Saturday, January 9, 2027: 5:15 PM-6:30 PM
514 (LACC)
Hanène Chelbi is not an active MLA member as of 4/29
How do literary texts register and enact resistance under conditions that constrain or prohibit dissent? This panel examines how writers of 16th-century France mobilize literary form as a means of engaging political, religious, and social authority. In a period marked by the French Wars of Religion, the expansion of print culture, and the centralization of royal power, expressions of dissent were often risky or indirect. Rather than relying solely on explicit critique, many authors developed formal and rhetorical strategies like fragmentation, polyphony, narrative indeterminacy, and strategic silence, that allowed them to question authority while navigating censorship, confessional conflict, and systems of patronage.
By foregrounding form as a site of intervention, the session contributes to ongoing conversations in early modern studies, literary theory, and the history of political thought. It challenges approaches that locate resistance primarily in overt ideological content, instead demonstrating how it can emerge through structure, voice, and genre. In doing so, the panel also speaks to broader questions about how literature participates in shaping, contesting, or reframing concepts of authority and freedom, aligning in part with the 2027 Presidential Theme by exploring the relationship between narrative and emancipatory possibility without assuming that resistance must take direct or declarative forms.
The first two papers focus on the Heptaméron (1559) by Marguerite de Navarre, highlighting its formal complexity as a mode of critical engagement. Carin Franzén reads the text’s dialogic and often contradictory narratives as a challenge to humanist ideals of a unified, rational subject, showing how it unsettles both religious and secular claims to epistemological certainty. Extending this perspective, Hanène Chelbi interprets the work’s fragmentary and unfinished state as a response to historical and confessional rupture, suggesting that its formal incompleteness resists narrative closure in a world marked by instability and violence.
Turning to gender and political authority, Daksha Shankar examines Anne de France’s Les Enseignements (1521). Her paper argues that the conduct manual, typically associated with prescriptive authority, can also function as a site of subtle resistance. Through strategic uses of silence, omission, and restraint, Anne fashions a mode of political agency that operates indirectly, complicating assumptions about authorship, gender, and power in early modern contexts.
Finally, Victor Velázquez turns to Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire to explore how the text both theorizes and exemplifies resistance. By attending to its rhetorical strategies and modes of circulation, the paper shows how La Boétie’s work enacts dissent not only through its arguments but also through its form, blurring the boundary between political philosophy and literary practice.
Taken together, these papers offer a cohesive account of how literary texts negotiate and contest authority through formal means. They demonstrate that in 16th-century France, resistance is often embedded in the structures of narration and representation rather than stated outright. By bringing into dialogue different genres and methodological approaches, and by featuring international scholars at varied career stages, the session highlights the interpretive value of attending to indirect, mediated, and formally complex expressions of dissent.
Each panelist will present for fourteen minutes, followed by a fifteen-minute discussion designed to foster exchange among panelists and audience members.
Organizer:
Alison Calhoun
Presider:
Chad Cordova