DICTIONNAIRE INTERNATIONAL DES TERMES LITTÉRAIRES (www.ditl.info)
2009 SEMINAR at HARVARD UNIVERSITY
(In connection with the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting )
on "Global literary theory and terminology"
Organizer : Jean-Marie Grassin, U de Limoges
=================================================================When the founding fathers (and mothers) of the FILLM and the ICLA first met in the 1960's, they encountered some misunderstandings in the use of literary terms by scholars of different nations (the French illuminisme is not the Italian illuminismo : «enlightenment»; to-day révisionnisme as negation of the Shoa in French has no relation to Harold Bloom’s revisionism, etc.). It was decided to constitute a global terminological reference lexicon; the standing project of an International Dictionary of Literary Terms (DITL) designed by Robert Escarpit was adopted by the ICLA in 1966. Its purpose is still «a. to identify [through a terminological watch of sciences of the text], b. to clarify [in seminars, conferences, networks, etc.], c. define [by the publication of a common dictionary, to-day through the www.ditl.info site] the critical terms actually used in an international context». The general objective is to establish and constantly revise the metalangage of comparative literature.
Following this «transcritical process», the seminar invites comparatists to study literary notions in a global perspective. Among the major contemporary approaches in re-examination globalism, deconstruction, cultural studies, gender, postcolonial studies, and information theory get priority on the DITL agenda; but presentations of any established term in international circulation are acceptable. A term (not a theme, a character, an event unless theorized as a literary category such as «detective» in «detective novel») is defined as a vocable having a specific meaning in the theory and the history of literature and being used in different parts of the world, whether it belongs to the traditional vocabulary of humanities (such as «genre»), or comes from various epistemological horizons: sociology (such as «habitus»), semiotics (such as «sememe»), anthropology (such as «bricoleur»), linguistics (such as «speech act»), psychoanalysis (such as «phallocentrism»), etc. JMG
Friday, March 27
8:30 - 10:30 DITL Session
Theory of literature
Session Chair: Bénédicte Mauguière, U of Louisiana
François Provenzano, U de Liège / FNRS
RHETORIC – A global term for local theories”
Jean-Marie Grassin, U de Limoges
“POETICS OF EMERGENCE – The postmodern paradigm shift”
Mario Domenichelli, U degli Studi di Firenze
“THEME – Thematology, philology, literature and cultural studies”
Shaojing Wu, Purdue U
“PING DIAN – A traditional Chinese evaluative method now in global perspective
Friday, March 27
2:30 - 4:30 General meeting for the advancement of the International Dictionary of Literary Terms
-Planning the future of the DITL (graduate student conferences, adaptations of the DITL in specific languages, search for host institutions, applications for grants)
-Updating the 2009 DITL calendar
-Nominations and perspectives for the new international committee to be appointed at the 2010 AILC/ICLA in Korea
-Call for the next annual DITL symposium, seminars, specific projects
-Search for a new web editor and an institution to host the www.ditl.info site
5:00 - 6:30 Plenary Panel: Writing Locally in Global Languages
Gish Jen and Elias Khouri
Saturday, March 28
8:30 - 10:30 DITL Seminar
Discourse analysis
Session Chair: Emmanuel Bouju, U de Rennes II
Gillian B. Pierce, Boston U
“DIFFÉREND – Kant and Lyotard on the Sublime”
Yen Mai Tran-Gervat, U Paris III
“PARODY – A complement to H. Baudin’s DITL article”
Cécile Moiroud, U Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris I
“DOGMATICS as the institution of literature” (in French)
Jean Fisette, U du Québec à Montréal
“SEMIOSIS – The contribution of the notion to comparative literature”
5:00 - 6:30 ADPCL Panel: Teaching World Literature
Sarah Lawall, Zhao Baisheng, Paulo Horta, Rosemary Feal
Sunday, March 29
8:30 - 10:30 DITL Seminar
Time and space
Session Chair: Maya Boutaghou, UCLA
Emmanuel Bouju, U de Rennes II
“PERIODIZATION – Achilleus and the turtle of literature”
Jochen Mecke, U Regensburg
“HYPERFICTION as an emergent literary kind”
Bertrand Westphal, U de Limoges
“GEOCRITICISM – A global approach to literary spaces”
Dae-Jong Kim, U of Nebraska Lincoln
“TRANS-SPATIALITY”
Anna Avaraki, Athens, Greece
“The GEOPOETICAL or TRANSCULTURAL POEM – Saint-John Perse, T.S. Eliot and Odysseus Elytis: Nation and universality”
Maria Luiza Berwanger da Silva, U Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
“PAINTING – Peinture et littérature: Paysage du Don et de l´Échange”