Esther Demoulin

Esther Demoulin, a 2021 doctoral student at Sorbonne Université's Littérature française et comparée doctoral school, is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Lille on an Access ERC grant. This young researcher from Liège tells us all about her career, her research project on the literary relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir, her 2022 Chancellery prize and her time at Fabula.

What's your background?
Esther Demoulin: I did a degree in French and Romance languages and literature at the University of Liège, Belgium. I then moved to Paris, where I was admitted to the École normale supérieure on the basis of my academic record, and went on to do a master's degree in research at Sorbonne University. I undertook a dissertation on dialogues in Sartre's novels under the supervision of Jean-François Louette, a dissertation I partially pursued in the second year of my master's, this time focusing on the novels of Simone de Beauvoir.

It was during this second year of my Master's that I realized I wanted to do a doctoral thesis. I asked Jean-François Louette if he would be willing to supervise me. He agreed, but asked me to take the agrégation. In Belgium, it's a different system, and I'd never heard of the "French-style" agrégation. So I found myself doing exercises I'd never done before: dissertations, commentaries... It was a bit confusing. After the agrégation, I was lucky enough to be able to go abroad thanks to the international agreements with the École normale supérieure; I taught reading at the University of Kent, in England, for 10 months, until April 2017.

How did you develop your research topic?
E. D.: After this experience in FLE (French as a foreign language), I did two months of research in Italy, at the Scuola Galileiana in Padua. It was at that moment that I began to work on the question of the relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir. When I returned to France, Jean-François Louette suggested that I continue working on this subject in my thesis. Before launching myself, I took the time to reflect, because I had clearly noticed during my master's degree that the research groups on Beauvoir and Sartre hardly interacted with each other. This has changed since then, but it is relatively recent. I therefore launched into this subject of the literary relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir from the angle of intertextuality.

For a very long time, I maintained a very poetic approach, which allowed me to delve in depth into the works in my corpus, but for a long time prevented me from understanding what appears to me today to be the interest of my subject, namely the problem of the couple in literature. I have long considered that Beauvoir and Sartre maintained a literary companionship, an intense, lasting, deep companionship, but hardly different, in fact, from that between Leduc and Beauvoir or between Sartre and Nizan. It took me a while to succeed in providing some elements of an answer to the following question: what, basically, is the difference between a friendly relationship and a romantic relationship in literature?

I therefore started from a definition of the couple in literature – constructed using, in particular, tools in the sociology of the couple – understood as a paradoxical space of tension between the imperatives of cooperation of the couple, on the one hand, and the imperatives partially contradictory singularity of the literary field, on the other hand. What interested me was to see how Beauvoir and Sartre managed to resolve this tension, how it worked on their literary relationship. I studied this relationship diachronically in order to see the evolution of their practices, their relationships, as the condition of women in the literary field changes and the evolution of literary history as as such. The Beauvoir and Sartre relationship evolved significantly between 1929, when they met, and 1980, when Sartre died. 

Finally, what strategies are put in place?
E. D.: I showed in my doctoral work that the strategies put in place to reconcile the couple and the field vary depending on the era: within the hidden cuckoo of the literary couple, it is Beauvoir who, until the end of the years 1960, played the role of the cuckoo and Sartre that of the hidden.

Hiding peekaboo is this childish game, very often analyzed by childhood clinicians, which consists of hiding one's face from the child only to make it reappear immediately afterwards. I used this concept to designate the fact that within the literary couple, each member can invest more or less in the posture of celibacy or that of the literary couple, an investment which can itself vary over time. Gender identity intervenes in this distribution of roles: because access to publication and recognition by literary institutions remains – even today – relatively more closed to women than to men, the latter have a greater need to use the mediation of their companions to achieve recognition. However, because this mediation presents them within the literary field as “the women of”, it contributes to their feminization and, thus, to their devaluation. The promotion of the literary couple therefore only serves women writers up to a certain point, and women have every interest in detaching their image as an author from that of their companion once their literary recognition has been acquired, which is what Beauvoir did – consciously or unconsciously.

You received one of the Chancellery’s “literature and human sciences” prizes in 2022. Can you tell us a few words about it? 
E. D. : After my thesis defense, we are all invited as PhDs from a university in Île-de-France to submit an application for the Paris University Chancellery Prize. I was lucky to win a prize, without really expecting it, or really knowing why, moreover, because the selection criteria are not communicated. This prize has in any case given visibility to my work, recognition outside of my thesis jury alone. This is a great opportunity to be read before being published. During the ceremony, the thesis directors are present, which also allows us to thank them for everything we owe them. Concretely, we receive 10,000 euros which we can use as we wish. This money could be used for a translation, for example, or a project that would not fit into the university’s funding boxes. In the precarious situation of young researchers, this is truly a luxury for which I am very grateful..

What advice would you give for preparing the file to young graduates?
E. D.: First of all, you should be on the lookout for the email from the Doctoral School announcing the opening of applications. You must then ask advice from doctoral school managers. The file is not very heavy: a cover letter, a summary of the thesis in 10 pages. You must also dare to ask for letters of recommendation. But above all, the criteria are not explicit, whatever the result, you should not question the quality of your thesis if you are not accepted or retained.

What have you done after your PhD defense?
E. D.: I defended on November 10, 2021. I then was an ATER at the University of Montpellier. In 2022-2023, I had the chance to take over from Perrine Coudurier for the Fabula site redevelopment project as a research engineer. Fabula.org is a literature research site created in 1999 by René Audet and Alexandre Gefen which connects researchers working in France or abroad in the field of literary studies. My role was to be the intermediary between the Fabula research team and the two computer scientists (Pierre Serin and François Lermigeaux) working on the redesign of the site. I ensured that the team's requests were well understood by the IT specialists and I tested their concrete implementation on the site. I also promoted the two magazines on the site, Acta fabula and Fabula-LhT, so that they are better referenced.

Currently, I am still part of the Fabula research team, but I am no longer an employee. Since September 1st, I have been a postdoctoral student at the University of Lille, because I received a brand new research grant entitled “Access ERC”. This is two-year funding which aims to encourage young researchers in SHS to apply for ERCs. I work in the Alithila laboratory, under the caring eye of Florence de Chalonge, on a sociohistory of French and Francophone literary couples, from 1893 to today.

Ultimately, what is your professional plan?
E. D.: I would like to continue applying for lecturer positions, because I would like to teach while doing research, and vice versa!