Plenary Lectures
Monday 24 August 14:00
Duncan Large (chaired by Neil Sadler)
Translating Affect (Ethically) in the Age of AI
Duncan Large is Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia / Former Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation
Monday 24 August 16:00
Susan Bassnett (chaired by Gigliola Sulis)
Reassessing Comparative Literature Today
Susan Bassnett is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of Glasgow / Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick / President of the British Comparative Literature Association
Respondent: Haun Saussy
Tuesday 25 August 09:00
Jean-Louis Haquette (chaired by Nigel Saint)
"Le cri de la nature : mises en scène de la morale naturelle au siècle des Lumières"
(The Cry of Nature: Scenes of Natural Morality in the Age of Enlightenment’)
Jean-Louis Haquette est Professeur des Universités en Littérature comparée, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
Abstract:
Les émotions ont une histoire, comme l’ont montré notamment les travaux d’Alain Corbin ou George Vigarello. C’est dans cette perspective que s’inscrit cette contribution au congrès Ethics and Affect: Rethinking the Text and the World. Elle aura pour cadre une période reconnue comme une charnière dans l’histoire des sentiments et des idées morales, le siècle des Lumières. En effet, s’y jouent des transformations dont notre modernité est encore l’héritière directe.
A partir des méthodes de la sémantique textuelle, dans un corpus en langue française, nous prendrons comme fil directeur les avatars d’une expression caractéristique de la naturalisation de la morale qui s’affirme au 18e siècle : le “cri de la nature”. De l’essai au théâtre en passant par le roman, elle met en scène une configuration centrale du lien entre éthique et affect, qui repose sur une évidence intérieure. Dans les contextes littéraires (théâtre et roman) ce cri est à la fois symptôme et signe. Surgissant avec une force irrépressible, dans des circonstances souvent extrêmes, il vient désigner, en deçà des mots, une évidence morale présentée comme incontestable car naturelle. Dans les textes de réflexion, sa valeur hyperbolique sert une rhétorique de l’évidence, qui vise à échapper à la contestation discursive. Dans les deux cas, c’est une évidence éthique qui est affirmée, dans une logique qui relève plus d’une communauté supposée des affects que de la réflexivité critique. On interrogera les présupposés d’une telle scénographie et ses implications idéologiques et esthétiques.
[Emotions have a history, as demonstrated in the works of Alain Corbin and George Vigarello, amongst others. It is within this framework that this contribution to the conference Ethics and Affect: Rethinking the Text and the World is situated. It will focus on a period recognised as a turning point in the history of emotions and moral ideas: the Age of Enlightenment. During this period several transformations took place of which our modern world is still a direct heir.
Drawing on methods of textual semantics and using a French-language corpus, we shall explore the various manifestations of a phrase characteristic of the naturalisation of morality that emerged in the 18th century: the ‘cry of nature’. From essays to plays and novels, this expression highlights a central aspect of the link between ethics and emotion, which is rooted in an inner certainty. In literary contexts (theatre and the novel), this cry is both a symptom and a sign. Emerging with irrepressible force, often in extreme
circumstances, it serves to express, beyond words, a moral certainty presented as indisputable because it is natural. In reflective texts, its hyperbolic value serves a rhetoric of self-evidence, which aims to evade discursive challenge. In both cases, it is an ethical self-evidence that is asserted, within a logic that relies more on a presumed community of affects than on critical reflexivity. We shall examine the presuppositions of such a framework and its ideological and aesthetic implications.]
Thursday 27 August circa 16:00
Elleke Boehmer (chaired by John McLeod)
Doing comparison across the blue hemisphere: why and how
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford / Director, Oxford Centre for Life Writing
Abstract:
My work on ‘southern imagining’ demonstrates how we might think laterally and comparatively from the far south of the world, the edges of the blue hemisphere, and considers why this is important at this time of climate crisis, and the continuing dominance of the planet by northern institutions, to which that crisis is directly related. The lecture will direct itself to the conference subtitle, ‘Rethinking the Text and the World’, by submitting that we might rethink the world through the text, in particular through our comparative reading of southern hemisphere texts. The question is not the postcolonial one of writing back, or of how the southern text confronts and challenges the north, but rather the question of how southern readings might work contrapuntally to imagine the planet in more holistic ways, ‘from below’. Drawing on the work of Janet Frame, Randolph Stow, J.M. Coetzee, Mia Couto, Zakes Mda, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriques, and others, I suggest that southern poetics contribute something distinctive and forceful to our understanding in this time of the Anthropocene, offering a means of seeing at scale, and at multiple scales; of imagining ‘over there’ as right here, pressing and urgent.
My reflections are mobilised by the awareness that only 11% of the world's population live in the southern hemisphere. The ‘edges’ of the planet are 'out of sight, out of mind' for most people—from which comes the assumption that the view 'from below' can be safely ignored. And yet the high southern latitudes are registering many of the effects of the climate acceleration more acutely than elsewhere. Reading the far south through the works of the far south, interactively, I contend, brings these 'faraway' developments into razor-sharp focus, reminding us that the (only seemingly) remote impinges on us all.