Mardi 12 septembre 2023, 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, salle 126 (Saint-Charles 1) et visioconférence

Séminaire organisé par Raphaël Ricaud dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Harilaos Stecopoulos (University of Iowa).

In Telling America’s Story to the World (Oxford University Press, 2023), Harilaos Stecopoulos argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, Harilaos Stecopoulos contends that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals-indeed, this rarely proved the case-but they did find their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings and possibilities of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), “Cultural Exchange” (1961, 1967), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Three Days Before the Shooting… (2010) reimagine US literature in a mobile, global, and distinctly political register.

Présentation de l’intervenant: Harilaos Stecopoulos is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He earned his doctorate at the University of Virginia and is a renowned scholar in the field of US literature and culture. Stecopoulos’s previous books include: A History of the Literature of the US South (2021), Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms (2008), & Race and the Subject of Masculinities (1997).

Participer à la réunion Zoom : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/93144920976?pwd=QmJ5cHpzb25FM0hpSUg0U2RTdGR3QT09

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