Postgraduate Mini-Conference October 2005

The Centre for the History of European Discourses

 Postgraduate Mini-Conference

 

October 20th 2005

 

Level 6 Meeting Room, Forgan-Smyth

 

1-5:30pm

Session 1
 
1pm: Annabel Temple-Smith, Julie’s Happy Ending
In Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, happiness is not a goal but a way of being. At Clarens, the difficult practice of virtue combines with prudence in an art of living. If it is the practice or living of virtue that matters, why do Clarens and the novel end with Julie’s death? Why not simply make a stop at the end of an ordinary day or interrupt it at a privileged moment of plenitude? This paper will explore the relation between domestic idyll and heroine’s death in a selection of pre-Revolutionary French sentimental novels. It will highlight a rich play on endings, in which death separates lovers yet preserves love, crowns a life yet critiques ideal state, ends community yet opens an individual to God. 
 
1:40pm: Martyn Lloyd, On Re-Reading Sade Philosophically
This paper offers a preliminary survey of some of the key issues with which I shall be dealing in my research. I shall begin with a brief justification of my intention to return to the work of the Marquis de Sade and read him philosophically. This research can be principally understood to be a project in the history of philosophy, however, in terms of that history Sade is a highly marginal figure. This raises some interesting philosophic issues and implies that methodological considerations will remain central to my work. Accordingly, in the major part of my paper I shall offer a preliminary consideration of the philosophy of the history of philosophy as it relates to the philosophic re-reading of Sade. I shall do this with heavy reference to Michael Frede’s Riverside Lectures and with reference to the work of Foucault.
 
2:20pm: Michelle Styles-Dargie, Mimesis:Mimesis
My thesis was inspired by the following quote from Liz Grosz’s Volatile
Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism: What psychoanalytic theory makes clear is that the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical,
physiological, and neurological levels. (Grosz 1994: 60)  My specific interest is ‘that the body is literally written on, inscribed …’  How do we make sense of this statement.  I recall quoting it to a philosopher, who shall remain nameless, and he responded that he ‘hated it when people used the term literally, metaphorically.  However, I don’t think that Grosz’s usage is metaphorical.  I think literally written on, means precisely that, bodies are literally written on. This led me to ask the questions what is writing in the context that it inscribes a body.  And further what sort of thing is a body such that it is inscribed?  And finally why are we using such violent metaphors as inscription to talk about this kind of writing? The answers I come to are that writing is a mimetic practice, the body as osmotic and that violent metaphors such as inscription require challenging.  For if we understand the body as literally written on then perhaps that writing need not be violent or indeed some of it isn’t already violent.
 
3pm Catered Tea-Break on Level 3 foyer Forgan-Smyth
 
Session 2
 
3:20pm: Andrew Munro, El caso Belsunce: Judgment, Uptake, Genre : Judgment, Uptake, Genre
In the following I mention an Argentine homicide case which has caused quite a fuss in Argentina recently. My interest is in the way it’s been taken up in the press in terms of a murder mystery. I’ll touch on the limits of extension of Lyotard’s notion of the différend and its construal of subjectivity, in order to point to the ways in which a rhetorical take on genre allows talk of compensation which is foreclosed by the différend.
 
4pm: Louise McCuaig, Teachers of the ‘Art of Living’
In this paper I present some ‘ruminations’ regarding those who have been responsible for teaching the art of living. Expanding on Foucault’s ethical fourfold, I attempt to map those who, across the history of western societies, have been responsible for teaching the proper use of pleasure. These teachers of the ‘art of living’ demonstrate a remarkably similar collection of characteristics including: a capacity to sustain intimate relationships with their students, a special knowledge of bodies, the ability to serve as an exemplar of proper practice and finally, an authority bestowed upon the institution within which they conduct their pedagogy.
 
4:40pm: Brad Nitins, ‘Rendering Unto Caesar...’: The  Interdependent Relationship Between a ‘Secular Domain’ and Christian Morality in Mid-Victorian England
This paper provides a suggestive overview of the interdependency between the dissemination and inculcation of basic principles of Christian morality and the operations and developments of a ‘secular’ domain in mid-Victorian England. It addresses the impact of political and economic instability, as well as technological innovation, the proliferation of various ‘secular’ intellectual discourses, and the role of popular education in fostering a basic Christian morality in large sections of the mid-Victorian community. It ends by briefly exploring the various positions taken by English evangelicals from the late 18th century on to the mid 19th century vis-à-vis a ‘secular’ social code of ‘respectability’. In the final analysis it not only argues that no strict demarcation can be established between a domain of ‘secularity’ and a domain of Christian religiosity in the mid-Victorian period, but also that the two existed in a relationship of intimate reciprocity.

On this site

Go to top