait une liaison avec Jeanne Rozerot, et que deux enfants étaient nés de cette union. La blessure est loin d’être refermée lorsqu’elle éprouve, en 1895, la tentation d’un voyage en Italie, et c’est une femme dévastée (on le mesure en lisant les réponses de l’écrivain à ses plaintes) qui, après avoir suivi les traces de la jeunesse de son mari, en , puis dans le nord de l’Italie, terre des ancêtres de Zola, s’installe pour quelque temps à Rome, qu’elle avait découverte l’année précédente avec le romancier lorsque celui-ci y avait séjourné pour préparer le deuxième volume des Trois villes. Zola va peindre Rome comme une ville morte ; Alexandrine, au contraire, va y renaître régulièrement, en y lavant ses plaies. Elle développe « une affinité singulière » avec une ville qui a survécu aux invasions, portant mémoire et témoignage de la destruction par les ruines qui subsistent en son centre comme à la périphérie. On peut conjecturer qu’elle y a puisé une leçon de résistance et de vie, et que, revenue à Paris, elle en a gardé la nostalgie, puisqu’elle y est retournée chaque année jusqu’en 1913, à l’exception de 1898, année d’exil de Zola en Angleterre, et de 1902, année de la mort de l’écrivain.

“Voyages et repérages dans l’univers naturaliste” Alain Pagès, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 Il arrive au romancier naturaliste de voyager à l’étranger : les Goncourt se sont rendus à Rome pour Madame Gervaisais et Zola a fait de même pour écrire son roman sur la Ville éternelle. Mais aux longs périples initiatiques qu’affectionnent les romantiques l’écrivain naturaliste préfère de courts déplacements qui le conduisent à des repérages de situations : Zola se rend à Anzin pour Germinal, va dans la Beauce pour La Terre, refait le trajet suivi par l’armée de 1870 pour composer La Débâcle, arpente Paris pour écrire L’Assommoir… Le repérage l’emporte sur le voyage. Ce schéma étant rappelé, nous nous demanderons ce qui peut le troubler, le déstabiliser – en pervertissant cette clôture spatiale dans laquelle s’enferme volontiers l’enquête naturaliste. Quelle impureté, quelle nostalgie d’un ailleurs insaisissable le voyage introduit-il ? Deux sortes de circonstances mériteront examen : le bouleversement de l’exil, ou le drame du voyage imposé, entre aventure et retraite (Zola fuyant en Angleterre au NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 moment de l’affaire Dreyfus) ; la tentation de l’exotisme, ou l’expérience du voyage colonial (de l’utopie de Fécondité, chez Zola, aux explorations africaines et asiatiques d’un Paul Bonnetain).

Panel 11.C: Through Glass Walls, Through Fourth Walls, Through Huysmans Chair: Willemijn Don, Bryn Mawr College

“Nature et artifice, ou de la porosité des aquariums” Julia Przybos, Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY Dans A Rebours, Des Esseintes lance un défit à la radoteuse nature, s’évertuant à prouver l’originalité et donc la supériorité des créations de l’homme. On connaît le résultat : la tortue ne survit pas à l’incrustation de pierres précieuses ; le Népenthès, « dont la fantaisie dépasse les limites connues des excentriques formes », imite bel et bien le caoutchouc ; Des Esseintes doit renoncer à une existence conçue à l’envers du rythme naturel de l’homme. Si les tentatives pour surpasser la flore et la faune terrestres se soldent par un échec, celles pour égaler le monde aquatique semblent couronnées de succès. Dans la salle à manger « donnant » sur un aquarium, le personnage réussit à se procurer les sensations d’un voyage de long cours. Les objets recréant une cabine de navire, l’eau de l’aquarium se plie aux désirs de Des Esseintes. Il lui suffit d’y verser quelques gouttes d’essences colorées pour s’offrir les tons variables des véritables rivières. Il y contemple « de merveilleux poissons mécaniques, montés comme des pièces d’horlogerie » qui s’accrochent dans de fausses herbes. En 1884, Des Esseintes croit égaler, voire surpasser le monde aquatique, en 1888, après une visite de l’aquarium de Berlin, Huysmans rend hommage au Dieu de la Genèse qui a « réservé ses bêtes les plus extravagantes pour les antres mystérieux des gouffres » maritimes. Grâce à la stupéfiante exubérance aquatique, la nature trouve aux yeux de Huysmans l’estampille de génie que lui refusait Des Esseintes. Introduit dans les lettres par Mallarmé (Dernières modes, 1874), l’aquarium figure, après Huysmans, chez quelques auteurs des prochaines décennies qui, eux aussi, explorent la frontière poreuse entre nature et artifice. Je propose de montrer que, par le truchement des aquariums, Laforgue (« Salomé »), Gide (Paludes), Breton (Poisson soluble), Soupault (Aquarium) et Roussel (Locus Solus) s’interrogent sur les rapports fluides entre les créatures de la nature et les créations de l’homme.

“‘L’Aquarium de Berlin’: A Majestic Oasis Within a Contaminated City” Claire Nettleton, Scripps College In “L’Aquarium de Berlin” (1902), J.-K. Huysmans temporarily escapes the polluted, industrial city of Berlin and enters the public aquarium, a portal to the fantastical deep sea. The narrator abandons the Spree River, described as a dirty gutter, to find glorious waters brimming with multicolored coral. The noises of cars and machinery fall silent amidst the squawking of macaws. The urbanization and industrialization of European cities contributed to the public’s fascination with the deep sea as an escape or refuge. With its undulating, serpentine lines and colorful, otherworldly creatures, the ocean inspired Art Nouveau artists and Decadent writers. They drew from observations from Charles Darwin and C. Wyville Thomson and public NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 aquariums. The Berlin Aquarium, which opened in 1869 and contained tanks embedded into rock, resembled a grotto inside the city center. This integration of the ocean within an urban institution culminates in Jules Laforgue’s “À l’Aquarium de Berlin” (1895). The poem idealizes and orientializes the aquarium as a haven from the chaotic frenzy of urban life. In contrast, at the end of Huysmans’ text, the narrator gains a new appreciation for the modern city. The imagery in these writings is emblematic of a 19th- century European vision whose drive for industrial and scientific progress is perhaps as obsessive as its desire to be one with the natural world. The aquarium in Huysmans’ A Rebours, filled with dyes and mechanical fish, illustrates the ways in which technology can replicate ecological resources. In my analysis of these works as well as zoological treatises and sketches, I will argue that as a living painting, which is at once organic and artificial, the public aquarium provides an idyllic sanctuary within a contaminated metropolis.

“‘Si quelqu'un méritait le nom de réaliste, ce seraient les Hanlon Lees’: Huysmans and Zola at the Folies-Bergère and the (Porous) Nature of the Real” Jennifer Forrest, Texas State University During their 1879 season in Paris, the Hanlon-Lees offered a series of dizzying pantomimes at which Émile Zola and J.K. Huysmans were spectators. Both writers are frequently cited in descriptions and assessments of the nature of the originality of the troupe's performances, and yet their approaches are fundamentally different. Zola's review in the Voltaire was of Le Voyage en Suisse at the Théâtre des Variétés, easily the most narratively constructed of all the pantomimes in the Hanlon-Lees repertoire. Le Voyage en Suisse, written according to a tried and true vaudeville formula by Ernest Blum and Raoul Toché, drew Zola's praises solely in those scenes of pandemonium featuring the Hanlon-Lees. Nevertheless, he took the performance for its mimetic qualities, alluding to but not following the acrobats into that madness that he identified as "le néant." Huysmans described another pantomime, Le Duel, in "Les Folies-Bergère en 1879" in his Croquis parisiens (1880). In contrast to Le Voyage en Suisse, Le Duel possessed only the skeleton of a narrative and a great dose of frenzied nonsense. Still associated with Naturalism, Huysmans ostensibly begins with an appraisal of the mimetic qualities in the performance ("la sordide chimère du théâtre n'est plus. La vie seule se dresse devant nous, pantelante et superbe"), but his subsequent description of the fear that takes total possession of the pierrots indicates that, unlike Zola, Huysmans willingly followed the acrobats into the "néant," into an unfiltered, porous, and undifferentiated presentation (not re-presentation) of life marked by narrative and generic contamination and confusion.

“‘Les fenêtres des incurables’: Glass Hospices and the Decadent Imagination” Natasha Ryan, University of Oxford Contemplating his opulent hothouse, des Esseintes sees the flowers arranged there ‘ainsi que dans un hôpital, parmi les salles vitrées des serres’. Des Esseintes’ alignment of the hothouse with a hospital is typical of late nineteenth-century Decadence, which frequently ruminated on questions of disease, enclosure, nurture, and suffocation. The gradual displacement of miasma theory with germ theory, and the extensive architectural vitrification throughout the century, coincided with an aesthetic movement that encompassed both a fear of contagion and a NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 fascination with artificial growth, display culture, and excess. The hothouse captured this ambivalence: as a sealed environment, it offered a protective retreat from contamination and a nurturing-house for exotic creativity; however, its humid, stifling atmosphere also represented a claustrophobia that starved the artistic mind of oxygen. Similarly, its marine equivalent, the aquarium, combines the exoticism of the decadent mind with the suffocating threat of enclosure within glass walls. Consequently, these structures appeal to numerous poets of the period, including Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, and Laforgue, in whose work hothouses and aquariums are often compared to hospices and hospitals. The impermeability of glass, coupled with its transparency and association with department-store display, mean that it at once represents an ‘art for art’s sake’ mentality, which prizes artifice over nature, and the claustrophobia of an aesthetic that is questioning its own future, suffocated by the weight of tradition. This paper will examine the relationship between the poetry of the late nineteenth century and the glass structures that were increasingly a feature of the bourgeois home. As society prized ever more vitrified architecture, poetry responded by internalising that vitrification, using the qualities of the glass structure to interrogate its social identity, its place in the rapidly changing aesthetic scene, and its philosophy towards content and form.

Panel 11.D: The (Im)Pure Work of Art Chair: Ashley Byczkowski, SUNY Buffalo

“Blurring Lines Between Pure Art and Social Art: Politically Engaged Literature of the Symbolist Movement” Richard Shryock, Virginia Tech Symbolist literature of the fin de siècle is known for being detached from the world and even being a paragon of pure art having itself as its own end. Some critics, both of the time and currently, say that Symbolism has a socio-political dimension which comes from how the esthetic is framed on an abstract level relative to other currents (usually ) as opposed to the referential function of the language it uses. However, a handful of Symbolist texts from the late nineteenth century do contain depictions of social strife or attack institutions of power consistent with what would typically be described as socially committed or political literature. My paper explores this phenomenon using examples from a variety of works from the 1890s by Adolphe Retté, Bernard Lazare, Paul Adam, Saint-Pol-Roux and Gustave Kahn. The majority of these works were written during or just after the era of the anarchist bombings in Paris from 1892 to 1894. I will explore three interrelated facets of this type of Symbolist literature relative to the time in which they were produced. 1) The tension generated by using an esthetic typically associated with the contradictory goals of creating pure art and art that has an explicit social function. 2) What is the message of these pieces of literature? What are the social goals they seek to achieve? 3) Who is the addressee of these works? Is this social literature for an élite or does it aim to reach a wider audience? These works are key for understanding Symbolism’s overall relationship to politics and social matters. The very nature of these works puts into question those who argue that Symbolist literature is not at all political and those who claim that its political character derives from its lack of open social involvement. These texts help to better define the place of ideology in Symbolist literature as a whole. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

“The Newspaper vs. the Storyteller: Phantasms of Orality and the Quarrel of the roman- feuilleton” Jennifer Gipson, University of Wisconsin-Madison In the 1830s and 40s, critics of the roman feuilleton faulted the newspaper and its skyrocketing popular readership for contaminating “true” literature: speed, quantity, and market demands trumped art and esthetics. As cheap print triumphs, the storyteller should, in Walter Benjamin’s estimation, fall. I consider, however, how phantasms of orality come to support notions of a “pure” literature. For example, Schéhérazade, of Arabian Nights fame, surfaces frequently in debates about feuilletons. Dominique Jullien has studied the resonance of Schéhérazade’s stories with political questions or themes in feuilletons. However, by focusing on the circumstances of Schéhérazade’s life-or-death narrative production before the sultan, I show how she also provides a means of thinking about audience demands and the fate of art in this new market place. On the eve of the publication of the Mystères de Paris, critic Alfred-Auguste Cuvillier- Fleury imagines nineteenth-century readers waking up feuilletonistes at night, echoing Schéhérazade’s sister’s request for . Originality is undesirable; stagnation ensues. Other examples include an 1842 story by Théophile Gautier, ironically published in the periodic press, which has a time-travelling Schéhérazade go to Paris in search of stories. Her death dramatizes the situation of writers like Gautier who do face not murderous sultans but a tyranny of “corrupted” public tastes. Yet, as shown in Sainte-Beuve’s notion of littérature industrielle, writers fear contamination not only from who is now reading but who is now writing. Schéhérazade is a subtle reminder of the storytellers imagined as vanishing in nineteenth-century France as well, those newly literate people who abandon their rural veillées to try their hand at writing. Thus, critics of the feuilleton position this popular genre as a menace both to “pure” literature and to the age-old oral traditions and poésies populaires that supposedly fall by the wayside as the masses rush to reading and writing.

“‘La pureté de l’oeuvre’: Proust, Sand, and the Author’s Hand” Evelyne Ender, Johns Hopkins University When asked by a journalist what other craft or métier he might have envisaged for himself had he not been a writer, Proust answered a “baker.” Once you unpack his answer, it isn’t as fanciful as expected: baking is night work, so was writing for Proust. More meaningfully -- at least for my inquiry into the underpinnings into creativity -- is the implicit symbolism. Bread, like books, has a material appearance, but it yields spiritual nourishment, through some form of transubstantiation. Tracing the line that divides manual from intellectual labor in the literary field is a delicate and necessarily theoretical enterprise, as the work’s existence as a causa mentale would seem to depend on the removal of the physical and material instruments of creation. The book, however filled with impressions, cannot carry the impress of the maker’s hand. Paradoxically, as each year of génétique research mines more unpublished materials of the Proustian corpus and enriches our sense of how much manual labor went into creating l’œuvre, what is gained is more dross, not ore. Hence the questions I wish to addres in this paper from a comparative angle and a phenomenological perspective. What might be the value of a materialist approach to the literary text when it comes to making sens of the idea? What can be learned from focusing on the NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 threshold between the last brouillon written by hand and the intellectual/aesthetic product in the form of a work or a book? The two exhibits I am using for this critical reflection are, on the one hand, George Sand’s manuscript of La Mare au Diable and, on the other, the last set of proofs, filled with the traces of Proust’s manual labor, of Du côté de chez Swann (at the Bodmer Foundation).

Panel 11.E: Dirty Readings Chair: Joshua Landy, Stanford University

“The Poet as ‘plaie sociale’ in Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux parisiens’” Nigel Lezama, MLLC Brock University Newly porous social frontiers and a rapidly changing economic landscape transformed nineteenth-century Paris into an unrecognizable city for many of its denizens. This growing alienation spurred the bourgeois order to compulsively protect the social body and instilled a fear of corruption, which became a paradigm of thought in all discursive domains: the medical – highlighted in the fear of disease spread through prostitution and poverty; the political – evidenced in the numerous political speeches decrying the “déclassement” of the working classes; and the literary – read in the predilection for figures like the escaped criminal or the degenerate young man. These discursive irruptions betray the nineteenth century’s fixation on self-preservation. By manipulating these ideological phobias and fixations in Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire sets himself against the bourgeoisie (attested to by his 1857 trial for outrage to public morality) and develops his own alloy of the pure and the impure. In the poet’s “Tableaux parisiens” cycle, bourgeois anxieties about the social, political and hygienic dangers of the urban space are transformed into poetic tropes that place the poet above, in the midst or left in the wake of these various distressing phenomena in ways that challenge and transform ideological figurations of perceived modern urban decay. My analysis of this cycle of poems will engage with different representation of “contamination” in the poet’s “Tableaux”: social, in his depiction of the urban marginalized (“Les Petites Vieilles”); physiological, in the depiction of miasmas, stagnant waters and communicable diseases (“Les Sept Vieillards”); and literary, in the depiction of the poet’s succumbing to the anguish of marginalization (“Rêve parisien”). In fact, the poet’s penchant for marginalized figures, permeable frontiers and urban filth highlights the new role occupied by the writer in the mid- nineteenth century: “plaie sociale.”

“Literary Intoxication and the Polemic of 1885 (Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and Paul Bourget’s Cruelle Énigme)” Daniel Ridge, Vanderbilt University Literature in nineteenth-century France was often blamed for corrupting or perverting readers, particularly young men and virtuous women, and for offending public morality (the 1857 censorship trials of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal are clear examples of this phenomenon). From the popularized yet contested Werther effect, to the Chambige Affaire of 1889 in which literature was figuratively put on trial, literature in the nineteenth century was often considered a moral danger by religious and judicial authorities, and in the court of public opinion. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

In 1885, with the simultaneous publications of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and Paul Bourget’s Cruelle Énigme, a veritable polemic erupted in the French press that specifically addressed the negative impact of literature and philosophy on the emerging generation. The climate of pessimism and anxiety characteristic of the Decadent movement was thoroughly examined by important critics of the time including Ferdinand Brunetière, Jules Lemaître, and Francisque Sarcey. In this paper I propose to conduct an in-depth analysis of this four-month long polemic in order to distill the crucial arguments used by an older, established generation to explain the attitudes of the emerging one. Remarkably, the porte-parole of the emerging generation was none other than Paul Bourget who spoke on behalf of young people, rather than against them. Later on in his career, Bourget came to recognize that he was not an innocent observer but had himself influenced, even “perverted,” the youth he was trying to understand through his essays and novels. His solution, as declared in his 1889 letter À un jeune homme published as the introduction to Le Disciple, was to write moralizing literature that condemned Decadent themes rather than valorize them as he had done in his youth.

“Mauvais genre: Reading the Improper in Jean Santeuil” François Proulx, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The unfinished and untitled text now known as Jean Santeuil was begun by Proust in 1895 and largely abandoned by the end of 1899. Proust had misgivings about the text’s generic status: ‘Puis-je appeler ce livre un roman ?,’ he writes in an unlabeled, incomplete manuscript page that stops mid-sentence. Bernard de Fallois, the editor of the first published version (1952), tidied up Proust’s disorderly manuscript into a narrative that followed the conventions of a novel of formation. A later version edited by Pierre Clarac (1971) attempted to restitute some the fragmentary nature of the text, but largely maintained Fallois’s reorderings. As noted by Jean- Yves Tadié in his update of Clarac’s version (2001), a complete critical edition of Jean Santeuil remains to be done. Proust’s strikethroughs and revisions, most notably, are not fully transcribed in any published version; the recent digitization of the manuscript (2014) makes them visible for the first time. The manuscript reveals the young Proust’s hesitations in matters of gender as well as genre, particularly around questions of reading and desire. Love scenes are rewritten to erase hints of gender ambiguity. Scenes of shared reading – precursors to the solitary reading scenes in À la recherche du temps perdu – can be dated to 1895, when Proust was enamored with the composer Reynaldo Hahn, since these sections of the manuscript are written on the same paper used by Proust and Hahn to write letters in the fall of that year. Considering Jean Santeuil less as a novel than as a composite text, alongside Proust and Hahn’s letters, allows for unexpected insight into the Proustian theory of reading, through its links to Proust’s experiences and conceptions of queerness. By undoing earlier editorial efforts toward generic purity and returning to the manuscript, we uncover a different text, and a different way of reading Proust.

NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Panel 11.F: The Industrial City Between Utopia and Chair: Macs Smith, Princeton University

“‘Quelque Babylone de l’avenir’: The Future as Contaminated Version of the Past” Chapman Wing, College of Staten Island A recurring figure in representations of French modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century is that of a hyper-technologized, architecturally incoherent Babylon of the future. In his 1851 short story “Paris futur,” Théophile Gautier elaborates a vision of Paris made of grotesque structures which combine all of the aesthetic styles of the ancient world into one building, fused with futuristic technological devices that highlight the decadent lack of proportions and extremes of universalism that he diagnosed in post-1848 France. From a critique of what would come to be known as the motley style artiste, to a parody of the unlikely synthesis of the world’s religions into one, to the evocation of future animals made of metal, Gautier depicts modernity sarcastically as a process of improbable and unpalatable juxtapositions between the old and the new. The Goncourt Brothers wrote of Paris in 1860 that it had become unrecognizable, that it had become like “quelque Babylone de l’avenir”; situated in some uncertain zone somehow belonging to both the ancient past and to the future, foreign in both its chaos and its strange orderliness. In the 1880s, Albert Bleunard’s futuristic novel, La Babylone électrique and Albert Robida’s novels La vie électrique and Le vingtième siècle further elaborate the uncanniness of modernity through metaphors of a mythical ancient world contaminated by the trappings of progress, many of which were still yet to be realized. In my paper, I examine this tendency in futuristic literature of the nineteenth century to juxtapose the unfamiliar modern world with the equal strangeness of the distant past, and argue that this recurring device serves as a grandiose mythologization of the present at the same time that it purports to undercut the present’s shameful incoherence and anticlimactic decadence.

“Industry and Class in Van Gogh’s 1887 Clichy Images” Christa DiMarco, The University of the Arts To date, scholars have not addressed Van Gogh’s 1887 images of the industrial suburb of Clichy in light of the Paris Gas Company (PGC) factory built along the Seine in the early 1880s. PGC marketed gas-powered lighting and stoves to those living in upper-class arrondissements in 1887, generating the largest margin of growth in sales and increasing the demand for factory workers. Domestic-gas created a class divide between those who could afford the resource and those who labored to provide the commodity. I intend to explore how Van Gogh’s paintings of Clichy subversively underscore this disconnect, conveying the peripheral community’s relationship to the day-to-day operations of modern Paris. In Factories of Clichy (1887), Factory at Clichy (1887), and The Bridge at Asnières (summer 1887), Van Gogh made reference to the PGC complex, which is significant because the plant was a sign of new industrial practices. In Factories of Clichy, the couple serves as surrogate viewers, inviting the spectator to consider the great efforts of labor occurring below the smokestacks. In Factory at Clichy, which depicts a glass factory, and The Bridge at Asnières, the artist made a connection between the gas factory and the glass industry, emphasizing the increased demand of glass due to the use of gaslights. In the three images, Van Gogh preserved artisanal methods of production, included new factory practices, and considered the nineteenth- century laborer as a figure sequestered along the city’s outskirts. Through Van Gogh’s unique NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015 visual devices, the viewer is not necessarily looking at images of work but through the lens of a couple in the banlieue or a factory worker in his complex. The relationship between the landscape and the factory workers shows that they exist within a cycle of supply and demand that absorbs them into the landscape, keeping them connected to the city through the commodity their work provides.

“Déchets et mysticisme rédempteur dans La Nouvelle Carthage de Georges Eekhoud” Philippe Chavasse, Rochester Institute of Technology Publié en 1888, La Nouvelle Carthage est un roman naturaliste de l’écrivain belge Georges Eekhoud. Ce roman, qui valut à son auteur le fameux prix quinquennal de littérature française, est le premier volet du récit des aventures de Laurent Paridael, jeune bourgeois en rupture de ban que ses affinités pour les classes inférieures et les milieux interlopes font graduellement descendre dans les enfers sociaux. Le cinquième chapitre, chapitre charnière du livre, est consacré au fossé dans lequel se déversent les déchets de la fabrique de bougies qui appartient à l’oncle de Laurent Paridael. Ce fossé nauséabond, rempli de résidus putrides, est le ferment d’une double contamination. Il est le déclencheur d’une épidémie de choléra dans les faubourgs avoisinant la fabrique. Sur un plan moins littéral il sert aussi de révélateur du « vice » de Laurent Paridael, à savoir son goût exclusif pour les êtres les plus impurs, contrebandiers, prostitués et criminels en tous genres. Le fossé devient le point d’ancrage de la rêverie de Laurent Paridael et de son attachement à une ville, Anvers, en particulier ses quartiers dangereux. Plusieurs images se superposent dans la description des faubourgs qui bordent le fossé. La présence de résidus butyreux, d’acides pestilentiels renvoie aux ravages de l’industrialisation et au traitement inique des classes laborieuses, qui sont contaminées suite à une négligence volontaire des propriétaires de la fabrique. La revendication sociale fait ici pendant à l’esthétique naturaliste. La vision d’un luminaire, composé de chandelles de suif disposées au pied d’une niche à console au fond de laquelle trône une madone en bois peint, invite à la rêverie qui transfigure le réel. L’intuition du vrai se fait jour sous les traits d’un mysticisme populaire qui amorce un retour vers les origines. C’est ce glissement vers le symbolisme que nous examinerons dans cette communication. Nous montrerons comment, chez Eekhoud, la contamination est une des clés qui en ouvre la voie, la trajectoire suivie par le héros eekhoudien étant celle d’une dissolution de l’être, d’un épanchement universel qui abolit les frontières afin de révéler l’unité du vivant.

“‘Les Contagions de l’esprit’: Science et politique dans Les Microbes humains de Louise Michel” Elizabeth Tuttle, The Pennsylvania State University Louise Michel : communarde, anarchiste, bagnarde, et… romancière ? Outre ses contes, ses pièces de théâtre, et sa poésie, Michel publie entre 1886 et 1890 trois romans d’anticipation : Les Microbes humains, Le Monde nouveau, et Le Claque-dents qui, jusqu’à la parution en 2013 d’une édition critique, ont souffert d’une double marginalisation : d’une part exclus de l’historiographie littéraire et de l’autre négligés chez les études portant sur Louise Michel en tant que militante. Dans ce travail, je propose d’analyser le premier roman de cette trilogie dans l’objectif de découvrir comment son auteure utilise la littérature pour exprimer ses croyances anarchistes. NCFS 2015: Contamination Princeton University November 5-7, 2015

Comme l’indique le titre, la science, en pleine évolution à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, occupe une place prépondérante dans Les Microbes humains. Les travaux de Pasteur ainsi que ses applications transforment la façon dont le monde pense la maladie et par conséquent influencent les rapports sociaux. En quoi ce nouveau rapport aux savoirs ouvre-t-il un espace à partir duquel Michel peut développer sa pensée politique dans une œuvre littéraire? Louise Michel subvertit des idées naissantes au sujet de la science microbienne, de la criminologie, et de la transmission des maladies pour créer un monde qui fonctionne comme un « coup d’œil sur les microbes humains qui fourmillent dans la pourriture de notre fin-de-siècle ». Non seulement elle identifie ces « microbes humains », mais elle nous offre également une vision utopique d’un monde guérit ; un monde dans lequel la science joue un rôle capitale et où les classes prétendument « dangereuses » trouveront enfin de la justice. Ainsi, je soutiens que le roman lui- même représente l’antidote contre ce que Louise Michel appelle « la maladie sociale ».

Princeton University Art Museum, Special Visit 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm Current Exhibition: Cézanne and the Modern – Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection

Banquet 7:30 pm, Whitman College Dining Hall