Thinking Work/Penser le travail
The London Postgraduate French Conference
Friday 4 November 2016
Room G35, Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London,
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Keynote speaker: Dr Claire White (King’s College London)
Thinking work – in all its forms and modes, in all its intensities and absences – has been a source of constant inspiration and concern for French and Francophone contexts across art, literature, film, philosophy, and political thought. What does it mean to work, or for something to stop working? What is the subjectivity, the phenomenology, the economy, the psychology, or even the neurology of work?
‘Digging’ (Dr Claire White, King’s College London)
In the last part of her autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (1847-54), George Sand looked back to the beginnings of her career as a writer. It was a vocation, she reflected, that had assured her financial autonomy, allowing her to disentangle herself from an unhappy marriage. But it was also a form of compromise: she would much rather, she claims, have been a digger than a writer. This paper explores the politics – above all, class politics – at work in Sand’s fantasy of a life of hard labour. I will look at how Sand interrogates, across her writing, the prevailing divisions between intellectual, aesthetic and manual work. And I’ll ask: what dream of solidarity underpins her wish to turn the soil? Can we place this fantasy at the heart of her reflections on the legitimacy and ethics of being a writer – not least, in the face of those of her contemporaries, her dear correspondent Flaubert included, who constructed a mythology of literary craftsmanship? Are we to understand Sand’s writing ultimately as a displaced form of manual work – or digging?
09:00 – 9:20 Registration and coffe
09:20 – 09:30 Opening remarks
09:30 – 11:00 Panel 1: Artwork (Chair: Kate Brook)
Alexandrine Théorêt (Montréal), ‘Le Temps du travail, le temps de l’œuvre par l’artiste québécois Nicolas Grenier, ou la redéfinition des règles du marché de l’art’
Camille Prunet (Paris 3) ‘Julien Prévieux: l’art au travail’
Loïc Le Gall (Centre Pompidou) ‘L'artiste et le voyage: le travail sous-jacent’
11:00 - 11:15 Break
11: 15- 12:15 Keynote address (Chair: Kate Foster)
Dr Claire White (KCL) ‘Digging’
12:15 – 13: 15 Lunch (own arrangements)
13:15 – 15:15 Panel 2: Unworking (Chair: Ben Dalton)
Anne-Marie David (Montréal) ‘L’après du travail’
Madeleine Chalmers (Cambridge) ‘Forged in the crucible: thinking work in Didier de Chousy’s Ignis (1883)’
Christos Andrianopoulos (Paris 10) ‘Le désœuvrement et l’idée de classe « utile » chez Saint-Simon’
Marie Chabbert (Oxford), ‘Can we ever escape functionalism? Thinking work and inoperativity with Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille’
15: 15 – 15: 30 Refreshment break
15:30 – 17: 00 ASMCF Panel: Reworking, underworking (Chair: Igor Reyner)
Joshua Richeson (Paris 8) ‘Anti-Work, Machines and Traps: Working Notes on a Philosophy of the Dispositif’
Rachel Nadon (Montréal) ‘Le travail de la littérature, la littérature au travail: propositions sur un imaginaire économique de la littérature’
Dorthea Fronsman-Cecil (UCLA) ‘Chômage grotesque: representations of the changing face of labor in France within the grotesque fabulism of Julien Campredon’s Brûlons tous ces punks pour l’amour des elfes’ (2013)
17: 00 – 17: 15 Break
17:15 – 18: 45 Panel 4: Working through Writing (Chair: Adina Stroia)
Krysteena Gadzala (Waterloo) ‘Le double travail de deuil dans L’enfant hiver de Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’
Rebecca Rosenberg (Nantes) ‘Working through and in Depression: Céline Curiol’s Un quinze août à Paris: Histoire d’une dépression and Chloé Delaume’s Éden matin midi et soir’
Gert-Jan Meyntjens (KU Leuven) ‘Martin Page’s Literary Advice: How to Work as a Writer’
19:00 Wine reception
20:00 Conference dinner (China City)
Ben Dalton, Kate Foster and Adina Stroia
Website: https://thinkingworkconference2016.wordpress.com
Event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/607819762755018/