Tuesday 22nd May
5.15-6.30pm, All Soul's College, Hovenden Room 

Alice Bibbings (St. Hugh's) - 'Theories of the Comic in 19th-Century France'

Stendhal was not alone in predicting an uncertain future for laughter when he declared: ‘La comédie est impossible en 1836’. An absence of gaiety, malignant derision, a lack of simple amusement – such were the commonly located symptoms of what scholars have since diagnosed as la crise du rire of the nineteenth century that gave rise to a distinctly modern form of laughter. The period that saw the crystallisation of le rire moderne also saw writers and philosophers attempt to theorise laughter on multiple occasions. In this seminar, I shall present three examples of such theorisations, each quite different in terms of scope as well as historical and artistic contexts: Stendhal’s ‘Le rire’ in Racine et Shakespeare (1823-25); Paul Scudo’sPhilosophie du rire (1840); and Baudelaire’s ‘De l’essence du rire’ (1855). While these texts all draw on pre-existing notions of laughter (e.g. laughter as profoundly human, as a demonstration of relative superiority, as a response to perceived disharmony), I shall argue that these ideas take on a new significance in a society of mass culture in which laughter is understood as a telling social marker and questions of aesthetic value are considered persistently in terms of their social dimensions. Examining how these works attach aesthetic and moral values to different types of rire, I shall propose that the hierarchisation of laughter is key to understanding the ambivalent position occupied by comedy as a literary genre at different moments during the nineteenth century.

Rebekah Vince (University of Warwick) - 'Beyond the Récit de filiation: Affiliative Memory in Valérie Zenatti's Mensonges [Lies](2011)'

Valérie Zenatti’s novella Mensonges [Lies] (2011) combines biography, autobiography, and fiction in its account of Ukranian-Israeli Aharon Appelfeld’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and the author’s own mediatized encounter with the catastrophe through the American television series Holocaust (1978). As well as their mutual connection to the Holocaust, albeit once removed for Valérie, a link can be made between Aharon’s experience upon arrival in British Mandate Palestine in the 1940s as a young Holocaust survivor and Valérie’s experience upon arrival to Israel in the 1980s as a French Jew of North African descent. Both had to denounce their diasporic identity and assume the Zionist ideology of the “New Jew”with its mandate to forget the past. Paradoxically, it is Valérie’s lack of connection to the catastrophic past of European Jews that excludes her from the Israeli collective which by the 1980s had absorbed Holocaust memory into its national identity, whereas Aharon was marginalized for having such a connection. In this article, I employ Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, particularly her theorisation of “filial memory” and “affiliative memory” (2008: 114). In so doing, I argue that Mensonges can be read as a récit d’affiliation, an extension of the récit de filiation, which encompasses the autobiographical narrator’s appropriation of Aharon Appelfeld’s memory alongside her own family story, raising ethical questions while demonstrating the creative potential of transgenerational and cross-cultural encounter.