Agenda
Événements & colloques
Literary Histories of Literatures

Literary Histories of Literatures

Publié le par Vincent Debaene (Source : Vincent Debaene)

Why do writers read literature?

How do they reinvent the past?

Do writers and scholars agree on the history of literature?


Academic literary history, written by professors and scholars, has experienced its autonomous development, both as a discipline and as a genre, from the end of the 19th Century, and its advancement has been widely researched. In contrast, not much attention has been paid to an alternative history of literature, which is told by the authors themselves. However, writers, just as scholars, keep producing histories of literature. In their works just as in their writings or interviews on their works, they give shape to their collective venture, create genealogies and invent precursors, in a global construction which can either complement or compete with the “official” scholarly history.

The purpose of this colloquium is to examine the literary history of writers – writerly literary history vs. scholarly literary history – as a creative one, that is, to analyze the formative role of this other literary history and literary memory for literature itself, for literature in progress.

This conference is part of an international program conducted by the group research "Littératures françaises du XXe siècle" at Paris IV-Sorbonne University.

More on: www.fabula.org/hle


Friday, October 26, Morning Session

8:30 Registration

9:00 Welcoming Remarks, Pierre Force, Chair, Department of French and Romance Philology

Introduction, Antoine Compagnon, Collège de France and Columbia University, and Vincent Debaene, Columbia University

Memory and Invention

9:30 Judith Schlanger, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

“L'écrivain devant le temps des écrivains”

10:15 Sylvia Molloy, New York University

“Disparate Libraries, Erratic Scribes: Borges and Literary History”

11:00 Bruce Robbins, Columbia University

“Too Much Information: The Ambitions of the Contemporary American Novel”

Friday, October 26, Afternoon Session

Forms

2:00 Michel Murat, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne

“L'histoire littéraire, sujet de roman”

2:45 Michael Wood, Princeton University

“If on a Winter's Night a Theorist...”

3:30 Break

3:45 Marielle Macé, CNRS, Paris

“‘Nous attendons un roman qui sera…'”

4:30 Ann Banfield, University of California, Berkeley, and Julien Piat, Université Grenoble III

“‘Proust's Pessimism' as Beckett's Counterpoison”

6:00 Plenary Session

Assia Djebar, de l'Académie française, New York University

“Étrangère... de l'intérieur”

Saturday, October 27, Morning Session

Positions: Case Studies I

9:00 William Marx, Université d'Orléans, Institut universitaire de France

“Une fiction critique : le classicisme selon T. S. Eliot”

9:45 David Damrosch, Columbia University

“The Road to London Goes through Paris: Literary Métissage in Eliot and Walcott”

10:30 Break

10:45 Ann Jefferson, New College, Oxford University

“L'histoire littéraire et la formation du lecteur chez Nathalie Sarraute”

11:30 Jacques Lecarme, Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle

“Vie littéraire et histoire littéraire : le cas Léautaud”

Saturday, October 27, Afternoon Session

Interventions: Case Studies II

2:00 Edward Mendelson, Columbia University

“Anthologies as Histories: W. H. Auden's Tendentious Tables of Contents”

2:45 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Northwestern University

“L. S. Senghor et la révolution de 1889”

3:30 Break

3:45 Didier Alexandre, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne

“Le roman américain dans l'histoire du roman français (1930-1960)”

4:30 Elisabeth Ladenson, Columbia University

“Nabokov's Canon”

5:30 Plenary Session

Edmund White

“The Novelist as Biographer”

A conversation with Antoine Compagnon and Elisabeth Ladenson

6:15 Reception at the Maison française