2018

• Les scènes du conflit en régime démocratique. Écritures, expériences et théories politiques de l’antagonisme (XIXe /XXIe siècles)

Colloque organisé à la Casa de Velázquez, Madrid, printemps/été 2018 Responsable : Agnès Delage, Maitres de conférences, Université Aix-Marseille

La littérature peut être pensée comme un espace où s’élaborent différents régimes de discursivité de la conflictualité politique. Nous souhaitons privilégier la saisie de la multiplicité de ces formulations du conflit en associant une approche pratique des acteurs et des expériences du conflit (peuple, communautés, sujets politiques collectifs en contexte de conflit) à une analyse des théories du conflit et de ses résolutions possibles (démocratie agonistique / démocratie délibérative). D’un point de vue esthétique et rhétorique, l’étude des écritures, des situations de paroles, des dramaturgies du conflit, à la fois politique linguistique, qui configurent la diversité des «scènes du conflit», doit permettre de suivre, entre le XIXe et le XXIe siècle, tout ce qui manifeste un conflit proprement politique, c’est-à-dire concernant l’existence même d’une scène commune, au sein de la démocratie.

• Multilingualism, World Literature and Freedom of Expression in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Colloque organise à Oxford, Exeter College, FALL 2018 Project Coordinator: Jane Hiddleston, Exeter College, Oxford

This conference will be focused on the question of language or linguistic plurality, and will explore the ways in which literatures and other forms of creative activity can cross linguistic borders so as to contest restrictive nationalist policies of monolingualism or linguistic hegemony. Political regimes that side-line the languages spoken by some of the nation’s people are inevitably inegalitarian and anti-democratic, and this conference will analyse the ways in which literature and culture is able to mobilise multilingualism as a creative force that questions the foundations of this form of authoritarianism.

2019

• State-sponsored Autonomy? The Republic of Letters after 1945

Conference organised at St Hugh’s College Oxford, MARCH 2019 Project Coordinators: Peter Mac Donald (St Hugh’s College), Gisèle Sapiro (EHESS) & Philippe Roussin (CNRS)

The conference will address the sometime paradoxical role the state has played as a sponsor of literary culture in ‘Western’ and ‘Western-style’ democracies, especially after 1945. Much previous research in this area has focused on the state as a sometime repressive regulator of culture, principally through various forms of censorship, and on the ways in which this indirectly or directly fostered the emergence of a relatively autonomous ‘Republic of Letters’. But this essentially negative relationship was modified if not transformed in the years immediately preceding and following the Second World War, most notably in France, in the United Kingdom and the United States, when cultural autonomy, and literature specifically, came to be recognized as a public good meriting official sponsorship. Adding a further complication, the growing complexity of many Western societies in this period, identified most prominently with the rise of multiculturalism, posed new questions about the idea of a ‘public good’, not just what it is, but who is able to determine what it might be. Much the same could be said for postcolonial polities as the earlier styles of nation building came under pressure from groups and communities that continued to be excluded or marginalised. Adding a further layer, the topic could also address the roles UNESCO and other internationalist bodies like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, PEN, the Parliament of Writers, etc played in all this.

• Contemporary Political Fiction: between Chronicle and Autobiography

Conference organised at Magdalen College, Oxford, SPRING 2019 Project co-ordinators: Reidar Due, Magdalen College, Oxford & Philippe Roussin, CNRS

The conference will explore a rhetorical pattern in writers dealing with political questions in the current time. This pattern is characterised, on the one hand, by the return to a chronicle form and on the other by an emphasis on the implication of the writing subject both in the narration, and in the question dealt with. Writers who are typical of this trend are for instance Coetzee, Handke and Bolaño. More specifically, the conference will examine the following three questions: a) to what extent does a preoccupation with an historical or political referent, which is treated as singular, produce a literary discourse, which is not structured by ideology? b) to what extent does the rhetorical emphasis on the implication of the writing subject, either relativize or reinforce the political statement that he or she makes in the text? c) to what extent does generic experimentation, with either the chronicle or the autobiographical form, contribute to the treatment of the political question?

• Is the concept of Authorship bound up with the democratic regime?

Conference organised in Taipei, Taiwan, Fall 2019 Project co-ordinator: LIN CHI-MING Chair and Professor, Department of Arts and Design National Taipei University of Education

The question of authorship gives the opportunity to raise the problem of some cultural differences or misunderstandings in a world where Western values are generally prevailing. In the “Western” world, the origins of the literary work as well as the determination of its author constitute a fundamental question. Though, traditionally, authorship, in the sense of authority (auctoritas), concerning an artwork was not defined in legal, material or historical terms, but following moral and ideological norms, with a purpose of transmission. The question arises of how to relate the singularity of literature (wen) and of the work of literature both formal and stylistic, defined as the sign of individuality engaged in the creation and the democratic regime. This questioning about authorship and democracy will give the opportunity to reexamine the social and cultural role of literature, the link between the literary work and the artist, as well as the ideological, social, even political consequences of the contemporary evolution of the concept of authorship.