“If the street were time and he at the end of the street”: T. S. Eliot’s spatio-temporal imagination

Dr. Kit Kumiko Toda, Université de la Réunion

Eliot’s first published poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), famously opens with the narrator inviting us for an evening walk through “certain half-deserted streets”, and, in joining him, we arrive “upon the beach”, at the shore of his anticipated old age. The Bergsonian “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (1915) also takes us on an insomniac’s stroll, “through the spaces of the dark”, in murky slums of muttering streetlamps, where “Midnight shakes the memory” and the passing hours are tolled at the start of each stanza. The Waste Land (1922) leads us through the Dantean “Unreal City”, tracing Eliot’s commute over London Bridge and down King William Street “to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine”.

In Eliot’s pre-1927 poetry, his sense of time, particularly the psychological perception of the passing of time, is repeatedly envisioned in (urban) spatial terms, something made explicit in “The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’” in which the narrator turns “Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to La Rochefoucauld, / If the street were time and he at the end of the street”. In 1927, Eliot was baptised into the Anglo-Catholic Church and his poetry shows an increasing preoccupation with Christian theological matters, as well as a distinctly liturgical turn in his poetics. This turn, I argue, was also accompanied by a turn in his spatio-temporal sense: in his poem Ash-Wednesday (1930), we find Eliot explicitly insisting “I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place”. Nevertheless, spatial conceptions of time persist prominently, albeit differently, in his work; the culminating final stanza of the final poem of Four Quartets opens with the affirmation: “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling/ We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time”. The solemn pun on “end” attests to a merging of temporal termination with spatial destination in Eliot’s vision. This paper will analyse Eliot’s evolving spatial-temporal imagination, tracing his work from the “end of the street” to the “end of all our exploring”.

Biographical note:

Kit Kumiko Toda is an MCF in English Literature and Translation at l’Université de la Réunion. Brought up in England, she took her degrees at University College London and the University of Cambridge before relocating to France. She has published articles in Review of English Studies, Resources for American Literary Study, Essays in Criticism and Shakespeare en devenir. She has a contract with Routledge for a book on T.S.Eliot’s Elizabethan Imagination (planned publication 2025). She has contributed reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and was the founding editor of The Literateur magazine, which has been digitally archived in the Contemporary British Publications collection of the British Library.

Cette journée d’étude est organisée par Juan Carlos Baeza-Soto (SPN), Sandrine Baudry (Université de Strasbourg) et Céline Planchou (SPN).

Le programme est à télécharger ici.

Mercredi 17 avril 2024, 11h, 13h, 18h, Patio, Campus Esplanade

Les étudiant.e.s de L3 présenteront à l’autrice leur traduction de trois nouvelles du recueil Dirty Love (2013), inédit en français, ainsi que les questions qui ont émergé lors de ce travail de traduction collectif mené lors du cours de version. Ce sera aussi l’occasion d’interroger l’autrice sur ses pratiques d’écriture et de traduction dans le contexte multilingue de Bombay. Le recueil explore en effet les multiples facettes de Bombay / Mumbai à travers plusieurs voix et donne à entendre les inflexions locales de la langue anglaise. Si vous souhaitez assister à ces ateliers, contactez Marianne Hillion (mhillion[at]unistra.fr).

Dire Bombay en prose et en poésie

Jeudi 18 avril 2024, 18h, Bibliothèque du Portique, Campus Esplanade

La soirée mêlera un entretien avec l’autrice mené par Marianne Hillion à une lecture musicale de ses textes, tirés du recueil de nouvelles Dirty Love (2013) et du recueil de poèmes The Fried Frog (2010). Cette lecture, menée par Lara Delage-Toriel et les étudiant.e.s de L3 études anglophones, sera accompagnée des musiciens Jean-Jacques Reymond et Thomas Vandevenne.

L’événement sera en anglais, des exemplaires papier des nouvelles de Dirty Love traduites en français par les étudiant.e.s de L3 études anglophones seront mis à disposition.

Possibilité de faire dédicacer et d'acheter (sous réserve) trois œuvres de Sampurna Chattarji: Dirty Love, The Fried Frog and Other Funny Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems et son ouvrage le plus récent, Unmappable Moves.

Inscription conseillée avant le 16 avril 2024. Si vous souhaitez réserver un ouvrage, merci d'en mentionner le titre dans la partie "commentaire" de l’inscription : https://applications.unistra.fr/invitation/unistra.php?time=02042024083215

Cet événement est soutenu par l’Idex France 2030, le laboratoire SEARCH et la Société d’Etudes Postcoloniales (SEPC).

Crossing the Line: Translator as Trespasser, Shapeshifter, Interloper

Vendredi 19 avril 2024, 10h-12h, MISHA, Salle de la table ronde, Campus Esplanade

“As an Anglophone writer for whom English is the primary language—the language of life, literature and love—translation revealed to me the extent of my Bengaliness.

In my talk, I would like trace the stages of my journey as an accidental translator, and how a simple desire to share my own delight in Sukumar Ray’s ‘kheyal rawsh’ (the rasa of whimsy) with those denied access to the originals grew into a lifelong practice.

If translating Ray had been pure joy, translating the powerful contemporary poet Joy Goswami was pure madness. I had to re-educate myself, as I set out from language towards a second self-hood.

Meanwhile, international translation workshops found me walking across the bridge of English back into Bengali.

From the duality of translator and text, a third possibility emerged: the collaborative mode.

While working with Portuguese poets Miguel Manso and Margarida Gato was born of an intense readerly longing to enter the closed room of Portuguese, my role in young Bengali poet Subhro Bandopadhyay’s collaboration with South African poet Ari Sitas, was that of the translatory-editorializing interloper.

What holds all these strands together is being unafraid to cross invisible lines.

It is these essential transgressions, subversions and interventions that make translation an urgent, even lifegiving, act for me as a creative writer.”  SAMPURNA CHATTARJI

SAMPURNA CHATTARJI is a writer, editor, translator and teacher with twenty-one publications to her credit. These include Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an Alien (HarperCollins 2015, 2020), which she wrote during her Charles Wallace India Trust writing residency at the University of Kent, Canterbury; her short story collection about Bombay/Mumbai Dirty Love (Penguin 2013); and her translation of Sukumar Ray’s poetry and prose Wordygurdyboom! (Puffin Classics 2008). The most recent of her eleven poetry titles is Unmappable Moves, just out from Mumbai-based indie-press Poetrywala.  Her translation of Joy Goswami’s prose poems After Death Comes Water (Harper Perennial, 2021) has been lauded as a recreation of the Bangla originals in ‘a living voice, as inventive and vivid as the English of Joyce’. She also translated Portuguese poet Miguel Manso’s collection Supremo 16/70 to English.

The keynote speakers are Professor Peter Gray (Queen’s University Belfast) and Professor Eugenio Biagini (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge). The other contributors are invited to examine the different facets of radicalism in Ireland, both in terms of its various forms and the different processes by which radicalisation, and then de-radicalisation, take place.

Radicalism is often perceived as the extreme expression of a political or religious ideology, but it also defines movements committed to substantial reforms. In Ireland, historiography has focused mainly on political radicalism and its various expressions over time. From the United Irishmen’s revolutionary insurrection of 1798 and that of Young Ireland’s in 1848 to the War of Independence and the Civil War, political demands have often been associated with civil rights and parliamentary autonomy, but also with rural agitation for land redistribution. The aim of this study day is to extend these questions to other forms of radicalism, and to the dynamic processes in which they are embedded.

Download the full programme here.

Organisers: Karina Wendling (U. Lorraine), Vanessa Boulet (U. Lorraine), Pauline Collombier (U. Strasbourg), and Tim Heron (U. Strasbourg)

9-11 April 2024, Strasbourg, France

The 18th Biennial Insular Romance Conference Beyond Borders will be held in person at the University of Strasbourg from Tuesday 9 to Thursday 11 April, 2024.

In keeping with the rest of the series, the focus of the conference will be on non-Arthurian, non-Chaucerian romances that have tended to receive less exposure elsewhere.

The programme is now available here.

Keynote speakers:

• Raluca Radulescu (Bangor University) et Sif Ríkharðsdóttir (University of Iceland), Emotions in Medieval Romance
• Sofia Lodén (Stockholm University), Strangers and Peripheries in Medieval European Literature: From Sweden to India
• Guillemette Bolens (Université de Genève), Bodies’ Versatile Borders

Information: https://medievalinsularromanceconferences2024.my.canva.site/

Any queries should be addressed to Morgan Dickson and Fanny Moghaddassi.

A two-day international conference at the University of Strasbourg funded by the Institut Universitaire de France

Dates: 21-22 March 2024

Venue: University of Strasbourg, France

Conference programme: view here

List of hotels: view here

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Dr. Judith Madera (Wake Forest University), who specializes in African American and Caribbean literatures from the eighteenth century to present.

Dawn Raffel is a New York-based writer whose book Boundless as the Sky came out in January 2023.

Seen as an emblematic feature of the United States, American space has been represented, interpreted and questioned along multiple lines. Yet, these lines of critical inquiry often remain separate and discrete, treated from perspectives that do not take into account their interaction. They are also spelt along a particularly white, male trajectory. While it is generally agreed that ‘space’ is a major component of the American imagination, literary representations and artistic practices of space in postwar US have rarely been treated together as intersecting narratives. This conference sets out to consider postwar and contemporary conceptualizations and material practices of space in American literature and art, with the prospect of opening larger and more interdisciplinary vistas. The conference builds on the 2018 conference in Paris on The cartographic imagination. Art, literature and mapping in the United States, 1945-1980.

What are the prevailing and the underrepresented spatial imaginaries in postwar and contemporary America, and how are they represented in literature and art? How do these expressions relate to various Indigenous and colonial traditions of the spatial imagination? How do issues of whiteness, race, and the racial imagination shape spatial practices and imaginaries? What does the dialogue between literary texts, visual studies and art historical practices bring to the understanding of the construction and experience of space in American postwar and contemporary contexts? What are the major paradigms that arise? How do national and transnational, local and global, official and alternative narratives of space intersect in literature and art? How do the contexts of US imperialism and militarization play out in the representation of Cold War and ‘war on terror’ geographies?

Organizers: Sandrine Baudry (University of Strasbourg), Chloé Bour-Lang (University of Strasbourg), Gwen Cressman (University of Strasbourg), Catherine Gander (Maynooth University), Hélène Ibata (University of Strasbourg), Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg/Institut Universitaire de France), Will Norman (University of Kent).

Selective bibliography

Alworth, David, Site Reading. Fiction, Art, Social Form, Princeton UP, 2015.

Baudry, Sandrine, Hélène Ibata and Monica Manolescu (eds.), Landscapes and Aesthetic Spatialities in the Anthropocene, RANAM. Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines, 54/2021.

Dear, Michael et al. (eds.), GeoHumanities. Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place, Routledge, 2011.

Gander, Catherine and Sarah Garland (eds.), Mixed Messages. American Correspondences in Visual and Formal Practices, Manchester UP, 2016.

Goeman, Mishuana, Mark My Words. Native Women Mapping Our Nation, University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Madera, Judith, Black Atlas. Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Duke University Press, 2015.

Manolescu, Monica, Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities. Art, Literature and Urban Spaces, Palgrave, 2018.

Manolescu, Monica and Will Norman (eds.), The Cartographic Imagination. Art, Literature and Mapping in Postwar America, European Journal of American Culture 39.1, 2020.

Manzanas, Ana Maria and Jesus Benito, Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture. Static Heroes, Social Movements and Empowerment, Routledge, 2016.

McKittrick, Katherine and Clyde Woods (eds.), Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, Between the Lines, 2007.

McNamara, Kevin R., Urban Verbs. Arts and Discourses of American Cities, Stanford

University Press, 1996.

Shaw, Lytle, Fieldworks. From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, Alabama University Press, 2012.

Tally Jr., Robert T., Topophrenia: Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination, Indiana University Press, 2018.

Dr. Aaron Shkuda (Princeton University)

In American cities, the term “loft” can denote a range of structures and spaces. The word describes both gritty live/work spaces in former industrial building that were informally, and sometimes illegally, renovated by individual artists, as well as large-scale luxury housing projects funded by developers as part of the state-sanctioned reuse of defunct factories and warehouses. The aesthetic of lofts has influenced the commercial architecture of high-tech startups, the interiors of fast-food restaurants, and the design of art museums. Depending on the context, lofts can represent creative energy, real estate investment, cultural appropriation, displacement, and/or the nostalgia for a more liberated and innovative time in the pre-neoliberal city.

The loft’s central place in narratives of artist-driven urban development and gentrification comes from its role in the transformation of New York’s SoHo neighborhood in the 1960s and 70s. Starting with a brief history of the SoHo loft, this talk will trace the loft’s enduring influence on the aesthetics of gentrification and the spatial imagination of contemporary cities. Particular attention will be paid to the architectural form of the loft, the large-scale market forces that drove deindustrialization and the adaptive reuse of lofts as live-work spaces, and the policy frameworks that shaped this urban architectural typology. Lofts are key to understanding how and why the arts are seen as critical to economic growth in urban areas, and the spatial imaginaries of lofts reveal the varied ways that an aesthetic of creativity is appropriated by development regimes in the contemporary city.

Bio:

Aaron Shkuda has run the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, a program that fosters collaboration between scholars studying urban life and the built environment, since 2014. Aaron received his PhD in United States urban history from the University of Chicago and is the author of The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (University of Chicago Press, April 2016). He has published articles on subjects ranging from arts-focused retail districts to the architecture and planning behind Battery Park City. Aaron previously taught at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Universities.

Avec le soutien de SEARCH (Université de Strasbourg), LINCS (Université de Strasbourg) et LAVUE (Université Paris 8)

Conférences plénières / Invité.e.s d’honneur :

• Pr. Ad Putter (Bristol University)
• Pr Kevin J. Harty (La Salle University, Philadelphia)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight est une oeuvre médiévale d’une grande richesse, œuvre divertissante, source d’apprentissage et d’initiation, intrigante et vibrante, foisonnante d’images et représentations visuelles et qui n’a pas fini de susciter les interprétations les plus variées. Les passages descriptifs y ont la part belle, sans pour autant couper le récit aventureux ni se présenter comme des morceaux de bravoure conventionnels. L'œuvre a donné lieu à de multiples ‘mises en images’ et ce, dès la composition du manuscrit lui-même (ca 1400), fort de quatre illustrations en pleine page pour ce seul poème, qui mêlent humour et réalisme. Des illustrations figurent également dans nombre d’ouvrages modernes appartenant à la littérature de jeunesse. Le récit en vers a donné lieu à plusieurs adaptations cinématographiques, dont la plus récente est The Green Knight de David Lowery (2021). En France, le peintre David Balade lui a consacré une série de tableaux fondés sur le thème de la végétalité; de fait, le poème apparaît fondateur pour la démarche éco-critique dans la littérature de langue anglaise. C’est aussi une œuvre magistrale au sein de la tradition allitérative, qui, à la fin du XIVe siècle, n’a jamais entièrement disparu depuis le vieil-anglais. Le questionnement de l’idéal chevaleresque invite à un regard réflexif sur les stéréotypes attachés à la tradition arthurienne.

Programme:

14h-14h30 Welcoming words and announcements

14h30-15h30 Fanny Moghaddassi (Université de Strasbourg): Spatialising Literature: The Bibliotopies of Medieval Romance

15h30-16h Anne Bandry (Université de Strasbourg): Exploring and Promoting Intercultural Heritage: Holdings in and about English in the Strasbourg BNU

16h-16h30 Coffee break

 16h30-17h30 Ridvan Askin (Basel Universität & Université de Genève): Reassessing the Romantic Project.

17h30 Closing words

Séminaire « De la Renaissance aux Lumières / Early Modern Research Seminar » (UR SEARCH, Configurations littéraires, ILLE)

Bien que les étiquettes « Renaissance » et « Moyen Age » aient été abondamment critiquées et que de nouvelles périodisations aient vu le jour, le cloisonnement entre les époques perdure et continue à façonner les disciplines et les champs d’étude. Quoique communément admis par les médiévistes, le caractère arbitraire des définitions chronologiques du « Moyen Age » ne les empêche pas de profondément structurer la réflexion universitaire encore aujourd’hui, bon nombre d’histoires de la littérature commençant ainsi au XVIe siècle. La notion de première modernité, par ailleurs, loin de faire disparaître la coupure impliquée par celle de Renaissance, n’a pas eu l’effet escompté de ce point de vue, et a même pu renforcer une lecture téléologique des XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Sa dimension initialement critique ne l’a ainsi pas toujours dissociée des implications de la notion de Renaissance telle qu’elle a été conceptualisée au XIXe siècle, et parler de première modernité ne suffit pas à se détacher des grands récits de Burckhardt ou de Michelet. Dans le domaine des études anglophones, on pourrait estimer que la période située à la charnière des deux époques (le XVe siècle et la première moitié du XVIe siècle) a pâti d’un découpage temporel renforcé dans les études littéraires par la domination des figures tutélaires que sont Chaucer et Shakespeare. Enfin, la structuration des domaines de recherche et l’organisation institutionnelle rendent encore trop souvent difficiles les échanges entre médiévistes et spécialistes de la Renaissance, et les regroupements existants se font plus volontiers entre Renaissance et Lumières.

Consacré aux Iles Britanniques et aux études littéraires, mais voué à s’étendre au-delà, ce séminaire vise à répondre à ces défis en créant un espace commun virtuel. Il explore les enjeux historiographiques de périodisation, soutient le regain d’intérêt actuel pour des périodes de « transition » souvent laissées de côté, croise les regards sur des thématiques pertinentes sur l’ensemble de la période qui court du XIII^ème siècle au XVI^ème siècle, et engage le débat sur les continuités et transformations qui ont marqué cette époque. 

Destiné aussi bien aux doctorant.es qu’aux collègues plus expérimenté.es, il est soutenu par l'équipe SEARCH.

Le 10 novembre 2023, nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir:

• Morgan Dickson (Université de Picardie), Tainted Love: Untangling Love and Illness in Tristan and Isolde
• Rémi Vuillemin (Université de Strasbourg), From proto-sonnets to sonetti: Reconsidering the "birth" of the English Sonnet

English version:

The hybrid seminar series Medieval to Renaissance, which was created in 2022-23 by Fanny Moghaddassi and Rémi Vuillemin (Université de Strasbourg, SEARCH UR2325), aims to favour dialogue between medieval and Renaissance/early modern studies.

While the ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ labels have largely been criticised and other labels have been used, the separation between the two periods remains, and still shapes academic disciplines and scientific fields of enquiry. Although commonly recognised by medievalists, the arbitrary nature of chronological definitions of the 'Middle Ages' still profoundly structures academic thinking today, with many histories of literature beginning in the 16th century. The notion of ‘early modern’, besides, has not really succeeded in cancelling out the divide implicit in the notion of Renaissance, and has even sometimes had the effect of strengthening teleological readings of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Though it was coined to question an earlier historical model, it has not allowed researchers to do away with the implications of narratives established in the 19^th century by the likes of Burckhardt and Michelet. In English studies, the century and half upon which the periodisation hinges (i.e. the 15^th century and the first half of the 16^th century) has been somewhat neglected, caught as it is between two major figures: Chaucer and Shakespeare. Finally, the institutional construction of scientific fields and the structural evolutions of work in academia has further strengthened divisions. It seems far more common today to work on the continuities from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment than from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Focused on the British Isles and on Literary Studies, but aiming to go beyond those limitations, this seminar series aims to address those challenges by establishing a common virtual space, discussing historiographical questions of periodisation, upholding the current renewed interest in previously neglected ‘transitional’ times . It will encourage crossed perspectives on relevant issues related to the period running from the 13th to the 16th centuries, and prompt exchanges on the continuities and transformations across existing temporal divides.

This seminar series is addressed to scholars at all career levels. It is supported by the SEARCH research unit.

On 10 November, 2023, we're delighted to welcome

• Morgan Dickson (Université de Picardie), Tainted Love: Untangling Love and Illness in Tristan and Isolde
• Rémi Vuillemin (Université de Strasbourg), From proto-sonnets to sonetti: Reconsidering the "birth" of the English Sonnet

Post-1960s African American fiction, this talk will argue, responds both to California’s contested and ambiguous role in histories of African American liberation and to a dichotomous
sense of extreme possibility (at once utopian and apocalyptic) that defines the cultural construction of California.

Michael Docherty is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck. His research primarily considers how California has been constructed in American (and indeed global)
imaginaries, and how fiction has both shaped and been shaped by California’s unique spatial, racial, and cultural histories.

You can download the full bio and the abstract below.

Colloque international organisé par l’UR SEARCH

Conférences plénières / Invité.e.s d’honneur :

• Ladan Niayesh (Université Paris Cité/LARCA)
• Michael Darroch (York University) and Lee Rodney (University of Windsor) - The research-creation hub IN/TERMINUS
• Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan (Artists, Hamilton Perambulatory Unit)

Ce colloque, organisé par l’unité de recherche SEARCH de l’Université de Strasbourg, est né de deux propositions : celle de la pertinence des réflexions sur l’histoire des frontières, de leurs représentations et des pratiques de délimitations au sein du monde anglophone, d’une part, et celle de l’importance de la cartographie et de la contre-cartographie comme modes de construction esthétique et de pensée critique essentiels à l’étude des frontières, d’autre part.

Comment les frontières, en tant qu’entités spatiales et géopolitiques, font-elles simultanément l’objet de cartographies et de contre-cartographies, ces processus faisant ainsi émerger des discours alternatifs ou concurrents mettant au jour des idéologies sous-jacentes, des tactiques spécifiques de représentation et d’appropriation créative ? Comment la représentation des frontières dans la littérature, les arts, les discours historiques et la culture matérielle passe-t-elle par des gestes cartographiques et contre-cartographiques, qui suivent ou brouillent les lignes de la carte ?

Les communications pourront ainsi porter sur la question de la représentation des frontières dans le monde anglophone sous l’angle de la cartographie et de la contre-cartographie, dans des limites temporelles larges (du Moyen-Âge à l’époque contemporaine) et à travers divers types de discours et de supports médiatiques (littérature, arts, discours historiques, représentations géographiques et cartographiques, culture matérielle).

Les cartes sont des systèmes constructifs qui naissent tout autant de processus imaginaires et idéologiques que de procédures scientifiques. Aussi immuables et inaltérables qu’elles puissent apparaître, elles sont l’expression d’une imagination cartographique (Tiberghien), fondées sur des considérations contextuelles spécifiques, façonnées par des conventions de représentation, et informées par des épistémologies, des programmes politiques, et des approches culturelles données (Lounissi, Peraldo & Trouillet). Des points de vue fluctuants, des cadres politiques antagonistes mènent souvent à des perspectives différentes sur les cartes et le geste cartographique, qui sont à l’origine de processus de contre-cartographie, particulièrement prégnants dans la représentation de régions frontalières sous tension.  La prise de conscience de la dimension idéologique des cartes, devenue un objet central de la recherche universitaire au cours des dernières décennies, a fondamentalement bouleversé le paradigme qui associait les cartes et la cartographie à la transparence et l’exactitude épistémologiques et représentationnelles. L’avènement de la cartographie critique dans les années 1980 a consacré la carte comme “proposition sur le monde” et les cartographes comme “créateurs sélectifs de mondes” (Wood, 39-51). Plusieurs géographes ont ainsi souligné le pouvoir de manipulation des cartes, tels que James Ackerman dans Decolonizing the Map ou Mark Monmonier dans How to Lie with Maps, ouvrages qui analysent l’usage des cartes en contexte colonial, mais aussi à des fins de propagande politique et commerciale. Toutefois, on constate l’émergence récente d’une nouvelle approche de l’« ambivalence » de la cartographie, qui consiste non seulement à dénoncer sa rhétorique manipulatoire et sa complicité politique dans des entreprises coloniales et guerrières, mais aussi à reconnaître les possibilités immenses d’appropriation subversive qu’offre la cartographie en termes de réécriture de récits et de création de modes de représentation expérimentaux, collectifs ou singuliers. De la « déconstruction » de la cartographie (Harley), nous sommes ainsi passés à une phase de « reconstruction » (Besse), qui reconnaît la puissance créatrice de la carte, sa capacité à être appropriée de diverses manières, et la façon dont elle contribue à créer des formes de connaissance et de représentation esthétique hybrides au contact des discours littéraires et artistiques.

Suite à la démocratisation de la cartographie et à l’émergence de Systèmes d'Information Géographique (SIG), la cartographie s’est « libérée », s’ouvrant ainsi à des communautés alternatives de cartographes non-professionnels (Pinder). Les stratégies de contre-cartographie ont fait florès dans les dernières décennies et plusieurs atlas collectifs ont été publiés, tentant de rendre visible sur les cartes des histoires passées sous silence, des toponymies et des groupes marginalisés, et d’étudier à nouveaux frais des siècles d’histoire (Solnit ; Bhagat et Mogel ; Russert et Battle-Baptiste). Toutes ces formes de contre-cartographie ont contribué à réinventer la pratique de la cartographie, et à donner une place à des histoires et des noms de lieux oubliés ou délibérément effacés.

Ce colloque vise donc à créer un dialogue interdisciplinaire entre la géographie, l’histoire, la littérature et les arts, dans la perspective thématique, théorique et critique offerte par ces notions-clés (le croisement de la cartographie, de la contre-cartographie et des frontières dans le monde anglophone). Un atelier itinérant (walkshop) sur les traces de la frontière Strasbourg / Kehl sera organisé par nos quatre invité.e.s canadien.ne.s lors du colloque, tous.te.s les participant.e.s sont chaleureusement invité.e.s à y participer.

15 posters présenteront les enjeux et les idées de ces projets riches et variés. Les porteurs seront présents pour vous les montrer et vous les expliquer. Venez nous rencontrer entre 12h00 et 14h00 quand vous le souhaitez dans la salle 4202, le Patio !

Nous nous réjouissons de vous voir !

Raphaël Jamet, Pablo Ruiz Fabo et Thomas Mohnike

Tenu en hybride, il favorise les échanges entre médiévistes anglicistes et offre un espace de dialogue et de débat.

Le 25 septembre 2023, à Amiens, nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir

• Lucy Brookes, Julia de Lacy Mann Fellow, Merton College, Oxford, pour une communication intitulée "The Borders of Truth in Middle English Verse Romance"
• Aude Martin, doctorante à l'Université de Lorraine et Bangor University: "A Historical Approach to Middle English Verse Romance: Contextualising Sir Percyvell of Galles and Sir Tristrem"

9 June 2023, Strasbourg

Download the programme here.

Etude interdisciplinaire de la construction du sens et de ses enjeux sociaux, anthropologiques et culturels en temps de crise

Vous pouvez téléchargez le programme ici.

Avec le soutien de SEARCH et de CREA.

A musical performance by Gerry Smyth  (Liverpool John Moores Univ.)

With the support of EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies), Culture Ireland, the Government of Ireland Emigrant Support Programme, the Arts Council of Ireland and SEARCH

Melvin Van Peebles’s Three Pick-Up Men for Herrick: Political Aesthetics and Transatlantic Film Distribution

Sam Smucker’s dissertation research is on the creative works and life of director and author Melvin Van Peebles during the years he lived in Paris, 1960-1968. Sam is a film historian with an interest in African American cinema, narrative theory, and aesthetics. He is the recipient of a Chateaubriand Fellowship for 2023. He previously worked in film distribution and as a union organizer. 

This material is based upon research supported by the Chateaubriand Fellowship of the Office for Science & Technology of the Embassy of France in the United States.

The talk will be given over Zoom. For the link, please contact David Lipson lipson[at]unistra.fr

12 May 2023, Amphithéâtre du Collège Doctoral Européen, University of Strasbourg

Programme: download here

In the words of Judith Butler, gender is “instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (140, author’s emphasis). In her foundational work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler focuses mostly on gender performance and femininity, though the concept is applied to both sides of the socially constructed binary. Anticipating Butler’s theorization of the importance of performance within the social existence of gender, literary critic Nancy Armstrong emphasizes the link between cultural representations of gender in literary texts. For Armstrong, fiction functions “both as the document and as the agency of cultural history” (23). Following this assessment, this conference proposes to analyze cultural representations of masculinities, working under the assumption that cultural artifacts, including but not limited to fiction, are “a matter of meaning: not meanings as free-floating ideas or as ideals embodied in texts but as part of lived experience, shaping social practice,” in a cultural studies approach (Hall 40).

Such studies on the constructed nature and varying definitions of different ideals of femininity alongside transgressions of these models through cultural objects have been increasingly common since the advent of feminist criticism in the 1970s, and we are looking to shift the focus to cultural representations of masculinities. Such a focus was marginally undertaken in the same time period, underlining the relational nature of the concepts of masculinity and femininity (Connell 28, 43). However, although hegemonic masculinity plays a central role in setting up an oppositional binary with the subordinately-constructed concept of femininity (the perpetual ‘other’?) - thus enforcing patriarchal power relations - it also defines itself against a range of subordinate or non-hegemonic masculinities, which often intersect with other considerations/categories/identities such as race, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation. (Val de Almeida, 2000). The dynamics between hegemonic models of masculinity, counter-models of masculinity and models of femininity vary according to the historical period and cultural context, and warrant further study. Masculinities studies is a growing field of inquiry, to which this study day aims to contribute. Papers from all geographical areas within the English-speaking world are welcome, across all time periods. Given that conceptions of masculinity are “inherently historical,” prone to change according to the shifts in the “conditions for the defence of patriarchy,” we are particularly interested in tracing a wide range of masculinities, and their relation to their hegemonic manifestation within their specific contexts (Connell 43, 77).

"The Disposable Frontier: U.S. Hazardous Waste and Toxic
Colonialism in the Oceans"

This talk focuses on the dire legacy of U.S. hazardous waste management in the world’s oceans. From the mid-1970s onward, the U.S. federal government launched a series of programs that were meant to guarantee the safe disposal of a staggering and ever-increasing amount of domestically produced hazardous chemical wastes. The U.S. government outlawed indiscriminate dumping of toxic waste in the oceans domestically and engaged in multilateral discussions to ban the practice at the international level too. Subsequently, Congress and the EPA set up a system that was supposed to identify and follow hazardous wastes throughout their life-cycle – “from cradle to grave” as the U.S. authorities liked to say. The implementation of such a varied policy, however, failed to achieve adequate standards for the protection of marine and coastal socio-ecological systems. Rather, it favored the installment and replication of a number of exploitative, neoliberal and indeed imperial practices that transformed the oceans into America’s disposable frontier, a supposedly empty and self-healing space to be bent to the exigencies of the ever-influential U.S. military-industrial complex. The talk will highlight the causes and consequences of this changing relationship between the U.S. and the seas, the role that an out-ofcontrol hazardous waste crisis played in it, and the many forms of socio-ecological resistance that tried to curb the harmful watery expansion of the U.S. empire.

Bien que les étiquettes « Renaissance » et « Moyen Age » aient été abondamment critiquées et que de nouvelles périodisations aient vu le jour, le cloisonnement entre les époques perdure et continue à façonner les disciplines et les champs d’étude. Quoique communément admis par les médiévistes, le caractère arbitraire des définitions chronologiques du « Moyen Age » ne les empêche pas de profondément structurer la réflexion universitaire encore aujourd’hui, bon nombre d’histoires de la littérature commençant ainsi au XVIe siècle. La notion de première modernité, par ailleurs, loin de faire disparaître la coupure impliquée par celle de Renaissance, n’a pas eu l’effet escompté de ce point de vue, et a même pu renforcer une lecture téléologique des XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Sa dimension initialement critique ne l’a ainsi pas toujours dissociée des implications de la notion de Renaissance telle qu’elle a été conceptualisée au XIXe siècle, et parler de première modernité ne suffit pas à se détacher des grands récits de Burckhardt ou de Michelet. Dans le domaine des études anglophones, on pourrait estimer que la période située à la charnière des deux époques (le XVe siècle et la première moitié du XVIe siècle) a pâti d’un découpage temporel renforcé dans les études littéraires par la domination des figures tutélaires que sont Chaucer et Shakespeare. Enfin, la structuration des domaines de recherche et l’organisation institutionnelle rendent encore trop souvent difficiles les échanges entre médiévistes et spécialistes de la Renaissance, et les regroupements existants se font plus volontiers entre Renaissance et Lumières.

Consacré aux Iles Britanniques et aux études littéraires, mais voué à s’étendre au-delà, ce séminaire vise à répondre à ces défis en créant un espace commun virtuel. Il explore les enjeux historiographiques de périodisation, soutient le regain d’intérêt actuel pour des périodes de « transition » souvent laissées de côté, croise les regards sur des thématiques pertinentes sur l’ensemble de la période qui court du XIII^ème siècle au XVI^ème siècle, et engage le débat sur les continuités et transformations qui ont marqué cette époque. 

Destiné aussi bien aux doctorant.es qu’aux collègues plus expérimenté.es, il est soutenu par l'équipe SEARCH.

Le 14 avril, nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir:

• Raluca Radulescu (Bangor University), Borders and margins: chronology, manuscript and print, and the circulation of romance and chronicles in medieval England
• Alessandra Petrina (Università degli studi di Padova), Petrarch’s reception in the British Isles: medieval to early modern

English version of the presentation:

The hybrid seminar series Medieval to Renaissance, which was created in 2022-23 by Fanny Moghaddassi and Rémi Vuillemin (Université de Strasbourg, SEARCH UR2325), aims to favour dialogue between medieval and Renaissance/early modern studies.

While the ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ labels have largely been criticised and other labels have been used, the separation between the two periods remains, and still shapes academic disciplines and scientific fields of enquiry. Although commonly recognised by medievalists, the arbitrary nature of chronological definitions of the 'Middle Ages' still profoundly structures academic thinking today, with many histories of literature beginning in the 16th century. The notion of ‘early modern’, besides, has not really succeeded in cancelling out the divide implicit in the notion of Renaissance, and has even sometimes had the effect of strengthening teleological readings of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Though it was coined to question an earlier historical model, it has not allowed researchers to do away with the implications of narratives established in the 19^th century by the likes of Burckhardt and Michelet. In English studies, the century and half upon which the periodisation hinges (i.e. the 15^th century and the first half of the 16^th century) has been somewhat neglected, caught as it is between two major figures: Chaucer and Shakespeare. Finally, the institutional construction of scientific fields and the structural evolutions of work in academia has further strengthened divisions. It seems far more common today to work on the continuities from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment than from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Focused on the British Isles and on Literary Studies, but aiming to go beyond those limitations, this seminar series aims to address those challenges by establishing a common virtual space, discussing historiographical questions of periodisation, upholding the current renewed interest in previously neglected ‘transitional’ times . It will encourage crossed perspectives on relevant issues related to the period running from the 13th to the 16th centuries, and prompt exchanges on the continuities and transformations across existing temporal divides.

This seminar series is addressed to scholars at all career levels. It is supported by the SEARCH research unit.

On 14 April, 2023, we're delighted to welcome

• Raluca Radulescu (Bangor University), Borders and margins: chronology, manuscript and print, and the circulation of romance and chronicles in medieval England
• Alessandra Petrina (Università degli studi di Padova), Petrarch’s reception in the British Isles: medieval to early modern

Conférence organisée par ILLE (Université de Haute Alsace), Configurations littéraires (Unistra), et SEARCH.

Tenu en hybride, il favorise les échanges entre médiévistes anglicistes et offre un espace de dialogue et de débat.

Le 23 mars, nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir

• Marco Nievergelt, Marie Curie Research Fellow à l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, pour une invervention intitulée : "How did poetry get so serious? Chaucer, Langland, and the ‘speculative turn’ of Middle English Literature"
• Hannah Victoria, doctorante à l'Université Paris-Université sur le thème : "Queer Sensibilities: Affective Discourse in the Devotional Poetry of Mechthild von Magdeburg & Hildegard von Bingen"