Christopher Goring
- PhD Student
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About
Chris is a PhD student in the French department whose current project focuses on the allegorical functioning of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels. His research interests include the development of the novel in the 19th century, naturalism, realism, theories of reader response, and narratology. Chris has a background in comparative literary studies, having completed an MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford, as well as an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Japanese Studies) at the University of Cambridge. Between 2022 and 2024, he was a Daiwa Scholar, studying Japanese language at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Supervisor: Prof Nicholas White
Research Topic: ‘To Swallow the World’: Allegory in Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart
Scholarships/Prizes: Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP - Corpus Christi College Studentship
Research
Chris’s doctoral project examines Émile Zola’s novel sequence Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893) as a form of self-conscious allegory. To do so, it draws on ideas elaborated by Angus Fletcher in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) and Gordon Teskey in Allegory and Violence (1996). In his work, Fletcher develops the concept of ‘demonism’, which refers to allegories’ propensity to segment the world into discrete sections, each expressing a particular meaning. Teskey, meanwhile, highlights the violence involved in allegories’ application of human significance to an unmeaning world (‘the Real’). In his account, this results in the world taking on human characteristics (he refers to this as ‘allelophagy’ or ‘mutual devouring’). Chris’s project adapts these theoretical tools, arguing that the classificatory tendency of Zola’s naturalism – which assigns each character a specific social valence within Second Empire French society – is a manifestation of allegorical demonism. Interestingly, however, Zola’s works foreground the violent, allelophagic processes of meaning-making, thereby highlighting the constructedness of his allegory and refuting interpretations which view his works as mere reflections of a pre-existing, pre-constituted world.
Conference Papers: 'The Allegorical Architectures of Pleasure and Joy in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames', paper delivered at the annual conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (SDN), University of Cardiff (9th April 2026). Winner of the SDN Postgraduate Prize.