Oxfordshire Local historian, Mark Davies, takes a look at the history of Medley Manor and its connections to empire as well as his own family history.

TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

Mark Davies on 'Medley Manor'

Keynote lecture in the Diversity and the British String Quartet Symposium, day 3, held on 16th June 2021. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Chair: Dr Nina Whiteman Speaker: Dr Des Oliver On our final day, we begin with a keynote lecture from composer Dr Des Oliver on his ‘Diasporic Quartets’ projects. You can learn more here https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/diversity-and-the-british-string-quartet-0#/

The Diasporic Quartets: Identity and Aesthetics

Keynote lecture in the Diversity and the British String Quartet Symposium, held on 14th June 2021. Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Lecture by Professor Laura Tunbridge (University of Oxford) Chair: Dr Wiebke Thormählen (Royal College of Music) We will hear from Beethoven and string quartet expert Prof Laura Tunbridge on the history of performing quartets working in UK universities.

The string quartet takes residence: class, community, curricula

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), award-winning poet, lyricist, musician, and activist Benjamin Zephaniah speaks out candidly about the writer’s responsibility to step outside the medium of literature and engage in political activism: “You can’t just be a poet or writer and say your activism is simply writing about these things; you have to do something as well, especially if your public profile can be put to good use.” In conversation with Elleke Boehmer and Malachi McIntosh, he will address the complex relationship of authorship and activism in a celebrity-driven media culture and the ways in which his celebrity persona relates to his activist agenda. The conversation will tie in with contemporary debates about the role of literature and the celebrity author as a social commentator. Pre-recorded introduction: Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author and editor of over twenty books, including Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (2002), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015), Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-century critical readings (2018), and a widely translated biography of Nelson Mandela (2008). She is the award-winning author of five novels, including Bloodlines (2000), Nile Baby (2008), and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), and two collections of short stories, most recently To the Volcano, and other stories (2019). Boehmer is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and principal investigator of Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds. Speakers: Benjamin Zephaniah is one of Britain’s most eminent contemporary poets, best known for his compelling spoken-word and recorded performances. An award-winning playwright, novelist, children’s author, and musician, he is also a committed political activist and outspoken campaigner for human and animal rights. He appears regularly on radio and TV, literary festivals, and has also taken part in plays and films. He continues to record and perform with his reggae band, recently releasing the album Revolutionary Minds. His autobiography, The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah (2018), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. Malachi McIntosh is editor and publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). His fiction and non-fiction have been published widely, including in the Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature. Q and A Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director. The event is organised in association with the Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds project and The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and forms part of the webinar series Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture.

Art and Action: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation

Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book: The emancipatory promise of liberalism - and its exclusionary qualities - shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of empire. Yet historians have mostly understood the relationship between Jews, liberalism and antisemitism as a European story, defined by the collapse of liberalism and the Holocaust. This volume challenges that perspective by taking a global approach. It takes account of recent historical work that explores issues of race, discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial and postcolonial settings, but which has done so without taking much account of Jews. Individual essays explore how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, religion, race functioned differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world. Speakers: Professor Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her recent work focuses on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. She is currently completing a three year Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, working on a new book on liberalism and the Jews, tentatively titled Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights. Working in partnership with colleagues in the heritage sector, she is also leading a major four year AHRC-funded project on Jewish country houses. Professor Simon Levis Sullam is Associate Professor of Modern History at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy. His fields of interest include the history of ideas and culture in Europe between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century, with a particular focus on nationalisms and fascism; the history of the Jews and of Anti-Semitism; the history of the Holocaust; the history of historiography, and questions of historical method. His many publications include, most recently, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy. Professor Adam Sutcliffe is Professor of European History and co-director of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London. His research has focused on in the intellectual history of Western Europe between approximately 1650 and 1850, and on the history of Jews, Judaism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Europe from 1600 to the present. Professor Sutcliffe’s most recent publication, What Are Jews For? History, Peoplehood and Purpose, is a wide-ranging look at the history of Western thinking on the purpose of the Jewish people. Dr Kei Hiruta is Assistant Professor and AIAS-COFUND Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of political philosophy and intellectual history, with particular interest in theories of freedom in modern political thought. His book Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity will be published from Princeton University Press in autumn 2021.

Book at Lunchtime: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism

A TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on ‘Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France’ by Professor Neil Kenny. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book: It is easy to forget how deeply embedded in social hierarchy was the literature and learning that has come down to us from the early modern European world. From fiction to philosophy, from poetry to history, works of all kinds emerged from and through the social hierarchy that was a fundamental fact of everyday life. Paying attention to it changes how we might understand and interpret the works themselves, whether canonical and familiar or largely forgotten. But a second, related fact is much overlooked too: works also often emanated from families, not just from individuals. Speakers: Professor Neil Kenny is a Professor of French at Oxford University, a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College and Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. He specialises in early modern French literature and thought, especially from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Professor Kenny’s current focus is on the relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy and previous projects have investigated different kinds of knowledge and belief. Professor Caroline Warman is a Professor of French Literature and Thought at Oxford University, and President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She specialises in the circulation of ideas and materialist thought and has recently completed a book on Diderot called The Atheist’s Bible: Diderot and the ‘Eléments de physiologie’. Professor Ceri Sullivan is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University and the author of five books on the literary features that structure early modern texts about religion, trade, bureaucracy, and rhetoric. She is the general editor of the English Association's series Essays and Studies and her most recent publication is Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer.

Book at Lunchtime: Born to Write

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City by Durs Grünbein, translated by Professor Karen Leeder. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book: Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein’s hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and “declaration of love” to the famed “Venice on the Elbe,” so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city’s destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the “white gold” porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Published in English for the first time, this translation by Professor Karen Leeder marks the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing. Panel includes: Professor Karen Leeder is a Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford University and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She has published widely on modern German culture and is a prize-winning translator of contemporary German literature, most recently winning the English PEN award and an American PEN/Heim award for her translation of Ulrike Almut Sandig. She was a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellow with the Southbank Centre from 2014-15 and she currently works with MPT, Poet in the City, and The Poetry Society on her project Mediating Modern Poetry. Durs Grünbein was born on 9 October 1962 in Dresden. He is one of the most important and internationally powerful German poets and essayists. After the opening of the Iron Curtain, he traveled through Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He was a guest of the German Department of New York University and The Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Georg Büchner Prize, the Friedrich Nietzsche Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize and the Polish Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His books have been translated into several languages. He lives in Berlin and Rome. Edmund de Waal is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. His interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Ateneo Veneto, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London. De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015). His new book, Letters to Camondo, a series of haunting letters written during lockdown was published in April 2021. He was made an OBE for his services to art in 2011 and awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. Born 1964 Nottingham. He lives and works in London. Professor Patrick Major is Professor of History at the University of Reading, where he is also an associate of the East German Studies Archive. His research interests are primarily the political, social and cultural history of divided Germany in the Cold War. He has published on the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and Hollywood's depictions of 'bad Nazis' and 'good Germans', and is currently researching the bombing of Berlin in the Second World War.

Book at Lunchtime: Porcelain - Poem on the Downfall of my City

A TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on ‘China's Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism’ by Professor Rana Mitter. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. About the book: For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization - and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Professor Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim. The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world. Speakers: Professor Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford. His books include China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist, and China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics "Meanwhile in Beijing" is available on BBC Sounds. He is a regular presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking/BBC Arts and Ideas Podcast. Professor David Priestland is Professor of Modern History at St Edmund’s College Oxford. His research specialises in communism and market liberalism, especially in the communist and post-communist worlds. His publications include a comparative history of communism, The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World, and Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power, a study of the history of market liberalism and its place in global history. Professor Vivienne Shue is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary China Studies and Emeritus Fellow of St Anthony’s College Oxford. Her current research examines certain distinctively 21st century Chinese governance techniques and practices, including high-tech national development planning. Her publications include The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic, and most recently To Govern China, co-edited with Professor Patricia Thornton. She is the former director of Oxford’s Contemporary China Studies Programme.

Book at Lunchtime: China’s Good War

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. This panel discussion and conversation with artist Khaled Kaddal examines The Formula of Giving Heart as a piercing study of our contemporary socio-political environment. Drawing from a variety of theoretical and creative perspectives, the panellists variously explore such themes as the global increase in physical confinement(s), the rise of cybernetics and biodata, and the continued privileging of contemporary science/medicine as distinct from other historical practices of healing. Exploring these phenomena amid a backdrop of global precarity, The Formula for Giving Heart forges fascinating linkages between seemingly disparate phenomena. It demonstrates how spatial imprisonment exists in and through hyperlinked and technologized (global) networks, ancient Pharaonic languages map onto and exist as contemporary (computer) code, and apparently distinct socio-political events—from the Coronavirus pandemic to the 2011 Egyptian revolution—can feel familiar through the very extraordinary nature of their temporal and affective regimes. Exploring these themes through the world premiere of Kaddal’s newest work, this panel broadly considers our present moment as well as the shifting nature of sonic and visual performance during a time of global crisis and ever increasing technologization. Christopher Haworth is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Birmingham. His scholarly interests lie in the broad areas of electronic music and sound art, which he researches using a mixture of historiographic, philosophical, and ethnographic research methods. He is currently researching the short-lived 'cyber theory' moment that accompanied mid-1990s hype for the internet and World Wide Web in Britain, and he was previously an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow on Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music. He also composes computer music, often incorporating principles from psychoacoustics, music psychology, and cybernetics. Khaled Kaddal is a Nubian visual artist and sound performer, raised in Egypt and currently resident in London. Allaying science and politics, spirituality and technology, he works with two interdependent abstractions; ‘Immortality of Time’ and ‘Sovereignty of Space’, in search for the imperishable balance between intelligence, emotions and moral judgments. Recent solo show at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen; group exhibitions include ‘One the Edge’ at Science Gallery, London; ’10 Years of Production’ at Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; ‘What do you mean, here we are?’ at Mosaic Rooms Gallery, London; ‘Art Olympics’ at Tokyo Metropolitan ArtMuseum, Tokyo; Performances at ‘Keep quite and Dance’ at Cairotronica Symposium, Cairo; Zentrum der Kunster Hellerau, Dresden; and ‘Daily Concerns’ at Dilston Grove Gallery, London. Kaddal has an upcoming show at 5th Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, Morocco; and a Resident Fellow at Uniarts Helsinki, Finland. He studied Computer Science at AAST (EG), and Sound Art at the University of the Arts London (UK). Darci Sprengel is an ethnomusicologist and Junior Research Fellow in Music at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Her research examines contemporary music in Egypt at the intersections of technology, capitalism, and politics. She is currently completing her first book, 'Postponed Endings': Youth Music and Affective Politics in Post-Revolution Egypt, which examines Egyptian independent music in relation to conditions of military-capitalism. She has two additional research projects. The first analyses music streaming technologies in the global South using a feminist and critical race approach to digital media. The second explores the influence of sub-Saharan African culture in Egyptian popular culture. Christabel Stirling is a musicologist specialising in ethnographic approaches to music and sound art in contemporary urban environments. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project ‘Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism’, based at the Music Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the social relations and coalitions that music and sound produce in their live forms, focusing particularly on the potential for such coalitions to transform or reinforce existing social and spatial orders. 

The Formula of Giving Heart: Panel Discussion and Conversation with the Artist

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown will feature the author James Attlee in discussion with Marina Warner and Professor Pablo Mukherjee (Warwick University). Chaired by Professor Wes Williams, TORCH Director. This event is also in collaboration with Blackwell's of Oxford. Blackwell's of Oxford has been selling books on Broad Street for over 140 years making it Oxford's oldest bookshop. With over five miles of books in the Broad Street flagship, Blackwell's booksellers' passion for the putting right book into the right reader's hands is undiminished after over a century. Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown is for sale at Blackwell's Bookshop on Broad Street. Call 01865 792792 for a copy signed by James Attlee and if you live within the Oxford ring road, Blackwell's will deliver it to you by bike. Alternatively, you can place an order online at Blackwells.co.uk. Speaker Panel: James Attlee is the author of Under the Rainbow:Voices from Lockdown; Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey; Guernica: Painting the End of the World; Station to Station, shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017, and Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, among other titles. His digital fiction The Cartographer’s Confession won the 2017 New Media Writing Prize. He works as an editor, lecturer and publishing consultant and his journalism has appeared in publications including The Independent, Tate Etc., Frieze and the London Review of Books. Marina Warner is an acclaimed polymath: a writer of fiction, criticism history, and mythography; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairytales. She has written for many publications, from The London Review of Books, through the New Statesman, to Vogue, and is a Distinguished Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Professor Pablo Mukherjee teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program at Warwick University, and is an expert on Victorian as well as contemporary imperial/colonial and anti-imperial/colonial cultures.

Under the Rainbow: Voices from Lockdown

Shivaike Shah hosts a podcast series with the artists and academics on the team in order to create a dialogue with potential audiences. The podcasts discuss the collaborations on Medea and explores the work of each guest beyond the ‘Medea’ project. Supported by the Humanities Cultural Programme and the Arts Council England

Platforming Artists Podcasts: Andi Burton Marsh

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Named after the original title of Richard Rathbone's book on Nana Ofori Atta I, the King of Akyem Abuakwa in Ghana, this talk will be the first that celebrates the paperback edition of Nana Oforiatta Ayim's celebrated novel The God Child. Both books have the kingdom as their centre, with Nana Oforiatta Ayim's book drawing on that of Richard Rathbone, as well as on her family's memories, for her fictional narrative. In this live event the two discuss the interplay of academia and fiction and how narratives are shaped and reshaped according to the telling. They also talk about the nuances of privilege, leadership, and of royalty within a West African kingdom and how this has evolved through time. Nana Oforiatta Ayim Nana Oforiatta Ayim is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Art Historian who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is Special Advisor to the Ghanaian government on Museums and Cultural Heritage, leading the country's museums restructuring programme. She is also Founder of the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, through which she has pioneered a Pan-African Cultural Encyclopaedia, a Mobile Museums Project, and curated Ghana’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She published her first novel The God Child with Bloomsbury in 2019, and with Penguin in German in 2021. She has made award winning films for museums such as Tate Modern, LACMA and The New Museum, and lectures a course on History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. She is the recipient of various awards and honours, having been named one of the Apollo ’40 under 40’; one of 50 African Trailblazers by The Africa Report; a Quartz Africa Innovator in 2017; one of 12 African women making history in 2016 and one of 100 women of 2020 by Okayafrica. She received the 2015 the Art & Technology Award from LACMA; the 2016 AIR Award, which “seeks to honour and celebrate extraordinary African artists who are committed to producing provocative, innovative and socially-engaging work”; a 2018 Soros Arts Fellowship, was a 2018 Global South Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, is a Principal Investigator on the Action for Restitution to Africa programme, and was appointed to the Advisory Council of Oxford University’s Cultural Programme in 2020. Richard Rathbone Richard Rathbone was born in war-time London. His father and mother worked for the BBC but during the war his father was an RAF pilot and he was killed soon after my birth. His childhood was largely spent in and around London. In 1964 Richard began his research career at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he worked under the pioneer historian of Africa, Roland Oliver. He was appointed o teach in the history department at SOAS in 1969, where he worked until early retirement in 2003. During that time Richard served as Chairman of the University of London's Centre for African Studies and as SOAS' Dean of Postgraduate Studies and was promoted to a chair in modern African history in 1994. Life was episodically interrupted by a series of research trips to Ghana and a variety of fellowships to universities in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Harvard and Princeton as well as for shorter periods to Bordeaux, Lesotho and Toronto. Richard's current appointments include Emeritus professor and professorial research associate at SOAS and honorary professor in history at Aberystwyth University. He has also served on the Council of the Royal Historical Society, most recently as one of its vice-presidents. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Chaired by Dr. Laura Van Broekhoven Dr. Laura Van Broekhovenis the Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professorial Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Previously she led the curatorial department of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures, was Senior Curator for Middle- and South America and was departmental lecturer in archaeology, museum studies and indigenous heritage at Leiden University. Laura strives to develop a more equitable decolonised praxis in museums including issues around shared and negotiated authority; restitution, reconciliation and redress and the queering of exclusionary binaries and boundaries with relation to social justice and inclusion. Her regional academic research has focused on collaborative collection research with Amazonian Indigenous Peoples and Maasai communities from Kenya and Tanzania; Yokot’an Maya oral history, Mixtec Indigenous market systems and merchant biographies, and Nicaraguan Indigenous resistance in colonial times. She serves on numerous advisory boards, is a member of the Women Leaders in Museums Network (WLMN) and the European Ethnographic Museum Directors Group and is co-chair of the Oxford and Colonialism Network.

A Concatenation of Rumour

Elise Busset, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in french. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station’ alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father’s broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma’s wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn’t end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion’ and ‘la félicité’ in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles’s gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma’s inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma’s Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader’s emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the description of Emma’s wedding cake, in French and in English. On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2004), p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading: The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot= Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70

The Cake, Emma’s Romantic dreams, and le bovarysme - part two, French

Eleanor Gilbert, an undergraduate at Oxford University, reads an extract from Madam Bovary in english. Blog post by Professor Jennifer Yee. The heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary, Emma, is the daughter of a farmer, who has been educated ‘above her station’ alongside aristocratic girls in a convent. She read Romantic novels, some of them smuggled into the convent illicitly, and her reading has filled her with vivid, unrealisable fantasies and less clearly defined aspirations to a more glamourous life. When Charles Bovary, a medical officer from a nearby village, comes to the farm to set her father’s broken leg, he falls in love with her. He is probably one of the first men Emma has met who is not a farmer, a priest, or her father. Naturally she accepts him. Theirs is a country wedding, rather more rustic than Emma would have liked (she would have preferred to be married at midnight, by the light of flaming torches). Emma’s wedding cake gives physical form to her Romantic dreams and half-formed aspirations. Clearly, Emma is not going to find satisfaction in her married life. Madame Bovary is one of the greatest French adultery novels, adultery being - of course! - one of the great themes of the French novel. Plot spoiler: it doesn’t end well. At the moment of her wedding, however, Emma still has, intact, the notion that she will find ‘la passion’ and ‘la félicité’ in married life. For the first chapters we are not given much access to her point of view. Instead, we see her mostly from outside through Charles’s gaze: her slim fingers, her sensuous gestures, and a sort of iridescence of her whole being, from the colour of her eyes to the light playing through her parasol. The wedding cake offers us a glimpse of things that we will learn later about Emma’s inner, fantasy life; and because it is a visually ridiculous object it also tells us about the impossibility of those fantasies. The cake is a joke - a grosse blague, such as Flaubert was very fond of. And yet it is not simply a way of mocking Emma’s Romantic dreams and social aspirations. Flaubert believed that irony at the expense of his characters did not reduce pathos (or the reader’s emotional response); on the contrary, it should increase it. Emma is a tragic figure in a very modern sense: she is caught in the gap between her inner life and the real world in which she lives. We are all potentially subject to this irony. Flaubert is reputed to have said ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’ and many of us could say as much. Later in the century, a philosopher called Jules de Gaultier was to coin the term le bovarysme (Bovarysm) for what he saw as the essential human capacity to imagine that we are something we are not. Here is the description of Emma’s wedding cake, in French and in English. On avait été chercher un pâtissier à Yvetot, pour les tourtes et les nougats. Comme il débutait dans le pays, il avait soigné les choses; et il apporta, lui-même, au dessert, une pièce montée qui fit pousser des cris. À la base, d’abord, c’était un carré de carton bleu figurant un temple avec portiques, colonnades et statuettes de stuc tout autour, dans des niches constellées d’étoiles en papier doré; puis se tenait au second étage un donjon en gâteau de Savoie, entouré de menues fortifications en angélique, amandes, raisins secs, quartiers d’oranges; et enfin, sur la plate-forme supérieure, qui était une prairie verte où il y avait des rochers avec des lacs de confitures et des bateaux en écales de noisettes, on voyait un petit Amour, se balançant à une escarpolette de chocolat, dont les deux poteaux étaient terminés par deux boutons de rose naturelle, en guise de boules, au sommet. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857. Listen to the passage read in French by Elise, an undergraduate at Oxford University. The tarts and nougats had been ordered from a pastry-cook in Yvetot. As he was new to the area, he had gone to a great deal of trouble, and he himself brought to the table, at the dessert stage, an elaborate confection which drew cries of admiration. The base was a square of blue cardboard repesenting a temple with, round its sides, porticos, colonnades and stucco statuettes in niches spangled with gold-paper stars. The main tier consisted of a medieval castle made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny battlements of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments; and, finally, on the topmost layer – a green meadow with rocks, lakes of jam, and hazelnut-shell boats – a little Cupid sat on a chocolate swing, the uprights of which were finished with real rosebuds in the place of knobs. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, ‘Oxford World’s Classics’, 2004), p. 27. Listen to the passage read in English translation by Eleanor, an undergraduate at Oxford University. Further reading: The manuscripts and drafts of Madame Bovary can be consulted on the website of the Centre Flaubert (Université de Rouen): http://www.bovary.fr/ The draft of the cake passage is at: https://www.bovary.fr/folio_visu.php?folio=1408&mode=sequence&mot= Gaultier, Jules de, Le Bovarysme (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902) Jenson, Deborah, ‘Bovarysm and Exoticism’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman and Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 167-70

The Cake, Emma’s Romantic dreams, and le bovarysme - part one

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities on Thursday 13th May 2021. Join us for a fascinating evening with award-winning playwright and actress Lolita Chakrabarti in conversation with journalist Matt Wolf. Streamed live from an Oxford venue and chaired by Dr Sos Eltis, the event will cover Lolita’s wide-ranging career and hone in on her most recent play, Hymn, at the Almeida Theatre. Lolita Chakrabarti is an award-winning playwright and actress. Writing credits include the award-winning stage adaptation of Life of Pi, which will open in the West End in 2021, the ambitious Invisible Cities (MIF), Hymn (Almeida) and Red Velvet, which opened at the Tricycle Theatre before transferring to London’s West End and New York. Acting credits include playing Queen Gertrude, opposite Tom Hiddleston, in Sir Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (RADA), Fanny & Alexandra (Old Vic) and Free Outgoing (Royal Court). A Casual Vacancy (BBC1/HBO), To Provide All People (BBC2), Beowulf (ITV), Jekyll and Hyde (ITV), Riviera (Sky), Criminal (Netflix) and Defending The Guilty (BBC). Matt Wolf is an American theatre critic based in London, where he has spent his entire professional life. He moved to the UK directly upon graduating from Yale, where he read English and was co-arts editor of the Yale Daily News (a good place to begin). Soon upon arrival in London, he found work in a self-created job as arts and theatre writer for the Associated Press (AP), where he remained for 21 years.  Along the way, following brief stints at the Wall Street Journal/Europe and The Hollywood Reporter, Matt became London theatre critic for Variety from 1992-2005, during which time he was freelancing regularly for The International Herald Tribune – now the International New York Times. Following the departure from his long-held post of the august Sheridan Morley, Matt became London theatre critic for the IHT/INYT, and in 2009 was thrilled to help birth The Arts Desk – an arts-centred website that within a few years of its inception was named best specialism journalism website at the Online Media Awards in London. He remains theatre editor at that site and reviews there across the cultural spectrum. In addition to his journalism, Matt has collaborated on two books – one about Guys and Dolls, the other about Les Miserables – and is the author of Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping into Freedom, an account of the theatre and film director Sam Mendes’s extraordinary tenure at one of London’s premier theatrical addresses. Matt sits on the panel of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and is on the faculty of both NYU/London and the V&A Museum; he can be heard regularly on various radio programmes for both the BBC and Monocle.  Following an acclaimed, sold-out live-streamed and on-demand runs, Lolita Chakrabarti's Hymn will be broadcast on Sky Arts on Sunday 18 April at 9pm. The world premiere of this production was directed by Blanche McIntyre and features actors Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani. Sky Arts is free to watch on Freeview Channel 11. Sky and NOW subscribers can also watch Hymn on-demand after the broadcast. Lolita Chakrabarti is a HCP Visiting Fellow part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.

In Conversation with Lolita Chakrabarti

The University of Oxford is home to an impressive range and depth of research activities in the Humanities. TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities is a major new initiative that seeks to build on this heritage and to stimulate and support research that transcends disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Here we feature some of the networks and programmes, as well as recordings of events, and offer insights into the research that they make possible.

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TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

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