BGSRC
BRUNEL CENTRE FOR THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF GENDER & SEXUALITY
***INVITATION TO OUR NEXT RESEARCH SEMINAR***
Pierre Zoberman
Université Sorbonne Paris Cité and Université Paris XIII
Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Antonin Artaud Building 103
6 pm
Wine reception to follow
ABSTRACT
This seminar addresses the ways in which Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in his Á la recherché du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) strives to identify and define species (e.g. the tante, or homosexual) very much keeping with Foucault’s construction of sexuality whilst undermining the very identities he seems to set up by introducing notions of performativity and the failure to perform gender ‘properly,’ thereby anticipating Judith Butler’s by now familiar definitions of gender performativity. In the process, Proust creates a Narrator whom he seems to endow with keen powers of observation, which are necessary in identifying such ‘species’ as the homosexual, but whose knowledge is often validated less by the reliability of his testimony than by intertextual connections to moralists, memoirists, and letter-writers of seventeenth century French culture.
BRIEF BIO
Pierre Zoberman is Professor of French Studies and Director of the Graduate Programme ‘Nouveaux Espaces Littéraires’ (New Literary Spaces) at Université Paris XIII and a member of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Comparatistes (Centre for Comparative Studies) at Université Sorbonne Paris Cité. He earned his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1988. Professor Zoberman is the author of two award-winning books, including Les cérémonies de la parole in 1998, which won the Thiers Prize from the Académie Française in 1999, and he has published extensively on 17th-century French literature, culture, social history, ceremonial oratory and queer rhetoric. He has edited and co-edited several collections and is the general editor of a translation of Pascal’s Pensées, forthcoming from the Catholic University of America Press. Professor Zoberman has been an active force in the development of gender and queer studies in France, and has collaborated extensively with Prof William Spurlin. This lecture is part of Prof Zoberman’s current research project on Proust and gendered/queer identities.
