Marina Perkins | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)

Articles by Marina Perkins

French Studies , 2020

In the wake of its first performances, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid provoked a critical debate in wh... more In the wake of its first performances, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid provoked a critical debate in which, among other criticisms, detractors of the play dismissed the Infante as a superfluous character. Scholarship has responded to this criticism periodically in the intervening years since the querelle du Cid, and often has sought to justify the Infante’s role by portraying it as a bolster for the central conflict. This article offers an alternative reading, arguing that the passivity of the Infante and her isolation from the primary plot structure serve to bridge the gap between the world of the play and that of the audience. Rather than echoing the conflicts of Chimène and Rodrigue, the Infante’s role functions as a form of social commentary, conveying a critique of the culture of surveillance and strict social codes that characterized the court of Louis XIII. I will argue that in addition to underscoring the oppressive nature of the seventeenth-century French court, the Infante’s role resonates with the particular circumstances of Anne d’Autriche. This parallel lends potential insight into the belated efforts of Richelieu to undermine the popularity of Le Cid.

Montaigne Studies, no. 29, 2017

This paper compares Montaigne's discussion of the power of the imagination in 'Les Essais' to tha... more This paper compares Montaigne's discussion of the power of the imagination in 'Les Essais' to that of Leonard Vair in his demonological treatise 'Trois livres des charmes, sorcelages, ou enchantements', and uses the concept of the placebo effect as a framing device to explore how each author conceives of the links between imagination, language and the body.

Conference Presentations by Marina Perkins

Society for Early Modern French Studies, 2019 Conference

Throughout the Essais, Michel de Montaigne demonstrates a preoccupation with communication as a m... more Throughout the Essais, Michel de Montaigne demonstrates a preoccupation with communication as a means of shaping the social and political world. He portrays communication as simultaneously cooperative and manipulative, forceful and contingent. A speaker guides a listener toward a particular understanding of his meaning, but the listener also has agency in this process, and may arrive at an interpretation that runs counter to the speaker’s intent. ‘La parole’, Montaigne explains, ‘est moitié à celuy qui parle, moitié à celuy qui l’escoute’ (III.13).

Communicative acts are always incomplete, underspecified; they merely provide evidence of the speaker’s meaning rather than fully encoding it. Relevance theory, a subset of pragmatics, considers how listeners enrich the underspecified content of an utterance to determine its import. The listener must combine the evidence from the utterance with contextual information to arrive at a complete interpretation of the speaker’s meaning.

Montaigne’s interest in this process is particularly evident in chapters where he discusses diplomacy, an arena where communicative exchanges shape international relations. In ‘Un traict de quelques ambassadeurs’ (I.17), Montaigne discusses ambassadorial latitude, or the extent to which ambassadors should be free to interpret their sovereigns’ instructions. He explores how the lag between the dispensation of instructions and their execution abroad affects this interpretation. Montaigne returns to the subject of diplomacy in ‘De l’utile et de l’honneste’ (III.1), but with a different focus. While I.17 deals with traditional diplomatic activity, transacted between separate sovereign entities, III.1 describes Montaigne’s own localized diplomatic practice, characterized by negotiation between claimants to the same sovereign territory. This paper will employ relevance theory’s framework of underspecification and enrichment in communication to compare the diplomatic exchanges Montaigne describes in the two chapters, and to consider the stakes of these exchanges in sixteenth-century France.

French Studies , 2020

In the wake of its first performances, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid provoked a critical debate in wh... more In the wake of its first performances, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid provoked a critical debate in which, among other criticisms, detractors of the play dismissed the Infante as a superfluous character. Scholarship has responded to this criticism periodically in the intervening years since the querelle du Cid, and often has sought to justify the Infante’s role by portraying it as a bolster for the central conflict. This article offers an alternative reading, arguing that the passivity of the Infante and her isolation from the primary plot structure serve to bridge the gap between the world of the play and that of the audience. Rather than echoing the conflicts of Chimène and Rodrigue, the Infante’s role functions as a form of social commentary, conveying a critique of the culture of surveillance and strict social codes that characterized the court of Louis XIII. I will argue that in addition to underscoring the oppressive nature of the seventeenth-century French court, the Infante’s role resonates with the particular circumstances of Anne d’Autriche. This parallel lends potential insight into the belated efforts of Richelieu to undermine the popularity of Le Cid.

Montaigne Studies, no. 29, 2017

This paper compares Montaigne's discussion of the power of the imagination in 'Les Essais' to tha... more This paper compares Montaigne's discussion of the power of the imagination in 'Les Essais' to that of Leonard Vair in his demonological treatise 'Trois livres des charmes, sorcelages, ou enchantements', and uses the concept of the placebo effect as a framing device to explore how each author conceives of the links between imagination, language and the body.

Society for Early Modern French Studies, 2019 Conference

Throughout the Essais, Michel de Montaigne demonstrates a preoccupation with communication as a m... more Throughout the Essais, Michel de Montaigne demonstrates a preoccupation with communication as a means of shaping the social and political world. He portrays communication as simultaneously cooperative and manipulative, forceful and contingent. A speaker guides a listener toward a particular understanding of his meaning, but the listener also has agency in this process, and may arrive at an interpretation that runs counter to the speaker’s intent. ‘La parole’, Montaigne explains, ‘est moitié à celuy qui parle, moitié à celuy qui l’escoute’ (III.13).

Communicative acts are always incomplete, underspecified; they merely provide evidence of the speaker’s meaning rather than fully encoding it. Relevance theory, a subset of pragmatics, considers how listeners enrich the underspecified content of an utterance to determine its import. The listener must combine the evidence from the utterance with contextual information to arrive at a complete interpretation of the speaker’s meaning.

Montaigne’s interest in this process is particularly evident in chapters where he discusses diplomacy, an arena where communicative exchanges shape international relations. In ‘Un traict de quelques ambassadeurs’ (I.17), Montaigne discusses ambassadorial latitude, or the extent to which ambassadors should be free to interpret their sovereigns’ instructions. He explores how the lag between the dispensation of instructions and their execution abroad affects this interpretation. Montaigne returns to the subject of diplomacy in ‘De l’utile et de l’honneste’ (III.1), but with a different focus. While I.17 deals with traditional diplomatic activity, transacted between separate sovereign entities, III.1 describes Montaigne’s own localized diplomatic practice, characterized by negotiation between claimants to the same sovereign territory. This paper will employ relevance theory’s framework of underspecification and enrichment in communication to compare the diplomatic exchanges Montaigne describes in the two chapters, and to consider the stakes of these exchanges in sixteenth-century France.