Keynote Speakers
Dr Hannah Freed-Thall
Hannah Freed-Thall holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California-Berkeley and specializes in modern French literature and theory. She has published articles in New Literary History, Modern Language Notes, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and in 2013, was awarded the Malcolm Bowie Prize for her article on Proust and fake diamonds ("'Prestige of a Momentary Diamond': Economies of Distinction in Proust").
She is currently completing a book about the afterlife of aesthetic beauty in twentieth-century France. The project, drawn from her dissertation research, identifies four experimental aesthetic concepts that spoil distinctions of taste: Marcel Proust's "quelconque" ("whatever"), Roland Barthes's "nuance," Francis Ponge's "profanation," and Nathalie Sarraute's "douceâtre" ("sickly sweet"). Other work in progress includes a study of the rhetoric of revulsion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, and articles on queer ecology, modernist speculation, and grunge aesthetics in contemporary poetry. At Princeton, she has lectured on topics ranging from Rabelais to nineteenth-century art for Humanistic Studies 217-218, a team-taught course which explores interdisciplinary approaches to Western Culture since the Renaissance. In the French department, she has taught seminars on emotion in modernity and on taste and disgust, and in Fall 2013 will offer a course on contemporary French thought. Freed-Thall is also the Resident Faculty Fellow of Whitman College.
Dr Katja Haustein
Before joining Comparative Literature at Kent in 2012, Katja Haustein studied Comparative Literature, German Literature, and History at the Free University, Berlin, and completed her PhD in French and German at the University of Cambridge. She was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge (2008-12), and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2007-8).
Her primary research interests are in modern French and German autobiographical writing in relation to visual culture; memory and identity; literature and the emotions; women and gender history; and art and medicine. In her recent monograph Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), she analyses the relationship between autobiography, photography, and the role of emotion in the work of Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes. Mapping their most well-known writings against little-studied material, this book is an expedition into the history of twentieth-century autobiographical writing in the light of a history of looking.
Her current research project, entitled 'A Cultural History of Infant Feeding in France and Germany', combines her interests in literature and the visual arts, modern identity formation and emotion, with questions of gender and medical history. She examines sources that range from paintings, drawings, photographs, novels, letters, and (auto)biographies to philosophical treatises, paediatric texts, and advice books on infant rearing to discuss breast feeding as a topic where personal experience, artistic imagination, medical debate, and ideology intersect. In this way she pursues the historical transformations of the often extremely controversial representations and discourses that form and surround this topic from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Hannah Freed-Thall holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California-Berkeley and specializes in modern French literature and theory. She has published articles in New Literary History, Modern Language Notes, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and in 2013, was awarded the Malcolm Bowie Prize for her article on Proust and fake diamonds ("'Prestige of a Momentary Diamond': Economies of Distinction in Proust").
She is currently completing a book about the afterlife of aesthetic beauty in twentieth-century France. The project, drawn from her dissertation research, identifies four experimental aesthetic concepts that spoil distinctions of taste: Marcel Proust's "quelconque" ("whatever"), Roland Barthes's "nuance," Francis Ponge's "profanation," and Nathalie Sarraute's "douceâtre" ("sickly sweet"). Other work in progress includes a study of the rhetoric of revulsion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, and articles on queer ecology, modernist speculation, and grunge aesthetics in contemporary poetry. At Princeton, she has lectured on topics ranging from Rabelais to nineteenth-century art for Humanistic Studies 217-218, a team-taught course which explores interdisciplinary approaches to Western Culture since the Renaissance. In the French department, she has taught seminars on emotion in modernity and on taste and disgust, and in Fall 2013 will offer a course on contemporary French thought. Freed-Thall is also the Resident Faculty Fellow of Whitman College.
Dr Katja Haustein
Before joining Comparative Literature at Kent in 2012, Katja Haustein studied Comparative Literature, German Literature, and History at the Free University, Berlin, and completed her PhD in French and German at the University of Cambridge. She was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge (2008-12), and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2007-8).
Her primary research interests are in modern French and German autobiographical writing in relation to visual culture; memory and identity; literature and the emotions; women and gender history; and art and medicine. In her recent monograph Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), she analyses the relationship between autobiography, photography, and the role of emotion in the work of Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes. Mapping their most well-known writings against little-studied material, this book is an expedition into the history of twentieth-century autobiographical writing in the light of a history of looking.
Her current research project, entitled 'A Cultural History of Infant Feeding in France and Germany', combines her interests in literature and the visual arts, modern identity formation and emotion, with questions of gender and medical history. She examines sources that range from paintings, drawings, photographs, novels, letters, and (auto)biographies to philosophical treatises, paediatric texts, and advice books on infant rearing to discuss breast feeding as a topic where personal experience, artistic imagination, medical debate, and ideology intersect. In this way she pursues the historical transformations of the often extremely controversial representations and discourses that form and surround this topic from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Other speakers
Synne Ytre Arne
Synne Ytre Arne is a Norwegian post-graduate student, holding a Bachelor’s degree in French language and literature and a Master’s degree in aesthetic studies. She finished her Master’s thesis on Marcel Proust’s female protagonist, Albertine, in November 2013, and is currently developing a research project on literature and ethics in affiliation with the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Nicoletta Asciuto
Nicoletta Asciuto is a third-year PhD student in English Literature at the University of Durham, UK. Her current PhD research focuses on T. S. Eliot’s use of light and dark imagery throughout his poetry. Her other research interests include Modernism more broadly, as well as issues of multilingualism and translation, the study of Classics, and the influence of the Far East on Western literature. Nicoletta holds a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from Università Cattolica, Milan (2009), and a Master of Philosophy in Comparative Literature from Trinity College, Dublin (2010).
While in the English Department at Durham, Nicoletta has helped organize various series of lectures and seminars, such as Late Summer Lectures (2012), Inventions of the Text (2012-13), and the MA Research Seminars (2013-14). Nicoletta also has an article published with Postgraduate English, entitled ‘A Japan of the Mind: Basil Bunting’s Modernist Adaptation of Chōmei’s Hōjōki’ (September 2012).
Her paper at the Proust Postgraduate Conference 2014 deals with Proust’s influence on Modernist poets with particular focus on T. S. Eliot through the publication of the Recherche’s first English translations in the magazine The Criterion. Although much has been said on the influence of French poets on English-speaking Modernism, the Proustian connection has not been explored much, and hopefully her paper will offer a new insight into the field of Modernism and Comparative studies.
Béatrice Athias
Agrégée de lettres modernes, Béatrice Athias prépare un doctorat en Littérature française sur « La voix dans À la recherche du temps perdu » sous la direction d’Eric Marty à Paris VII. Elle a enseigné plusieurs années en tant que professeur de français en lycée, et donne des cours à l’Université de Paris-Est-Créteil.
Sa communication examine la très polysémique notion d’interprétation, en s’appuyant sur les passages de la Recherche consacrés à l’art de la Berma, et particulièrement la seconde représentation de Phèdre.
Clara Dupuis-Morency
Clara Dupuis-Morency est doctorante au Département de littérature comparée de l'Université de Montréal. Après des études de littérature française et de philosophie, elle a écrit un mémoire de maîtrise sur la grand-mère et la figure de la mère qui meurt chez Marcel Proust. Elle enseigne actuellement à l'Université de Montréal et prépare une thèse sur l'écriture de l'informe chez Proust, W.G. Sebald et Claude Cahun.
Sa communication propose, dans une perspective comparatiste, une lecture de l'auteur allemand W.G. Sebald à partir d'une poétique proustienne de l'évidement.
Yvonne Heckmann
Yvonne Heckmann est lectrice DAAD au département d’Allemand de l’université de Caen et doctorante à l’EPHE Paris. Elle a également une formation de violoniste et une formation musicale générale.
Elle a suivi des études de romanistique, de philosophie et d’allemand aux universités de Heidelberg, Paris (Sorbonne Nouvelle) et Berlin (Humboldt Universität), et a été stagiaire auprès de la Société des amis de Marcel Proust à Illiers-Combray, ainsi que guide dans la « maison de tante Léonie ».
Doctorante contractuelle au collège doctoral international Ordres institutionnels, écrit et symboles de l’université de Dresde/EPHE Paris (DFG et UFA), sa thèse s’intitule : Développements musicaux et compositions littéraires – les innovations romanesques d’André Gide et de Marcel Proust, directeurs : Jacques Le Rider / Barbara Marx, soutenance prévue pour 2014.
Richard Mason
I completed my undergraduate degree and Masters in the French department at King's College London where I am currently working on a PhD. under the supervision of Professor Patrick ffrench and Dr. Hector Kollias.
The current title of my research is 'Choreographing New Relational Modes: Narrative, Space and Subjectivity in the Novels of Jean Genet and Marcel Proust'.
My wider research project looks at the relations between the narrator and external space in A la recherche du temps perdu and asks how new forms of connectedness to the world emerge based upon the impersonal, the abstract, or the indeterminate. I question psychoanalytic readings of the novel by identifying surface or peripheral intimacies that disregard the psychological profundity of the other. In this paper I seek to show how A la recherche du temps perdu's models of inter-textuality and inter-subjectivity can be seen as mutually informative. Deleuze offers the most compelling account of the tensions in the novel's account of a narrative subject; stressing the tension between enclosure and fragmentation versus connectedness and communication.
Drawing analogies, then, between subject and text, I consider inter-textuality by proposing the following questions: Does a text operate as a closed unity? How does it interact and enter into relations with other texts? How does reading organise our relations with others?
Delphine Paon
Delphine Paon est agrégée de lettres modernes, allocataire-monitrice à Paris 13 – SCP en littérature générale et comparée sous la direction de Juliette Vion-Dury et Vincent Ferré, en 3ème année de doctorat, et ses recherches portent sur l’enchâssement chez Proust et Goethe.
Sa communication propose d’analyser comment la lecture de la Recherche de Proust éclaire la lecture des œuvres romanesques de Goethe, à travers l'exemple de l'enchâssement, phénomène qui semble fondamental dans leurs œuvres respectives.
L’exemple précis de la comparaison des deux récits enchâssés, « Un Amour de Swann » dans Du Côté de chez Swann et « Les Confessions d'une belle âme »dans Les Années d'apprentissage de Wilhelm Meister de Goethe permet de mettre en perspective un enchâssement formel et une esthétique de l’enchâssement. Elle se proposera donc de comparer ces récits d'un point de vue formel, esthétique et théorique afin de montrer comment, en passant par Proust, une esthétique de l’enchâssement se dessine.
Igor Reyner
Igor Reyner master’s thesis outlines the role played by listening in Pierre Schaeffer’s works between 1938 and 1966 interpreting excerpts from Le Côté de Guermantes with reference to Schaeffer’s notions of quatre fonctions de l'écoute, of comportement d'écoute and of écoute réduite. He is a first-year PhD student in the Department of French at King’s College London under the supervision of Professor Patrick ffrench and Dr. Johanna Malt.
His current research project, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s musicalité généralisée and the aural nature of A la recherche du temps perdu’, combines Schaeffer’s notions of listening with Sound Studies debates on the classical forms of sounds (i.e., music, voice and noise) in order to depict the sound spaces of Proust’s novel and define the role played by sound and listening in his notions of time, memory and habit.
He collaborates with the ARIAS (CNRS/ENS/Paris3) research project Transculturalités des arts. Mots et concepts. Glossaires multilingues et interdisciplinaires as well as with the Federal University of Minas Gerais research group Music, Technology and Society, in addition to writing programme notes for the Philharmonic Orchestra of Minas Gerais. Igor Reyner is currently the recipient of a CAPES Foundation (Ministry of Education of Brazil) Ph.D. scholarship.
Cecilia Rossari
Originaire de Vérone, titulaire d’un baccalauréat littéraire, je me suis inscrite à la Faculté des Lettres –Département d’Italianistique de l’Université de Bologne où, en 2007, j’ai obtenu une maîtrise en Linguistique et Littérature Italienne avec un mémoire portant sur la réception de Proust en Italie. Pendant le premier semestre 2007 j’ai été assistante du Prof. Alberto Bertoni pour son cours sur la Prose et la Poésie Italiennes du XXe siècle. Depuis septembre 2010 je suis doctorante à l’Université de Genève ; ma thèse de doctorat (sous la direction du Prof. Emilio Manzotti) a pour sujet les catégories d’architecture et de paysage dans les romans contemporains. Actuellement je fais partie de deux programmes doctoraux (CUSO - http://italiano.cuso.ch/accueil/; et Scuola Dottorale de l’Université de la Suisse Italienne - http://www.isi.com.usi.ch/civitafirenze2013dossier-218151.pdf) et je participe en tant qu’enseignante aux activités de formation continue promues par l’Unité d’Italien de l’Université de Genève.
Raffaello Rossi
Originally from Florence, I finished my primary studies with a score of 83/100, and then joined the course of Intercultural Studies at the University of Florence, where I studied English and Spanish languages, and the literatures of Southern America and United States. After two years and a half, I attended a course of Modern Literature, where I graduated for the first time with the maximum score (110/110 cum laude). For my Masters I joined the course of Modern Literature, Language and Philology at the University of Siena, where I graduated in Literary Criticism with a 110/110 cum laude score by presenting a comparative thesis on Proust and Goethe. I began my postgraduate studies last year at the PhD in Modern, Comparative, Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Bologna. My convention with the University of Paris-Est Créteil is in progress.
I am currently working on a PhD project concerning Modernist Narratives, where Proust has a pivotal role both in the theoretical conceptualization and in the comparative discourse with authors such as Joyce, Kafka, Woolf and Faulkner. The definition of a modernist subjectivity and the research about its relation with different narrative strategies are my favourite topics. In this case I think that the challenge and originality of comparing Proust with a contemporary TV-series are quite self-evident, but I think that such an "extreme" comparison is authorized by the wide-spreading field of modernist studies, which allows to take a not-retrospective look at the literature of the early twentieth century. In addition to that, drawing narratological theories from In search of lost time and using them to read the Mad Men series, which by itself is a sort of foundational myth of the postmodern era, might be a useful contribution for re-thinking the very categories of Modernism and Postmodernism, as well as discussing the opportunity of their antinomic conception.
Synne Ytre Arne is a Norwegian post-graduate student, holding a Bachelor’s degree in French language and literature and a Master’s degree in aesthetic studies. She finished her Master’s thesis on Marcel Proust’s female protagonist, Albertine, in November 2013, and is currently developing a research project on literature and ethics in affiliation with the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Nicoletta Asciuto
Nicoletta Asciuto is a third-year PhD student in English Literature at the University of Durham, UK. Her current PhD research focuses on T. S. Eliot’s use of light and dark imagery throughout his poetry. Her other research interests include Modernism more broadly, as well as issues of multilingualism and translation, the study of Classics, and the influence of the Far East on Western literature. Nicoletta holds a Bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from Università Cattolica, Milan (2009), and a Master of Philosophy in Comparative Literature from Trinity College, Dublin (2010).
While in the English Department at Durham, Nicoletta has helped organize various series of lectures and seminars, such as Late Summer Lectures (2012), Inventions of the Text (2012-13), and the MA Research Seminars (2013-14). Nicoletta also has an article published with Postgraduate English, entitled ‘A Japan of the Mind: Basil Bunting’s Modernist Adaptation of Chōmei’s Hōjōki’ (September 2012).
Her paper at the Proust Postgraduate Conference 2014 deals with Proust’s influence on Modernist poets with particular focus on T. S. Eliot through the publication of the Recherche’s first English translations in the magazine The Criterion. Although much has been said on the influence of French poets on English-speaking Modernism, the Proustian connection has not been explored much, and hopefully her paper will offer a new insight into the field of Modernism and Comparative studies.
Béatrice Athias
Agrégée de lettres modernes, Béatrice Athias prépare un doctorat en Littérature française sur « La voix dans À la recherche du temps perdu » sous la direction d’Eric Marty à Paris VII. Elle a enseigné plusieurs années en tant que professeur de français en lycée, et donne des cours à l’Université de Paris-Est-Créteil.
Sa communication examine la très polysémique notion d’interprétation, en s’appuyant sur les passages de la Recherche consacrés à l’art de la Berma, et particulièrement la seconde représentation de Phèdre.
Clara Dupuis-Morency
Clara Dupuis-Morency est doctorante au Département de littérature comparée de l'Université de Montréal. Après des études de littérature française et de philosophie, elle a écrit un mémoire de maîtrise sur la grand-mère et la figure de la mère qui meurt chez Marcel Proust. Elle enseigne actuellement à l'Université de Montréal et prépare une thèse sur l'écriture de l'informe chez Proust, W.G. Sebald et Claude Cahun.
Sa communication propose, dans une perspective comparatiste, une lecture de l'auteur allemand W.G. Sebald à partir d'une poétique proustienne de l'évidement.
Yvonne Heckmann
Yvonne Heckmann est lectrice DAAD au département d’Allemand de l’université de Caen et doctorante à l’EPHE Paris. Elle a également une formation de violoniste et une formation musicale générale.
Elle a suivi des études de romanistique, de philosophie et d’allemand aux universités de Heidelberg, Paris (Sorbonne Nouvelle) et Berlin (Humboldt Universität), et a été stagiaire auprès de la Société des amis de Marcel Proust à Illiers-Combray, ainsi que guide dans la « maison de tante Léonie ».
Doctorante contractuelle au collège doctoral international Ordres institutionnels, écrit et symboles de l’université de Dresde/EPHE Paris (DFG et UFA), sa thèse s’intitule : Développements musicaux et compositions littéraires – les innovations romanesques d’André Gide et de Marcel Proust, directeurs : Jacques Le Rider / Barbara Marx, soutenance prévue pour 2014.
Richard Mason
I completed my undergraduate degree and Masters in the French department at King's College London where I am currently working on a PhD. under the supervision of Professor Patrick ffrench and Dr. Hector Kollias.
The current title of my research is 'Choreographing New Relational Modes: Narrative, Space and Subjectivity in the Novels of Jean Genet and Marcel Proust'.
My wider research project looks at the relations between the narrator and external space in A la recherche du temps perdu and asks how new forms of connectedness to the world emerge based upon the impersonal, the abstract, or the indeterminate. I question psychoanalytic readings of the novel by identifying surface or peripheral intimacies that disregard the psychological profundity of the other. In this paper I seek to show how A la recherche du temps perdu's models of inter-textuality and inter-subjectivity can be seen as mutually informative. Deleuze offers the most compelling account of the tensions in the novel's account of a narrative subject; stressing the tension between enclosure and fragmentation versus connectedness and communication.
Drawing analogies, then, between subject and text, I consider inter-textuality by proposing the following questions: Does a text operate as a closed unity? How does it interact and enter into relations with other texts? How does reading organise our relations with others?
Delphine Paon
Delphine Paon est agrégée de lettres modernes, allocataire-monitrice à Paris 13 – SCP en littérature générale et comparée sous la direction de Juliette Vion-Dury et Vincent Ferré, en 3ème année de doctorat, et ses recherches portent sur l’enchâssement chez Proust et Goethe.
Sa communication propose d’analyser comment la lecture de la Recherche de Proust éclaire la lecture des œuvres romanesques de Goethe, à travers l'exemple de l'enchâssement, phénomène qui semble fondamental dans leurs œuvres respectives.
L’exemple précis de la comparaison des deux récits enchâssés, « Un Amour de Swann » dans Du Côté de chez Swann et « Les Confessions d'une belle âme »dans Les Années d'apprentissage de Wilhelm Meister de Goethe permet de mettre en perspective un enchâssement formel et une esthétique de l’enchâssement. Elle se proposera donc de comparer ces récits d'un point de vue formel, esthétique et théorique afin de montrer comment, en passant par Proust, une esthétique de l’enchâssement se dessine.
Igor Reyner
Igor Reyner master’s thesis outlines the role played by listening in Pierre Schaeffer’s works between 1938 and 1966 interpreting excerpts from Le Côté de Guermantes with reference to Schaeffer’s notions of quatre fonctions de l'écoute, of comportement d'écoute and of écoute réduite. He is a first-year PhD student in the Department of French at King’s College London under the supervision of Professor Patrick ffrench and Dr. Johanna Malt.
His current research project, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s musicalité généralisée and the aural nature of A la recherche du temps perdu’, combines Schaeffer’s notions of listening with Sound Studies debates on the classical forms of sounds (i.e., music, voice and noise) in order to depict the sound spaces of Proust’s novel and define the role played by sound and listening in his notions of time, memory and habit.
He collaborates with the ARIAS (CNRS/ENS/Paris3) research project Transculturalités des arts. Mots et concepts. Glossaires multilingues et interdisciplinaires as well as with the Federal University of Minas Gerais research group Music, Technology and Society, in addition to writing programme notes for the Philharmonic Orchestra of Minas Gerais. Igor Reyner is currently the recipient of a CAPES Foundation (Ministry of Education of Brazil) Ph.D. scholarship.
Cecilia Rossari
Originaire de Vérone, titulaire d’un baccalauréat littéraire, je me suis inscrite à la Faculté des Lettres –Département d’Italianistique de l’Université de Bologne où, en 2007, j’ai obtenu une maîtrise en Linguistique et Littérature Italienne avec un mémoire portant sur la réception de Proust en Italie. Pendant le premier semestre 2007 j’ai été assistante du Prof. Alberto Bertoni pour son cours sur la Prose et la Poésie Italiennes du XXe siècle. Depuis septembre 2010 je suis doctorante à l’Université de Genève ; ma thèse de doctorat (sous la direction du Prof. Emilio Manzotti) a pour sujet les catégories d’architecture et de paysage dans les romans contemporains. Actuellement je fais partie de deux programmes doctoraux (CUSO - http://italiano.cuso.ch/accueil/; et Scuola Dottorale de l’Université de la Suisse Italienne - http://www.isi.com.usi.ch/civitafirenze2013dossier-218151.pdf) et je participe en tant qu’enseignante aux activités de formation continue promues par l’Unité d’Italien de l’Université de Genève.
Raffaello Rossi
Originally from Florence, I finished my primary studies with a score of 83/100, and then joined the course of Intercultural Studies at the University of Florence, where I studied English and Spanish languages, and the literatures of Southern America and United States. After two years and a half, I attended a course of Modern Literature, where I graduated for the first time with the maximum score (110/110 cum laude). For my Masters I joined the course of Modern Literature, Language and Philology at the University of Siena, where I graduated in Literary Criticism with a 110/110 cum laude score by presenting a comparative thesis on Proust and Goethe. I began my postgraduate studies last year at the PhD in Modern, Comparative, Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Bologna. My convention with the University of Paris-Est Créteil is in progress.
I am currently working on a PhD project concerning Modernist Narratives, where Proust has a pivotal role both in the theoretical conceptualization and in the comparative discourse with authors such as Joyce, Kafka, Woolf and Faulkner. The definition of a modernist subjectivity and the research about its relation with different narrative strategies are my favourite topics. In this case I think that the challenge and originality of comparing Proust with a contemporary TV-series are quite self-evident, but I think that such an "extreme" comparison is authorized by the wide-spreading field of modernist studies, which allows to take a not-retrospective look at the literature of the early twentieth century. In addition to that, drawing narratological theories from In search of lost time and using them to read the Mad Men series, which by itself is a sort of foundational myth of the postmodern era, might be a useful contribution for re-thinking the very categories of Modernism and Postmodernism, as well as discussing the opportunity of their antinomic conception.