Archives mensuelles : mai 2021

Séance 7 : Écrits de l’intime et handicap

Vendredi 21 mai 2021 | 16h-18h (Friday 21 May 2021, 4-6pm CET)

Thème : Aux frontières (des écrits) de soi (et de la littérature) : études sur le handicap face aux écrits de l’intime, un état des lieux /
Limits of the Self, Limits of Literature : Crossing Autobiographical and Disability Studies

Intervenants / Guests :

  • Tom COUSER (Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY USA)
    The Limits of Disability Life-writing

Fresh from two experiences that have stimulated my thinking about the topic of this seminar, I will approach it directly and quite broadly. The first experience was that of co-editing a two- volume reference work entitled Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives for Gale Cengage, with Susannah B. Mintz (2019). The second was teaching the Illness/Disability Narrative Course in Columbia’s Narrative Medicine Program this last term. Both experiences have entailed consideration of distinct and various limits of disability narrative: e.g., generic, geographical, physiological. I will address limits on both the production and the reception of such narrative and the consequent limitations of this discourse. Overall, the status of disability life writing today is paradoxical: on the one hand, it often exceeds what might have been considered its limits; on the other, it remains limited in troubling ways.

  • Mateusz CHMURSKI (Sorbonne Université, Eur’ORBEM)
    Six Characters (and a Document) in Search of an Author: The Facsimile of Witold Gombrowicz’s Kronos

Since its invention situated usually in 1862, fac-simile as a technical disposal promises literally “to make similar” in print an original of a given work of an author. Representative for the modern “fascination with subject formation (of a text or of an author) and the role of materiality in this transformation” (Roland 2011, 52), the facsimile production became gradually theorized from different perspectives both in art history and literary studies. I propose to observe its ambivalent status through the case study of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) Kronos facsimile edition as an intersemiotic frame in which discourses, hierarchies (and, first and foremost, norms) crisscross while “the on-going historical process of text production known as editing” (Dane 1995, 46) becomes a complex play with six protagonists – the heir, the editor, the translator, the researcher, the journalist, and the reader. Tutti in cerca d’autore.

Discussion : Clara ROYER (Sorbonne Université, Eur’ORBEM)


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Séance 6 : La technique comme symbole

Séance du 07 mai 2021 | 16h-18h

Intervenant-e-s :

Yuri LEVING (Dalhousie University)
How the Revolution Triumphed: Alisa Poret’s Textbook of Cultural Iconography

Yuri Leving offers an exploration of a Soviet children’s book – How the Revolution Triumphed (Kak pobedila revoliutsiia), illustrated by Alisa Poret (1902–1984). The book, published in 1930, thirteen years after the October Revolution, offered a visual-verbal narrative that served, in effect, as a primer for teaching communism to Soviet children. Its key didactic goal was to introduce the newest generation of Soviet readership to the sequence of historical calamities that led to the Bolshevik seizure of power and, even more importantly, to ensure that their interpretation of the anti-imperial coup was correct. The book relies on both the clear visual expressionism of Poret’s imagery and the accompanying text. WithHow the Revolution Triumphed, Poret invented a didactic « cinebook » (or a « knino »), a hybrid work conceptually blending a totalitarian optics with a print medium. Leving will demonstrate the emergence of a visual vocabulary that successfully blended cinema, photography, graphic art, and book illustrations using dynamic visual language to amplify a story of political upheaval.

Daria SINICHKINA (Sorbonne Université, Eur’ORBEM)
Kuznica and the science of the new “proletarian” poetry

In the aftermath of 1917, a new vocabulary enters the discourse on literature in general and on poetry in particular. The young proletarian culture in the making – its content is intensively debated on the pages of periodicals of different political stripes – formulates its principles using a vocabulary that comes from the fields of politics, science, technology and, last but not least, medicine. Kuznica (the forge), a group of proletarian poets founded in 1920, which includes Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov, embraces the artisanal metaphor of the “factory” of poets. Nonetheless, while calling for the creation of new rational poetic standards, Kuznica’s manifesto recycles organic and industrial metaphors of the same culture it rejects. The example of Kuznica is particularly interesting for grasping the dynamics at work in the new “proletarian” discourse on poetry in the aftermath of 1917, when poetry was the object of an ambition of rationalization and recasting applied to all living forms.

Discussion : Rodolphe BAUDIN (Sorbonne Université, Eur’ORBEM)


CONSULTER LES ARCHIVES : ici