‘MY KINGDOM FOR A FRAME!’

CONTEXTUAL DILEMMAS IN FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

CAMBRIDGE FRENCH GRADUATE CONFERENCE 

CALL FOR PAPERS

King’s College, Cambridge - 22nd April 2025 

Keynote: Dr Doyle Calhoun (Cambridge)

The recent history of criticism illustrates a deep love — and contempt — for the contextual analysis of culture, be this textual, visual, theatrical, or social. Consistently, historical and political modes of reading have been confronted by what literary theorists Wimsatt and Beardsley describe as the ‘intentional fallacy’; or, by a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ first inspired by Paul Ricœur’s readings of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, and echoed by Louis Althusser’s ‘lecture symptomale’.  

In nineteenth-century France, we witness myriad attitudes towards the relationship between art and context: most famously, critic Sainte-Beuve proposes biographical criticism as a sure means of finding an author’s intention, a method Marcel Proust rejects in his celebrated book of essays, Contre Sainte-Beuve. In the twentieth century, Julia Kristeva argues that art in general, and narrative in particular, are essentially revolutionary, as they overthrow authoritative discourses. In an attempt to emancipate the former from the latter, Kristeva’s Tel-Quel colleague Roland Barthes famously questions the relation between artwork and author. 

From D.H. Lawrence’s instruction to trust ‘tale’ and not ‘teller’ through to I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism and Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, the anglophone world also plays host to contextual debates of all kinds. In historiography, the ‘contextualist’ approach of ‘Cambridge School’ historian Quentin Skinner questions the hermeneutic frameworks proposed by post-structuralism (Foucault) and deconstruction (Derrida) to assert that we can salvage authorial intention from even the remotest of texts.   

More recently, the enquiry continues. Bruno Latour introduces his ‘Actor-Network-Theory’ with a dialogue between a student and a professor, who explains that context is ‘simply a way of stopping the description when you are tired or too lazy to go on.’ Questioning how literary critics use context, Rita Felski quotes Latour’s evocation of architect Rem Koolhas: ‘Context stinks!’ Building on these insights, Michaela Bronstein highlights criticism’s discomfort towards the transtemporal persistence of art. 

However, in our contemporary conjuncture of far-right relativism and contingent universalism, a new question arises: in periods of crisis, is context necessary? Since the appearance of the novel, and in particular the roman psychologique (Mme. de La Fayette), through to the surge, in the early 1980s, of so-called ‘beur fiction’ (Mehdi Charef), and more recently texts engaged with diverse social experiences (Édouard Louis, Alice Zeniter, Tal Madesta), is it possible to think without context? Should we want to? What would happen if we tried? 

We invite postgraduate students (PhD, Master’s etc.) to consider these themes with reference to the full range of historical time periods covered by French and Francophone Studies. The question of context is manifold, as is its timeline, and we invite you to interpret it broadly: methodological inquiry, textual analysis, critical, political, historical, and social readings are all welcome.

In addition to those introduced above, papers may consider (but are not restricted to) the following topics:

• Ideology in literature/art

• Tensions between contexts/areas/focuses

• Problems in methodology: clashes, rifts, discrepancies

• Historicism versus trans-historicism 

• Literary theory as political thought

• Contexts of contemporary crisis: rethinking practice 

• Indifference and disregard

• Spatiality, powerlessness, political writing and résistance 

• Economies of ignorance/knowledge