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

20th and 21th - Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

New Worlds, New Spaces

Spaceand time are the two frames of sensory experience. But, space, to aneven greater extent than time, seems to be the most fundamental givenof human experience, because we can travel through it any direction,unlike time, whose arrow points in only one direction: from the pasttowards the future. From the discovery of the New World, to the firststeps on the Moon, the first scientific discoveries in human genetics,from cuneiform writing to cyberspace, all the progress of humanity'sknowledge can be considered the exploration of new spaces. What can wesay then about literature? We can affirm that space itself forms itsvery matrix. From the space of the blank page where anything ispossible to the palimpsest as saturation, from the deterritorializationof French in Francophone space, to hyper-fiction, literature cannotescape space. Similarly, the other arts and social sciences cannotescape the hold of space either.

The2010 Conference will seek to explore new worlds and new spaces inFrench and Francophone literature, in the social sciences and the artsin the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some possible fields ofstudy include:

translatedspace; deterritorialization: language, immigration, the space of theother; cyberspace: hyper-fiction and digital literature; personalspace: autobiography, autofiction; symbolic and mental space;performance art; intermediality; chronotopes; topoï; spatiality andlettrism; the book as material space ; illustrations

Proposals for complete panels and individual papers, in French or English,  should be sent to espaces@uoguelph.cabefore August 31, 2009. Each paper should be represented by a 150-200word abstract and include the author's contact information for Fall2009.