Please join us Sunday, November 16 at 5pm at the National Humanities Center for our next seminar meeting. David Gill, PhD candidate in French and Francophone Studies at UNC, will be discussing a draft chapter from his dissertation, Novel Things: Material Narratives of Early Modern France.
David writes: “The project focuses on three eighteenth-century writers, Alain-René Lesage, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny. It explores how these writers represented commercial things in their novels…and how characters in these novels manipulate and perform with things for social and economic gain. From analysis of their prose, I explain how Lesage, Marivaux, and Graffigny detailed an increasingly consumer-focused French society and a world where everyday things, including novels themselves, became something almost anyone could purchase. The project draws on the authors’ plays, archived correspondence, art historical sources, and materialist and sentimentalist philosophies to analyze how these novelists chart the effects of consumerism on selfhood, subjectivity, and social relationships.”
The chapter draft, entitled “Habile Habillement: Investing in Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane,” is currently available on the password-protected Papers page of this website. Please contact a co-convener for this month’s password.
A remote attendance option is also offered for this meeting. Please contact a co-convener for the Zoom link.