39th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium

Thresholds and Horizons

39th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium October 24–26, 2013, Richmond, Virginia

The 19th century begins with the ultimate threshold and an uncertain horizon: the first French revolution, the Terror, and advent of Napoléon Bonaparte mark the long transition across the threshold from the 18th century to a period of radical transformation and dislocation that we now call “modernity,” while the fracturing of society into revolutionaries and royalists made for destabilized prospects and an ambiguous horizon for the com- ing age. As Madame de Staël would put it: as we headed into the 19th century, we were all in some sense a limit-figure, an orphan. This indeterminacy and crossing over would continue until the threshold from the 19th century into the twentieth, with multiple uprisings, revolutions, regime changes, and the declaration of two more republics. The cultural landscape of the 19th century reflected this socio-political backdrop and invented thresholds and horizons of its own, frequently ending in -ism: Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism, Naturalism, Parnassianism, Saint Simonism, Impressionism, etc. What we propose for the 39th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium is a fresh look at all of the period’s thresholds and horizons from the increasingly multidisciplinary standpoint of our own era of scholarly work.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the 19th century

• At the margins

• Mixtures and amalgamations

• Blurring of boundaries

• Barricades

• Space and time

• Events

• Crises (economic and political “event horizons”)

• Transgression

• Non-space

• Exclusion from/inclusion in social space

• Satire, parody, caricature

• Literal horizons (landscape painting and photography)

• Literal thresholds (doors, homes, property lines, and borders)

• Imaginary, theoretical, and geographical peripheries

• Barrières de Paris (troubling the intra/extra muros divide): Paris-

  apache, Paris coupe-gorge, from Eugène Sue to faits divers

• Memory and revolution: threshold or limit

• The long 19th century vs. the long 18th century

• Theories of afterlife

• Theories of gender(s)

• The body as threshold (towards phenomenologies and theories

  of the unconscious)

• The nation/territory as limit/frontier

• Class as threshold (déclassés, bohème, etc.)

• Exiles

• Je [et] l’autre/ self and other

• Allegory (as threshold of representation)

• The “tout à l’égout” – sewers, catacombs, and figures of

  alternative spaces

• Utopia, heterotopia, and the space of the city

• Expositions universelles

• Positivism, naturalism, and Parnassus

• Limits and thresholds of realism

• Fin-de-siècle and the dawn of the 20th century

• The disappearance of thresholds and removal from horizons:

  Palais du Trocadéro, Palais des Tuileries, Hôtel de Ville de Paris,

  Colonne Vendôme, etc.

• New thresholds, new horizons: Tour Eiffel, Arc(s) de Triomphe,

  Place de la Concorde, Haussmann, Grand Palais, Petit Palais, etc.

• Possibilities for special panels on Edgar Allan Poe and France

  (regional interest)

Submissions: Submissions for individual papers or sessions may be in French or English and should be in the form of an abstract (250–300 words) sent as an email attachment in Word to the address below. For session proposals, a separate abstract for each paper should be included. The deadline for all submissions is March 15, 2013. Please indicate your A/V requirements on your abstract.

Email : ncfs2013@gmail.com

Organizers

Sara Pappas (University of Richmond) and Robert St. Clair (College of William and Mary)