About the Conference
"Le centre relégué au milieu d’autres centres, c’est à la formation d’une constellation que nous assistons, où la langue libérée de son pacte exclusif avec la nation, libre désormais de tout pouvoir autre que ceux de la poésie et de l’imaginaire, n’aura pour frontières que celles de l’esprit."
—“Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français” manifesto, Le Monde des Livres, March 15, 2007
The Department of French at New York University is pleased to invite papers that explore spatial, temporal, and aesthetic relationality in French studies. The literal and figurative uses of the terms “center” and “periphery” with regard to literature in French animate our interrogation. The littérature-monde manifesto calls polemically for transforming the geography and geometry that link language, literature, and peoples. This echoes previous challenges to dichotomies in French literature, from theories such as deconstruction and postmodernism, as well as from movements such as négritude and créolité. We welcome papers that use the methodologies of literary criticism, philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology in their address to these issues.
Some questions we wish to examine in the conference are:
· How can we define the terms “center,” “periphery,” and “constellation”?
· What is the history of “center/periphery,” both le mot et la chose, with regard to literature?
· Are these terms relevant or useful today, as an object of study or as a category of analysis, for understanding literature in French?
· How does the academy—its sites, its disciplines, its hierarchies—inform “center/periphery” relations in literature?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
· the bounds of French literature, francophone literature, world literature
· minor literature, paraliterature, genre literature
· consecration, canonization
· standardization of the French language
· exoticism, orientalism, imperialism
· colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism
· New World/Old World
· urban/metropolitan/rural
· global North/global South
· marginality, liminality, alterity, the subaltern
· migrations, exile, diasporas
"Le centre relégué au milieu d’autres centres, c’est à la formation d’une constellation que nous assistons, où la langue libérée de son pacte exclusif avec la nation, libre désormais de tout pouvoir autre que ceux de la poésie et de l’imaginaire, n’aura pour frontières que celles de l’esprit."
—“Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français” manifesto, Le Monde des Livres, March 15, 2007
The Department of French at New York University is pleased to invite papers that explore spatial, temporal, and aesthetic relationality in French studies. The literal and figurative uses of the terms “center” and “periphery” with regard to literature in French animate our interrogation. The littérature-monde manifesto calls polemically for transforming the geography and geometry that link language, literature, and peoples. This echoes previous challenges to dichotomies in French literature, from theories such as deconstruction and postmodernism, as well as from movements such as négritude and créolité. We welcome papers that use the methodologies of literary criticism, philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology in their address to these issues.
Some questions we wish to examine in the conference are:
· How can we define the terms “center,” “periphery,” and “constellation”?
· What is the history of “center/periphery,” both le mot et la chose, with regard to literature?
· Are these terms relevant or useful today, as an object of study or as a category of analysis, for understanding literature in French?
· How does the academy—its sites, its disciplines, its hierarchies—inform “center/periphery” relations in literature?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
· the bounds of French literature, francophone literature, world literature
· minor literature, paraliterature, genre literature
· consecration, canonization
· standardization of the French language
· exoticism, orientalism, imperialism
· colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism
· New World/Old World
· urban/metropolitan/rural
· global North/global South
· marginality, liminality, alterity, the subaltern
· migrations, exile, diasporas