Archives de catégorie : Séminaire régulier

Séminaire “Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes:  Fragmented Untranslatable Blackness”

Mardi 30 janvier 2024 à 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, site Saint-Charles, salle 126.

Séminaire organisé dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Claudine Raynaud.

“I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations,
over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.” (Note 18)

This talk follows from the presentation of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) to map out major directions of African American thought and to delineate the contours, the import, and the limits of what has been labeled Afro-pessimism (Frank B. Wilderson III). Along with Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother, 2006; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019), Christina Sharpe, who teaches Black Studies at York University in Toronto, has been hailed as one of the foremost contemporary Black radical cultural critics. To French readers, Ordinary Notes will recall Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux: the 248 notes of various lengths address the intimate—Notes is an ode to her mother—and the cultural, the collective, the current historical moment of #Blacklivesmatter and the legacy of slavery. Pondering what is seen and not seen of Black life in the United States, Sharpe convokes a series of private and public photographs—she critiques La Chambre claire—in this dense mélange of memories, artwork, and academic “notes,” i.e. observations. She calls us to attention.

Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2023 for National Book Awards for Nonfiction. Sharpe has authored two studies, of which Ordinary Notes is a follow up: Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (2016). She has recently edited a collection of Dionne Brand’s poems and is working on three books: What Could a Vessel Be? (Knopf, Canada, FSG, USA, 2025), Black. Still. Life. (Duke UP, 2025) and To Have Been To the End of the World: 25 Essays on Art.

Présentation de l’intervenante: Claudine Raynaud est Professeure émérite en études africaines-américaines à l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA.

Séminaire “Unis contre l’esclavage ? Les antiesclavagistes états-uniens, Noirs et Blancs, 1754-1830”

Mardi 28 novembre 2023, 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3salle 126 (Saint-Charles 1) et visioconférence (https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/95127500322)

Séminaire organisé par Lawrence Aje dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Université Paris Cité, UMR LARCA).

Dans son ouvrage, Noirs et Blancs contre l’esclavage, une alliance antiesclavagiste ambiguë aux Etats-Unis 1754-1830, publié en 2022, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol a cherché à raconter une histoire de la jeune république états-unienne au prisme de l’esclavage et plus particulièrement du premier mouvement antiesclavagiste auquel elle veut restituer toute sa complexité. Dans sa présentation, elle reviendra sur les acteurs noirs du mouvement, qui posent la première pierre du mouvement des droits civiques dès les années de la guerre d’indépendance, rédigent le premier corpus intellectuel africain-américain et élaborent la stratégie de l’ « uplift » . Elle s’intéressera également au déclin du militantisme blanc conservateur après 1800 dans un pays de plus en plus raciste et esclavagiste avant de revenir sur l’émergence, dans le Nord-Ouest, d’un nouveau militantisme blanc confronté à l’expansion territoriale après 1815. En conclusion, elle reviendra sur la rupture de 1830, qui mérite sûrement d’être davantage justifiée, ainsi que sur les sources d’histoire sociale et intellectuelle qu’elle a utilisées. 

Présentation de l’intervenante. Outre Noirs et Blancs contre l’esclavage. Une alliance antiesclavagistes ambiguë 1754-1830 paru chez CIRESC-Karthala, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol a publié au printemps 2023 Anthologie de la pensée noire, Etats-Unis Haïti (XVIIIè-XIXè) aux éditions Hors d’atteinte, un livre qu’elle a édité avec Michaël Roy (et Marlène Daut et Cécile Roudeau). Elle pilote depuis 2013 la collection « Récits d’esclaves » aux PURH avec Claire Parfait. En 2012, elles avaient inauguré la collection par la traduction et l’édition du récit de William Wells Brown, premier ouvrage dont une version révisée sera publiée par Payot en 2024. Toujours avec Claire Parfait (et d’autres collègues), elle avait publié une anthologie d’historiens noirs en ligne Ecrire l’histoire depuis les marges : une anthologie d’historiens africains-américains. Elle s’implique actuellement dans un projet collectif « L’Amérique de Tocqueville », avec Augustin Habran and Laurence Cossu-Beaumont, à la suite du projet UPC IDEX « Race, Démocratie et République France, Etats-Unis XVIIIè-XIXè siècle » dont elle a été lauréate. 

Séminaire “For a contemporary poetics of Middle Earth: Recovery and presence in the world”

Mardi 21 novembre 2023, 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3salle 126 (Saint-Charles 1) et visioconférence (https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/91654686842?pwd=UGVKazkvYUJkR0pub0NPWm5LM0Judz09)

Séminaire organisé par Théo Maligeay dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Laurent Alibert (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, ReSO).

John Garth’s recent work, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) responds to an expectation. With the proliferation of developments of tolkienian’s legendarium oriented towards a largely autotelic fantasy, it was time to recall how Tolkien’s writing is rooted above all in an attentive look at reality and that, in many aspects, this work is of another type of imagination, where the frame of reference of the points of view from which the story is considered – whether it is the Shire for the Lord of the Rings or Beleriand for the Silmarillion(s) – is marked by attention to the surrounding world (parsimony of the uses of magic, largely contemplative narration or, on the contrary, narration focusing on the historical and political mechanisms and their consequences on the oikouménē [Letters, p.283]) which holds many respects of a culture of presence in the world, thereby joining a central theme in European poetry since the second half of the 20th century.

« What use are poets in times of need? (« wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? ») wrote Hölderlin a century earlier. Did Tolkien have the answer, he who laid the foundations of The Silmarillion during the Great War and wrote a considerable part of The Lord of the Rings during the Second World War? As an extension of this questioning, we will ask here why we should read Tolkien in our time of disintegration of the link to the world, whether ecological, social, human or poetic. Why, then, read Tolkien in the 21st century? We know that his criticism of the dangers of technical society is not without parallel with the work of Bergson and Ellul (but also Berdyaev) and can poetically accompany a degrowthist model. But the contemporary strength of Tolkien’s work goes beyond the sole environmental concern to raise the question of presence in the world: sense of collective necessity but also sensitive presence, of attention to the place where the living is incarnated.

We will indeed seek to see how, contrary to another type of escapism which feeds itself on the model of entertainment in the Pascalian sense, this work continues to speak to our time and can help us to live in it. For this we will partly rely on the work of John Garth but we will parallel Tolkien’s approach with the questioning of the French poet Yves Bonnefoy on the relationship between presence in the world on the one hand and the role or lure of the image of a « somewhere else ». On this point, Tolkien’s approach is both radically distinct, even opposed to that of the French poet, but he paradoxically joins him by in fact renewing a poetics of reality through myth.

Indeed, Middle Earth presents itself as the construction of a poet and a philologist for whom language and myth are inescapably linked and who uses myth as language in order to offer us what he calls recovery“regaining of a clear view […], seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves) whose first function is to innervate our gaze – amazed, but not illusioned – on the world around us.

Présentation de l’intervenant: Laurent Alibert is a PRCE teacher in Occitan Language and Literature at University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 and Ossetian Language and Civilization at the French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). He wrote Le Roman de Jaufré et les Narty Kaddjytæ (Honoré Champion, 2015), La mimesis et son refus dans la littérature occitane (L’Harmattan, 2021) and directed “Archéologie et praxis du conte occitan”(Revue des langues romanes, Tome CXXVII n°1 | 2023) . He is a qualified MCF in sections 10 (comparative literature), 15 (other languages) and 73 (regional languages and cultures) of the CNU. In addition to his work on the occitan and ossetian fields, he has regularly written and published on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. 

Publications et interventions sur l’oeuvre de Tolkien:
– « Le Moyen Age comme matière linguistique et structurelle dans le Seigneur des Anneaux : quelques jeux littéraires, historiques et culturels comme source du renouvellement narratif » conference at the Crest Medieval Festival (Drôme), 27th of may 2023
– Translation of the critical review of The People of Middle-Earth (History of Middle-Earth vol. 12) par Charles Noad, in J.R.R. Tolkien, « L’effigie des Elfes, La feuille de la Compagnie », Cahiers d’études tolkieniennes n°3, dir. Michael Devaux, Bragelonne, collection essais, 2014, p. 475-99
– 8 entries in Dictionnaire Tolkien, (dir. Vincent Ferré,), CNRS Editions, Paris, 2012 : « Amour », « Géants », « Fermier Gilles de Ham », « Exodus », « Lúthien », « Livre de Jonas, (traduction par Tolkien) », « Mandos », « Tolkien (Edith) »
– « L’héroïsme chez Tolkien : une étude de Farmer Giles of Ham », seminary in the Symposium  “Tolkien aujourd’hui” (13th-15th of june 2008, Rambures). Published in M. Devaux, V. Ferré, Ch. Ridoux, Tolkien aujourd’hui, Valenciennes, Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2011
– La place de l’héroïsme amoureux, de l’amour chevaleresque et du merveilleux dans les Lais (Marie de France), Jaufre (anonyme occitan, XIIème/XIIIème siècle) et The Lay of Leithian (Tolkien), (Master 2)
– « Farmer Gilles of HamThe Lord of the RingsThe Lay of Leithian, trois éclairages pour l’esquisse d’un héroïsme tolkienien », (with Emeric Moriau) invited to S. Provini’s seminary on heroism, 15th of june 2006, Université Paris VII. Published as « The Lay of Leithian ou l’héroïsme du couple », in Camenae, n°4, juin 2008, the online journal of Paris IV-Sorbonne University
– « L’influence indo-européenne en Arda et ses limites », seminary in the Tolkien Symposium at Rennes II University (2 avril 2003), published in Tolkien, Trente ans après (1973-2003), Vincent Ferré (dir.), Paris, Christian Bourgois, 2004
– « J.R.R. Tolkien, de la Terre-du-Milieu à notre histoire » in Aventures de l’Histoire, Janvier 2003, Hors série n°5, p. 88-92
– Imaginaire médiéval et mythologique dans l’oeuvre de Tolkien, Maîtrise de lettres (dir. Armand Strubel) Paris X-Nanterre/Warwick University, 2002.

Séminaire EMMA/(Inter)Agir – mardi 26 septembre 2023 18h, site St Charles.

Jeroen Vandaele (Univ. Ghent) nous invitera à réfléchir aux conditions dans lesquelles l’humour grinçant peut être reçu et traduit. Sa présentation est intitulée : « Cringe Across Communities. Understanding and Translating The Office with Erving Goffman ».

 

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Cringe Across Communities. Understanding and Translating The Office with Erving Goffman 

Erving Goffman provides a brilliant ‘micro-sociological’ analysis of how individuals manage their image in front of others. In public, individuals intend to promote what they think is a positive self-image and therefore conceal image-incompatible information and supply image-enhancing information. Moreover, image enhancement is most effective when it seems a natural and unconscious expression that individuals give off, not a conscious effort to make an impression on others. When these mechanisms fail, there is face loss, the individual may experience embarrassment, and become the object of comedy. If there is antagonism between the embarrassed and the audience, the felt comedy is usually a form of Schadenfreude. However, the embarrassment may also carry over on the audience, which leads to second-hand embarrassment—cringe— and the mixed emotion called cringe comedy. In this paper, I show that both Schadenfreude and cringe are dominant emotive effects in the sitcom The Office (British and American versions), I investigate how these two distinct emotions come about, and how they fare in translation. 

Jeroen Vandaele teaches courses in literary translation and Hispanic literatures at Ghent University. Earlier he was professor of Spanish at the University of Oslo, teaching courses in poetics, translation studies, and discourse analysis. In Fall 2023 he is a Mare Balticum Fellow at the University of Rostock (Germany), for the domain of translation studies. He is the author of Estados de Gracia, which is a monograph on the censorship, translation, and influence of Billy Wilder in Francoist Spain (published by Brill in 2015) and, more recently, of Translation and Big Details, a monograph in press at Routledge New York. Among the volumes he edited or co-edited are Cognitive Poetics (Mouton de Gruyter) and Translating Humour (a special issue of The Translator). In the domain of humor research, one of his biggest efforts is the double essay “Narrative Humor,” published in Poetics Today

Séminaire “Locating the Self: Welcoming the Other in British and Irish Art, 1990–2020”

Mardi 7 november 2023 à 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, site Saint-Charles, salle 126.

Séminaire inaugural. Intervention de Valérie Morisson.

Valérie Morisson will present her volume Locating the Self: Welcoming the Other in British and Irish Art, 1990–2020 (Peter Lang, 2022). This volume addresses how spatialized identities, belongingness and hospitality are interrogated in British and Irish contemporary art (painting, installation, video, photography, new public art) at a time when economic and political crises tend to encourage individual or exclusive usages of space. It sketches a cartography of encounters encompassing the home, the neighbourhood, the village or city, and the nation. Artists interrogate how intimacy is both facilitated and threatened by spatial devices, how space fashions our perception of gender, social or ethnic identity and activates power relations. They explore the need for a home or a homeland and the various forms exile or placelessness can take. They may also take part in the restoration of the Commons and the constitution of alternative communities. Whether the analyses focus on the private sphere (in urban, suburban or rural contexts), or on shared communal spaces, they ponder the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in human encounters and shed light on how artistic apparatuses make the tensions between openness to the other and rejection or withdrawal perceptible. The approach, borrowing from art history as well as anthropology, lays emphasis on context, situationality and field work; it proposes to repoliticize relational art and concludes on the dialogical positionality which lies at the core of art.

Valérie Morisson is a Professor of British and Irish Studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and a member of EMMA. She has studied Irish contemporary art and its relation with post-nationalist culture extensively and has published many academic texts on British contemporary art. Though firmly anchored in art history, her approach stresses the relevance of context in the understanding of visual culture and the arts and borrows from anthropology to shed light on the position of the artist as well as the role of art in society. Her publications focus on a wide range of subjects (feminist art, memory and the commemoration of history, the Northern-Irish situation, postcolonial art, lens-based art) and consistently emphasize field work and praxis in art as key vehicles for expression, analysis and critique.

Séminaire EMMA / « Poetry Talks » : Craig Dworkin, « The Materiality of Infrastructure: On Virtual Libraries »

Mardi 10 octobre 2023, 18h, Salle 126 Site Saint-Charles 1. Séance animée par Lily Robert-Foley (MCF, EMMA).

This talk contextualizes the hybrid text of Helicography (Punctum Books, 2021) – part art-historical essay, part experimental fiction, part pataphysical investigation – by considering the practical and theoretical limits of digital libraries and their implications for scholarly and creative work in the age of the fibre-optics.

Craig Dworkin is the author of four scholarly monographs – Reading the Illegible (Northwestern), No Medium (MIT), Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (Fordham), and Radium of the Word: a Poetics of Materiality (Chicago) – as well as a half-dozen edited collections and a dozen books of experimental writing, including, most recently, The Pine-Woods Notebook (Kenning Editions) and Helicography (Punctum). He teaches literary history and theory at the University of Utah.

Séminaire EMMA : Conférence de Philip Metres (John Caroll University, USA) « Erasing Erasures: On Documents & Lyric in Poetry »

Mardi 3 octobre 2023, 18h, Salle 126 Site Saint-Charles 1. Conférence animée par Karim Daanoune (MCF, EMMA)

The work of documentary/investigative poetry parallels the work of truth commissions—not only by gathering testimonies that haven’t been aired widely, but also by examining, working with, and critiquing the political, legal, economic, and cultural systems that engineer oppression and injustice. A truth commission is a transitional justice mechanism for societies attempting to confront the past, reestablish the rule of law and responsible governance, and move into the future. Lacking an official truth process, artists and activists create a counterarchive, undoing erasure, and making visible and audible histories that the official narratives suppress or exclude. If archives began as a way of maintaining hegemony’s memory through written records, the counterarchive is more flexible, more fluid, more vivacious, less bound to documents—a laughing memory, a funeral dance, a mapped songline, worn prayer beads passed down. This talk will explore the origins and implications of this idea through some of my recent work in investigative poetry—from Sand Opera, Shrapnel Maps, and Fugitive/Refuge.

Philip Metres is the author of many books among which the poetry collections To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008), Sand Opera (Alice James, 2015), Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron, 2016) and Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020). He also published a collection of essays on poetry entitled The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018) and a scholarly monograph Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, Since 1941 ( University of Iowa Press, 2007). Philip also translated from the Russian Sergey Gandlevsky’s poetry in a bilingual edition A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr Press, 2003). He also co-translated with Tatiana Tulchinsky two volumes, one on the poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989), I Burned at Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State University, 2015) and another on poetic texts by Lev Rubinstein, Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Poetic Texts of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014). His latest translation Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky has just been released by Green Linden Press. His forthcoming poetry collection Fugitive Refuge will be published in April 2024 by Copper Canyon. His work was awarded many prizes among which the Adrienne Rich Award and three disctinctions by the Arab American Book Awards.

Philip Metres teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio. He is the founder and director of the “Peace, Justice, and Human Rights (PJHR)” at John Carroll University. He lives in Cleveland.

Plus de renseignements sur : https://poetry-talks.weebly.com/

Séminaire “Telling America’s Story to the World”

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