Literature: history & criticism
More general subjects:
Reconsidering Consent and Coercion
Power, Vulnerability, and Sexual Violence in Medieval Literature
How can contemporary theorisations of consent help us to nuance our understanding of consent and coercion in the Middle Ages? And what can reconsidering medieval attitudes towards consent offer to our own ‘consent culture’? Contemporary feminist approaches have identified consent both as a potent political framework for liberation and as an inherently limited concept that opens out onto other important ethical questions. Proceeding from this moment this book looks in two directions to understand the varied ways in which structural inequalities impact meaningful consent and facilitate coercion in the Middle Ages and today.
Building upon the momentum of ‘medieval consent studies’ as a newly defined field this volume expands the focus beyond rape and raptus assessing more varied representations of consent and coercion through an intersectional consideration of power inequality and sexual violence. The contributions bring together different methodologies cultural contexts and literary traditions to highlight literature’s capacity to reflect otherwise undocumented forms of sexual vulnerability. Offering a compelling case for integrating critical approaches like trans history codicology animal studies ecocriticism and disability studies into this field Reconsidering Consent and Coercion demonstrates the vital necessity of a nuanced and inclusive understanding of the past for our present discourses of consent.
The Byzantine Historiographical Prefaces (4th–15th Centuries)
A Study on the Praxis and Culture of Writing History in Byzantium
In recent years a lively debate has developed on the features of Byzantine historiography. The increasingly dominant tendency today is to treat historical texts more as pleasant literary narratives than as systematic historical accounts of the political and military history of Byzantium. The present study aims to contribute to this debate by revisiting the voices of the Byzantine authors themselves focusing on the extant historical prefaces from the Early Middle and Late Byzantine eras. This seemed timely more than a century after the publication of Ηeinrich Lieberich’s fundamental work on Byzantine historiographical proems.
Obviously not all prefaces are of equal interest: some serve a purely conventional function while others are composed more thoughtfully and merit more careful attention. The book’s goal is twofold: firstly to outline the details of the prefatory function of the Byzantine historiographical proems as microtexts; secondly to detect and evaluate the theoretical views expressed by the authors of each period regarding the genre of Byzantine historiography. This will expand our knowledge of how the Byzantines wrote (praxis) and thought (culture) about historiography.
«Nelli occhi della filosofia». La logica nell’opera di Dante Alighieri
Codificata a partire da una sezione specifica del corpus aristotelico la logica rappresentava nel Medioevo latino quell’"arte delle arti" (ars artium) che studiava le regole del ragionamento corretto e le era riconosciuta una universalità di tipo strumentale. Come notato sin dai primi biografi e commentatori Dante dimostra in svariate occasioni una maestria e una padronanza della materia del tutto degne per dirla col Boccaccio di un «maraviglioso loïco». Giustamente celebri sono i versi di Inferno XXVII in cui «un d’i neri cherubini» con un raffinato ragionamento strappa l’anima di Guido da Montefeltro all’impotente San Francesco («forse / tu non pensavi ch’io loïco fossi!» v. 123); ma è soprattutto nel Convivio nella Monarchia e nella controversa Questio de aqua et terra che l’Alighieri sfoggia una competenza difficilmente riducibile alla consultazione occasionale di qualche ‘manuale’. Questo studio analizza sistematicamente i passaggi dell’opera dantesca riconducibili a questo specifico ambito disciplinare; e offre una panoramica sugli ambienti culturali in cui il Poeta avrebbe verosimilmente potuto formarsi (Firenze Bologna la Toscana occidentale la marca Trevigiana). Da un lato quindi si inserisce nel fortunato filone di studi che si è occupato di valutare la conoscenza che Dante poté avere delle dottrine di Aristotele e dei suoi interpreti. Dall’altro tenta di ricostruire i tempi i luoghi e i modi in cui «peregrino quasi mendicando» poté acquisire tale competenza specialistica. In tal modo non viene solo illuminato un lato inesplorato di questo eccezionale «amatore di sapienza» ma viene anche offerto uno scorcio privilegiato sullo stato delle conoscenze filosofiche in Italia fra XIII e XIV secolo.
Storyworlds and Worldbuilding in Old Norse‑Icelandic Literature
The storyworlds of Old Norse-Icelandic literature are multifaceted and variable ranging from the worlds of heroic poetry and popular romance to the recognizable narrative universe built by the Sagas of Icelanders. Despite this they have rarely been explored and narratological theories of storyworlds or fantasy scholarship have had little impact on the field. Yet given that every story creates its own storyworld it can be assumed that Old Norse-Icelandic literary texts too build worlds — and these worlds are diverse and complex as shown by the contributors in this volume: they constantly engage with one another exploring shaping and expanding while also entering into a dialogue with the primary world from which they draw.
This volume brings together scholars from different areas of Old Norse-Icelandic studies to explore questions related to not only the storyworlds of medieval Icelandic literature but also those of legal and learned texts and to the way that they are built. Together they inquire into the nature of these worlds into their preservation and transmission in manuscripts their transmediality transnarrativity and reception. In doing so these inquiries showcase the breadth of new perspectives on medieval Icelandic literature made possible by the application of narratological theory in its study.
Approcher la philosophie par ses gestes
This article examines the relevance of reading philosophy as a set of characteristic and transmissible gestures. It first attempts to understand the topicality of this notion of gesture and then to define its meaning distinguishing it from related notions such as philosophical act posture or method. It then examines the limits and relevance of the metaphor of the philosophical gesture in order to avoid its pitfalls and assess its value for thinking about what philosophers do drawing on the notion of hypergesture borrowed from Yves Citton to enrich the analysis. In conclusion the article suggests some examples and further applications of the analysis.
« Un vieux fond de tendresse pour les clowns »: Portrait de J.‑K. Huysmans en écrivain parnassien
In his preface to Théodore Hannon’s Rimes de joie (1881) J.-K. Huysmans divided Parnasse into a rigorist option embodied by Leconte de Lisle and a second led by Théodore de Banville. By complicating our usual understanding of this movement this article examines the possibilities of a Parnassian sensibility in Huysmans’ work and more specifically in his first book Le Drageoir aux épices (1874). It also looks at Huysmans’ relationships with figures in the Belgian literary world: Hannon Eekhoud and Lemonnier whom Max Waller called a naturaliste-parnassien. Can such a label be used to describe Huysmans in return?
Con-tact : les gestes de la littérature selon Annie Ernaux: Une lecture de « Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit »
Drawing on Heidegger's redefinition of the concept of gesture as an action without end this paper aims to reinterpret « Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit » by Annie Ernaux in light of a writing gesture that indefinitely reworks the figure of her mother. In particular the notebook covering the years 1984-86 is re-examined in relation to the book Une femme which represents on the other hand a writing gesture which is planned and structured both regarding the form of the text and the attribution of meaning with respect to the existential trajectory of the author’s mother. Through this comparison the article focuses on the modes of a writing that of « Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit » capable of bringing into the world not because writing is a demiurgic act (Fort 2008) but because writing as an unoriented gesture becomes each time a place for preserving the irreducible otherness of the other.
Deux gestes en un: Cinéma et médialité chez Giorgio Agamben
In his theory of gesture and montage Giorgio Agamben argues that the element of cinema is gesture and not image. Cinema is the exemplary medium for capturing and evoking the moment at which humans have lost control of their gestures. The gesture is a particular type of action: it involves movement but it also appears as a moment of action. What has this got to do with cinematic montage? The power of the montage is to reveal the potential of the image and transform it back into gesture. Both gestures and montage leave us in the realm of mediality. We discover how this process releases what has been frozen in the image. It is this theory on gesture that I want to discuss.
Comment reconnaître un geste théorique quand on en voit un ?: Gestes corporels et matérialités textuelles dans les théories de la lecture
This article examines the notion of “theoretical gesture” in the field of theories of reading and builds on an apparent paradox: while the term “gesture” is readily used in a metaphorical sense a large proportion of the general systems created to conceptualize reading often exclude the material aspects of this activity and don’t give any weight to the body of the theorist who produces them. By contrast I propose through the analysis of a famous anecdote by Stanley Fish to reconstruct the materiality of the theoretical gesture and to measure its influence on the way reading is conceived on a general scale. In this context the theoretical gesture is defined as the specific movement of thought through which a theory negotiates its conceptual relationship with materiality. For theories of reception represented here by Umberto Eco’s singular attempt at “hands-off reading” this gesture corresponds to a necessarily imperfect operation of “dematerialisation”. On the other hand the “material turn” in humanities has given rise since the 1990s to a proliferation of more conscious theoretical gestures signaling an evolution in the frameworks and postures that questions the very nature of theoretical operations and the ways in which they can be situated.
Penser le geste en littérature: Entre gestes d’image et gestes de pensée
This article looks at the continuity between gestures of image and gestures of thought using the example of writers’ iconographic and critical practices. The gestures of authors such as Louis Aragon Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Claude Simon show how real gestures shape more abstract gestures of thought and ultimately give rise to concrete gestures of thought. This continuity justifies the interest of the HANDLING research programme (UCLouvain 2019-2024) in practices long considered anecdotal in literary studies such as collage the arrangement of images on walls or the collection of postcards or other iconographic material. Based on the results of this European research project this paper calls for concrete gestures to be taken more fully into account and for a literal approach to gesture in literature.
Corneille baroque: Notes sur une contre-histoire de la France classique
This article would like to add some additional elements to Christian Biet’s analysis of the political uses of Pierre Corneille’s work starting from the specific question of the Baroque and its ideologies. The metamorphic and indefinite character of the qualification “Baroque Corneille” meets not only institutional and methodological concerns but also makes it apt to serve the most opposite ideological purposes ranging from the Marxist denunciation of the harmful social role of the bourgeoisie assimilated to classicism to the defense of the politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen allegedly fighting against classical institutions in the name of a conception presented as baroque of existence. In these circumstances Corneille’s work disappears behind a fantasized figure the critics using his biography to their advantage as a harbinger of their political conceptions.
« Penser en rond »: Spatialité, répétition et évolution de gestes de pensée
Within the perspective of an ethology of thought investigation into the way we intellectually produce and create this article considers which intellectual gestures would correspond to “thinking round in circles” (penser en rond). On the one hand this offers an opportunity to examine gesture – why and to what extent we can speak of “intellectual gestures” – and on the other to try out forms to understand how thought proceeds. This text aims to highlight the heuristic value of a figure drawn by thought. Thinking circularly could be the mark of a thought and occasionally of the thought itself; “penser en rond” might entail tracing several circles.
Part speculation part commentary this article draws on examples of gestures by thinkers and writers (Deleuze Barthes literary critics) who talk about gestures while performing them. The article formulates a few propositions on the impetus of thought addressing the spatial nature of thought the part played by the new the old and the repetition in intellectual progression and creation. And the productive or unproductive force of intellectual progression through circles for to think might be thinking in circles – thinking anew with the already as a starting point.
Outils, objets, supports: Insérer le numérique dans l’histoire matérielle de l’édition littéraire au Québec
Common perceptions tend to oppose the book and the digital their tangible and virtual nature seeming to be irreconcilable. However to understand their characteristics and their historical development we need to look at their materiality: what are the material factors involved in their dual function of recording and dissemination? The joint study of literary publishing practices and digital literary practices here set in the context of Quebec calls for consideration of the generic idea of publication (as ‘making available to the public’) and attention to exploratory manifestations at the point of contact between literature and digital culture.