"New Worlds, New Spaces" : 20th/21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

New Worlds, New Spaces

Space and time are the two frames of sensory experience. But, space, to an even greater extent than time, seems to be the most fundamental given of human experience, because we can travel through it any direction, unlike time, whose arrow points in only one direction: from the past towards the future. From the discovery of the New World, to the first steps on the Moon, the first scientific discoveries in human genetics, from cuneiform writing to cyberspace, all the progress of humanity's knowledge can be considered the exploration of new spaces. What can we say then about literature? We can affirm that space itself forms its very matrix. From the space of the blank page where anything is possible to the palimpsest as saturation, from the deterritorialization of French in Francophone space, to hyper-fiction, literature cannot escape space. Similarly, the other arts and social sciences cannot escape the hold of space either.

The 2010 Conference will seek to explore new worlds and new spaces in French and Francophone literature, in the social sciences and the arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some possible fields of study include:

translated space; deterritorialization: language, immigration, the space of the other; cyberspace: hyper-fiction and digital literature; personal space: autobiography, autofiction; symbolic and mental space; performance art; intermediality; chronotopes; topoï; spatiality and lettrism; the book as material space ; illustrations

Proposals for complete panels and individual papers, in French or English, should be sent to espaces@uoguelph.ca before August 31, 2009. Each paper should be represented by a 150-200 word abstract and include the author's contact information for Fall 2009.