Katie-Rose Nandhra (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
katie-rose.nandhra.25@ucl.ac.uk

Tubercular breath in the poetics of Laure

My project explores the ‘tubercular breath’ in the posthumously published poetic writings of Colette Peignot, known as Laure (1903–1938). Beyond the literary discipline, it is informed by engagement with the medical humanities, psychoanalysis and feminist studies.

The tubercular breath is a modification of the concept of breath as the flow, or rhythm, of language, mirrored in Laure’s case by the physical suffocation of her lungs by tuberculosis. Inspired by Havi Carel’s collaborative project, Life of Breath (with Jane McNaughton; 2015–2020), and her work on the phenomenology of illness, I consider breath and tuberculosis in a medical humanities context, in parallel with spatialised readings of Laure’s poems that explore the persistent, if stifled, movement of voice. This includes some comparison with the ‘mad’ writings of Antonin Artaud, with regard to the linguistic projections of the body. In this sense, I draw on studies in genetic criticism, considering the notion of the avant-texte and its relationship to the subject.

The links and tensions between this deconstructed subject and the phenomenology of the tubercular breath in the traumatised poetic breath find analogies elsewhere in 20th-century literature and thought. In dialogue with existing criticism on Laure, I evaluate her place within Georges Bataille’s avant-garde and her ‘singularity’ with respect to this masculine community. I look to Amelia Rosselli’s Serie ospedaliera (1969) and to theoretical and creative works by both Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, proposing a place for her in an additional, feminine grouping of writers.

I also consider Laure’s conception of the sacred, and how it converges with and diverges from those of the likes of Bataille and Michel Leiris. I focus on Laure’s articulation of the sacred through breath as the rhythm of experience and acknowledge a feminist, or ‘feminine’, perspective through readings of Irigaray and of Catherine Clément & Julia Kristeva (Le féminin et le sacré, 1998).

Principal supervisor: Prof.Mairéad Hanrahan