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The Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway University of London (HARC)

Event Date: Friday 11 June, 2010 - 10am-6pm

The Boardroom, 2 Gower Street, London

Unsettling Scores: A Study Day on French Musico-Poetics from Banville to Duras

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Claire Launchbury (RHUL):

Douleurs exquises: Tears, Telephones and Music transgressed in Duras, La Musica deuxième and Cocteau/Poulenc La Voix humaine

By exploring the thresholds of love and separation, the voice and the gaze, and, indeed, of text and music via the symbolic intrusion of the telephone, this paper assesses the critical, clinical and musical implications of narratives of exquisite, yet profound suffering. In Poulenc’s setting of Cocteau’s play, La Voix humaine (1958), Elle is linked to her former lover in one last phone call. Echoing the truth of her lies, the telephone itself becomes a metonym for the absent lover as her voice is disembodied in the suicidal stranglehold of the telephone wire; pushed to the ultimate limits of her strength by the one diegetic intrusion of music in the opera. Music is then discussed as operating as an exorbitant metaphor for unutterable suffering in Marguerite Duras’s La Musica deuxième (1985), where a couple are reunited three years after their separation for their final divorce hearing. While it is realised, in spite of the interruptions of telephone calls from new lovers, that this end is merely a beginning, the resistance to resolution and the resonance of elliptically unsaid emotion presents a challenge to clinical discourses themselves famously reluctant to engage with music.

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The Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway University of London (HARC)

and the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway University of London

Event Date: Friday 11 June, 2010 - 10am-6pm

The Boardroom, 2 Gower Street, London

Unsettling Scores: A Study Day on French Musico-Poetics from Banville to Duras

Organised by Dr Claire Launchbury (e-mail)

Abstract: Encounters with music and the musical in French cultural practice are marked by their difficulty. Music is found to be an impenetrable, mysterious, and evasive art that confounds meaning in its multiplicity and subsequent resistance to firm conclusion. By highlighting problems such as listening, particularly in terms of entendre which carries with it a sense of understanding, we ask what music might be heard to encode; how we might fail to account for it with wrong metaphors, or how music transfigures meaning in a way that is impossible to render due justice in discourse. The study day brings together a selection of papers that each in their own way work in a theoretical field of words and music studies outlined particularly in the work of Jankélévitch, Lawrence Kramer, Peter Dayan and Malcolm Bowie to explore the different perspectives on the boundaries between textual practices and their engagement with music in French literary culture.

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(AUDIO NOT AVAILABLE)

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