The editorial team of Relief - Revue électronique de littérature française invites proposals for contributions to a special issue on the utilizations of literary heritage in other fields in modern and contemporary culture. This issue will be edited by Mathilde Labbé (Nantes Université) et Marcela Scibiorska (FNRS – Université Libre de Bruxelles & Vrije Universiteit Brussel).
The circulation of literary figures has been attracting growing interest from heritage conservators and the general public alike since the 1985 exhibition La gloire de Victor Hugo and in more recent years Rimbaudmania (2010), Les Hugobjets (2011), or Monumental Balzac (2019). This phenomenon of circulation is linked to literary figures’ heritagization and legitimation: depending on the mediation vector and their own specific aura, they can gain greater visibility, stability, and/or canonicity. They are also transformed from this journey among the objects which take them as emblems or embrace them as models. As a testimony to their presence and reputation, such objects have been heritagized since the end of the 19th century, and exist in various forms such as manufactured items, and more broadly brands, institutions and tourism sites. This is not an exhaustive list as these objects belong to various fields, many of which are not at first sight obvious spaces of cultural legitimation, such as business, tourism and politics. Marjorie Garber highlights, for example, the dissemination of the Shakespearian text and its role in modern culture in which it has become the lingua franca (Garber: 2008). Yves Jeanneret has also drawn attention to the “polychresis” of the literary text, in other words, how it is well-suited for “constant re-appropriations” (Jeanneret: 2008, 83). While drawing on a national imaginary, these phenomena not only reflect a global evolution of the relationship between society and literature, they also cross borders.
These relationships have mainly been considered for what they do to literature: criticism has focused on the impact of these objects on the authors’ image and the reading of the texts, i.e., the overall impact on the perception of literary figures (Boucharenc, Guellec & Martens: 2016; Wrona & Thérenty: 2019; Labbé: 2020). This issue, on the contrary, deals with what literature does to them and starts from eh hypothesis that there is a continuum between ways of displaying literature to disseminate it, and practices looking to use it for commercial or political purposes – a continuum all the more complex given that transfers of legitimacy are often accompanied by an appropriation of the ethos of selflessness that is intended to blur the hierarchy of modes of cultural consumption (Sapiro: 2013).
Our aim in this issue is to study the utilizations, “actualisations” (Citton: 2007), “trivializations” (Jeanneret: 2008), appropriations, instrumentalizations and even usurpations of literary heritage in other fields in modern and contemporary culture, in France and elsewhere. To use Umberto Eco’s distinction, we are concerned here with the uses the work is put to – the way in which it is mobilized according to an intentio lectoris (reader’s intention) as opposed to readings based on the intentio operis (the work’s own intention) (Eco: 1979, 1990). Heritagization is often presented as a selfless conservation undertaking, so these instrumentalizing processes would appear to be of a different nature. The aim is to investigate to what extent these phenomena are part of the heritagization operations. This transfer of values is more often based, rather than on the work itself, on its perception in collective memory. These transfers have repercussions both on the object and its users who benefit from a representation of themselves in a social space as readers. As such, a three-way relationship emerges between: 1) author, 2) second work or product, and 3) reader, assumed to be a spectator or a user, respectively. In this tripartite relationship, the issues of visibility, recognition and legitimacy are concealed behind the affirmation of a love of art, the exploration of a singular or collective relationship with the works, and the mystical celebration of the presence of literary figures from the past. However, such utilizations of these works and figures cannot be reduced to mere mediation, i.e., creating links between the works and subsequent generations. Their circulation, which incorporates them in commercial logic at several levels, changes the scale of values that determine the prestige of both the works and their derived objects, or the objects that make use of them. This is why we believe that the notion of recuperation, sometimes used to signify the limit beyond which no further meaning can be given to these exchanges, seems particularly well-suited to exploring these relationships. In the concrete sense of collecting unused or obsolete objects – and not only in the political and intellectual sense of appropriating an idea or a movement – it can shed an interesting light on the destiny of literary culture at the age of its heritagization. When the literary work is vulgarized and largely disseminated, it runs a greater risk of becoming a “commodity” (Martens, Boucharenc, Guellec, 9; Baudrillard: 1968) since it appears as a relic of a lost world in danger of being forgotten. Capitalization of the literary work therefore seems to be a process that is indicative of a consumption society, within which the recognition of an object depends on its categorization as a “product”.
This issue of Relief builds on the explorations carried out in the different areas of literary circulation (advertising, museums, tourism…) and sets out to examine:
1) the capability of literature to contribute to the heritagization of the fields it mobilizes, and
2) the continuum (or entanglement) of relationships with these fields of circulation
The questions addressed in this issue will cover the actors (authors, readers, mediators), the scales of values mobilized, the literary genres circulated and the forms produced by these adaptations. As literature conveys values, imaginaries and connotations, it can be a powerful tool for heritagization and distinguishing other objects or cultural practices.
§ What types of heritage do literary works contribute to legitimate ?
§ How do writers and editors benefit from helping to shape heritage?
§ To what extent are specialist literary criteria mobilized or impacted by these literary heritagization undertakings?
§ As regards writing, what genres (poetry, novel, biography, etc.) contribute to these heritagization processes and in what forms?
§ What representation(s) of reading produce these mobilizations of literature? Are readers, buyers and visitors one and the same? Is it necessary to be a reader before becoming a buyer or a visitor?
§ What intermediality arises from the literary heritagization of visual and plastic arts or performing arts, and art and craft practices in general. How can we consider intermediality when one of its forms of expression is clearly placed at the service of the other?
§ Finally, what is the role of adopting a scientific approach towards these recuperations: can they be observed without being condemned or condoned?
Contributions must be in French or English and focus on a national corpus or several national corpuses in a way that highlights the structural characteristics of the relationships between literature and heritagization.
The deadline for receiving proposals is 15 January 2024. Authors of successful proposals must submit a complete article of between 6,000 and 8,000 words, in line with the Relief style guide, by 15 July 2024.
Please send a proposal of around 300 words accompanied by a short biobibliographical note to: revuerelief@gmail.com, Marcela Scibiorska: marcela.scibiorska@ulb.be and Mathilde Labbé: mathilde.labbe@univ-nantes.fr.
About the Journal: Relief - Revue électronique de littérature française is an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to literary and cultural studies. Its historical scope is open as long as it relates to French-language corpuses. Relief serves as a meeting place for the study of literature, texts, and discourses. Bilingual (French-English) and pioneering, Relief has been a digital open-access journal since its first issue was published in 2007. Relief appears twice a year. Issues are organized thematically or around monographs, but each issue reserves space for open contributions as well as for book reviews.