Presentation

The present-day globalization of Victorian writing can be traced back to the extraordinary plasticity of its textual and visual forms, as it travels from place to place and media to media. Such temporal, geographical, cultural and intermedial persistence is to be the subject of a seminar which will consider the different modes of resistance of literature within the nineteenth-century as well as its survival and rebirth in later times. Three texts from the following domains will be chosen for each session: 1. theory/philosophy 2. academic criticism and 3. literature/journalism. They will be made available beforehand. The idea of the seminar is to allow speakers to discuss their area of research with others through a study of the three texts and chosen images, and thus open out the subject to other corpora, centuries, disciplines. The seminar takes place at the université Paris Diderot and is supervised by Sara Thornton, Professor of English studies, as part of the LARCA research centre. (UFR d’Etudes anglophones Charles V, 10 rue Charles V, 75004 Paris, métro Bastille, Sully Morland or Saint-Paul.)

Programme for the following sessions

• 10th October 2012: Sonia Ouaras (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), "The Mind in Distress: Investigation into the Uncanny in Victorian Fiction". François Vergne (Maître de conférences, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) will be her respondent. (Salle A11)
• 14th November 2012: Céline Prest (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), "Circulation, Saturation and Implosion: the Dynamics of Paper in Dickens’s Novels". André Topia (Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle) will be her respondent.  (Salle A50)
• 5th December 2012: Sarah Gould (Université Paris Diderot), "From “Sir Sloshua” to significant surface: the approach to texture in Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini and early Pre-Raphaelite painting". David Peters Corbett (Professor of Art History and American Studies, University of East Anglia) will be her respondent. (Salle A50)
• 7th December 2012: "Victorian Persistence: Persistence in/of Victorian Literature and Culture", A one-day postgraduate conference (A50). Our two keynote speakers will be Professor Juliet John (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Professor Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester)
• 16th January 2013: Shannon Delorme (Oxford University / Université Paris Diderot), "Physiology or Psychic powers? William Carpenter and the debate over Spiritualism in Mid-Victorian Britain". Thibaud Trochu (université Paris 1) will be her respondent.
• 27th February 2013: Mathieu Duplay (Université Paris Diderot) and Jagna Oltarzewska (Université Paris-Sorbonne), ‘From Emerson to Eminem’
• 20th March 2013: Marie Laniel (Maître de Conférence, Université d’Amiens – Picardie-Jules-Verne), "Virginia Woolf’s Victorians". Catherine Bernard (Professeur de littérature britannique et d’histoire de l’art, Université Paris Diderot) will be her respondent.
• 17th April 2013: Marie Ruiz (Université Paris Diderot), "Overpopulation in Victorian England: ‘“Surplus Women”: Emigration as the nineteenth-century solution to female overpopulation", Marie Terrier (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), "Annie Besant and nineteenth-century Neomalthusianism: “family limitation” or “birth-restricting checks” as remedy to overpopulation and poverty". Pr. Myriam Boussahba Bravard (Université Paris Diderot) will be their respondent.
• 15th May 2013: Marina Poisson (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), "Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith: Persisting Figures, Persistent Visions"
• june 2013: Helena Gurfinkel (Southern Illinois University), "The Ethics of the Signifier: Wilde with Lacan"