Extract from : Mildonian, Paola ; Scarcella, Alessandro (eds.); It started in Venice : Legacies, Passages, Horizons. Fifty Years of ICLA. Venezia : Ca’Foscari, 2006.
“Fifty years of literary criticism lexicography”
(an International Comparative Literature Association standing project in view of the Dictionnaire International des Termes Littéraires www.ditl.info)
An anniversary report by
Jean-Marie Grassin Université de Limoges
"It all started in Venice" with the foundation of the International Comparative Literature Association (AILC) in 1955. And in Oxford a little earlier with the foundation of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes (FILLM ). Fifty years later,the international convention «Legacies. Passages. Horizons» organized by Paola Mildonian, Alessandro Scarsella’s team at the Università Ca’ Foscari of Venice is also an anniversary for the International Dictionary of Literary Terms (DITL) which was created in illo tempore as a standing project of the association. When the founding fathers (and mothers) of the AILC and the FILLM first met in international venues, they were soon confronted with a problem that apparently had not been attended to before. In those early times of the internationalization of criticism, they became aware that discrepancies existed in the acceptations of the cognate terms used to discuss literature in different countries. It was not so much a matter of languages as of different academic and cultural traditions in the periodization, theorizing and instrumentation of literature. Various examples of misunderstandings were considered, sometimes so subtle that they remained unnoticed until they end up sometimes in vain disputes. For instance, it was considered that the English, the German, the French, etc. have different time references to define and to locate romanticism in cultural history. The Italian term illuminismo (with reference to the Enlightenment) barely overlaps its French cognate illuminisme (with reference to mysticism), a difference few language dictionaries record. That is nothing compared to Aristotelian notions used in a Chinese, Japanese, Korean,... context, or to Sanskrit terms applied to modern Western literature.
It was then resolved by the AILC «to survey the critical terms actually used in international contexts» (Robert Escarpit’s correspondence). Examples of «international context» could be : congresses of major learned societies (presentation, program, abstracts, proceedings,...), journals of wide circulation (Revue de Littérature Comparée, PMLA,...), reference works (well-known histories of literature, encyclopedias), recognized theoretical treatises, or, to-day, the websites and discussion lists of specialized organizations, etc. In 2005, the programme of the anniversary colloquium in Venice offer a new harvest of critical terms in cross-linguistic, cross-cultural perspectives.
The terminological problem was at the center of the debate between the so-called French and American schools during the second international congress of comparative literature in Chapel Hill, N. C. in 1958. It was decided then that the next congress in Utrecht in 1961 would focus on the definition of important literary notions in view of a common reference lexicon. A number of lectures and papers there were in fact drafts of articles for the future Dictionnaire International des Termes Littéraires : "Literary criticism" (René Wellek, Yale), "Literature" (Robert Escarpit, Bordeaux), Mannerism (A. M. Boase, Glasgow), "Style" (R. A. Sayce, Oxford), "Baroque" (Jean Rousset, Genève), "Picaresque" (Claudio Guillén, Princeton), "Influence, fortune" (A. Balakian, New York), "Allegory, symbol" (H. M. Block, Wisconsin), "Satire" (R. C. Elliot, Ohio), etc. (Actes / Proceedings, ‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962).
On that occasion, the AILC appointed a Conseil scientifique de terminologie littéraire. This original DITL committee was comprised of some of the best-known literature scholars of the time from Europe, the USA and Japan, as its letterhead still reminds us. The secretariat was entrusted to J. C. Brandt Corstius assisted by the future president of the AILC Douwe Fokkema of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Different countries were particularly active at some time in the course of the years, especially Japan at the beginning, which explains why a good proportion of Japanese terms were included in the priority list of notions to be considered. From the onset, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, thanks to another future president of the AILC György Vajda, contributed proposals to the project of a global literary terminology including the criticism carried in languages of «lesser extension» such as, of course, Hungarian.
In the meantime, considerable work had been accomplished in France on literary terminology, and discussions about an international dictionary had been carried in 1957 within the Société Française de Littérature Comparée under the impulsion of Henri Roddier, of the University of Lyon, later in Paris. The Centre de Sociologie des Faits Littéraires founded in 1959 at the University of Bordeaux by Robert Escarpit (who already had conducted a seminar on critical notions as early as 1951) undertook extensive research on literary terminology; in 1961 Robert Escarpit and Nicole Robine published the results of an "Enquête préliminaire sur le vocabulaire de la critique littéraire" in the Revue de Littérature Comparée (35e année, nE1, pp. 91-101. It is probably the first publication leading to the Dictionnaire International des Termes Littéraires).
Robert Escarpit submitted a comprehensive Report on the International Dictionary of Literary Terms (reprinted, Limoges: Vita Nova, 1988) to the AILC congress in Fribourg in 1964.This foundational document set three main objectives to the project: first to identify the literary terms commonly used by scholars in different countries (the data are collected into a lexicographical base constituting the thesaurus of criticism), then to provide practical definitions which could serve as references in international communication (this is done in the «semantical study» section of the articles), finally to clarify obscure or semantically complex literary terms by comparing the positions of various national traditions, theoretical schools, critical approaches (that is the function of the «commentary» section of the articles entrusted to specialists by the committee). Fifty years later, the resulting document partly published on the Internet (www.ditl.info) is not just another passive reference tool for specialists of comparative literature, it is also a product of long term world wide cooperation. It requires active participation of its users. Its epistemè, the configuration of axioms that determines its practice with the fore- and backgrounding of particular aspects at one time, is that of the scholarly community at large. Its progress over the years parallels the evolution of literary theory and history.
Research on the lexicon of criticism was continued throughout the years in Bordeaux according to the guidelines set up in Fribourg by Alain and Francisca Boisson linked to the French CNRS. Alain Boisson regularly reported the progress of the DITL to the Bureau meetings of the AILC. When the director of the DITL Robert Escarpit was about to retire, it was up to the Société Française de Littérature Générale et Comparée (SFLGC) to make arrangements for the materials on international literary terminology gathered in Bordeaux. A commission for the DITL convened in 1984 by Jean Bessière, another future president of the AILC, then vice-president for research of the SFLGC, proposed that a federation of French research centers in comparative literature cooperate to manage the materials accumulated and to coordinate the French contributions to the project. The new consortium inherited the files of the research unit of the CNRS directed by Henri Béhar and Danielle Bonnaud-Lamotte Lexicologie et terminologie littéraires contemporaines. Finally, in 1988, the materials and the secretariat of the international committee were transferred to the Université de Limoges. The consortium was recognized by the French Ministry of research as the inter-university «Pluriformation» programme «Theory and Terminology of literature» and «Sciences of the text and IT». It re-organized the Observatory of literary terminology, reactivated linguistic committees in various countries, and launched several sub-projects; one of them in 2005 is Psychê taking advantage of the materials gathered in the DITL base to produce an applied lexicon of terms at the intersection of literature, psychoanalysis and psychiatry (Éric Charles is reporting on its advancement to the 2005 AILC colloquium in Venice).
When the Limoges Observatory assumed the responsibility of the DITL, the entire project was reexamined and updated in successive conferences on literary terminology. Priority was given to the computerization of the lexicographical surveys and the publication of the dictionary. Previous work had been carried on hand-sorted cardboard files apart from a few rudimentary punch cards left by Danielle Bonnaud-Lamotte. Publication of the DITL by fascicles was suspended to produce an evolutionary electronic text. Public access on the Internet to a good part of the DITL became a reality as soon as 1994. Discussion lists were created to facilitate communication between the contributors scattered all over the world. Reading committees were constituted to evaluate the materials submitted to the DITL. By 2000, a new site at a new address (www.ditl.info) was created for the DITL by Joseph Fahey. At the end of 2005, it averages per day about 4000 visitors consulting about three articles each.
The first discussions centered on what a term, a literary term is. An international literary term is a word, or a phrase, having a specific meaning inside a science, an art, a discipline, a domain (literary criticism and theory, history of literature, connected areas of the humanities dealing with the establishment and the interpretation of texts, discourse analysis, cultural studies, etc. in the case of the DITL) as practiced in circumstances, or contexts gathering specialists from different national, linguistic, cultural and philosophical backgrounds.
The founding report by Robert Escarpit in Fribourg stipulates that the objectives of the interlinguistic surveys are to identify, clarify and describe the various acceptations of the terms actually used in international criticism in order to produce a reference document common to literary scholars all over the world, the DITL. Having delimited a field of practice (the discourse on literature produced in an international context), the terminographer registers vocables in the international corpus of critical texts, sorts the meanings out, correlates them to nomenclatures, select the headings under which the literary notions can be grouped for study, establish equivalents in different languages and traditions, etc.
The diversity of origin of the users of the metalanguage of literature and the subjective nature of the criticism lead the DITL to be more descriptive than normative. In artificially constructed thesauri and nomenclatures, especially in exact sciences, a term has only one meaning in relation to other strictly defined monosemic terms. To define a term is to set a norm. On the contrary, the vocabulary of criticism includes many words which can have different technical acceptations, which actually are metaphors, which sometimes belong both to the metalanguage of literature and to ordinary speech . The usages of various schools and critical traditions often contradict, diverge. Then the only scientific approach to literary terminography is descriptive.
One originality of the DITL compared to the various dictionaries of literary terms is that it reflects the actual terminological usage in international criticism. Instead of being drafted a priori by a theoricist or by editors agreeing on a number of entries, it results empirically from the observation of practices based on lexicographical surveys. Its objective is certainly not to impose a general theory of literature as a norm of reference; if it points out contradictions and happens a posteriori to make recommendations for clarification or even standardization of established terminologies, it can only be to avoid the confusions and the misunderstandings between the critical schools of different countries that led to the project.
The terminological watch kept by the Observatory records not only vocables as they appear in actual practice, but also their unstable acceptations whether scientific or vernacular. The task of the team is to identify those words and expressions which have a technical meaning in the description and interpretation of literature, thus acquiring the status of terms. But a hapax, no matter how technical it may be, does not make a term. A vocable cannot be entered into the DITL thesaurus before it is attested in several international contexts, and unless it correlates with other words with a status of terms. In the DITL procedure, this necessitates that a vocable should be entered in the lexicographical base with its technical context so that its technical status and its relations with already recognized terms be established. Families of terms forming distinctive nomenclatures may then emerge from the correlation of terms. Eventually it is a whole system which is consituted by the interplay of terms between one another and between nomenclatures. In literature and cultural studies where the matter is subjective and the perspective depends on particular world visions, this system cannot be a set, coherent one as exact sciences may construct, but an evolutionary, polyphonic, self-deconstructing layout of notions.
Terms recorded in the thesaurus must be «lemmatized» to constitute entries into the dictionary , that is to say that they integrate a conventional title, just as in a language dictionary such forms as went, gone, goes are lemmatized under the heading go. It is the responsibility of the Observatory to relate the vocables collected in the various «inventory languages» and to associate them into single lemmata. The lexicographical watch scan documents in a variety of language in which a significant literary criticism activity can be recorded: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Persian (Farsi), Korean, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish and Viêtmamese, and in three classical languages: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Nomenclatures of terms in these languages are provided by a number of DITL linguistic committees working in different countries and by the listings obtained from the lexicographical enquiries.
A connection is made first between the two «working languages» of the DITL, English and French. For instance the English slippage is paired with the French glissement, and the two are associated into a single lemma according to the format [FRANCAIS / English] : GLISSEMENT / Slippage. Vocables in other languages are then distributed with their context among the already recognized lemmata. Equivalents between these terms allow the interrogation of the base from any of the languages.
Once principles were laid out and surveys made to record the terminological practices in all their diversity, a strategy of presentation had to be defined in order to produce a useful work of reference. Pragmaticism again remained the governing rule. Literary terms and notions were lemmatized under the heading deemed the most convenient to international scholars. Under Robert Escarpit's direction, the founding fathers intended to boil the thesaurus down to five hundred words or so deemed to represent the basic vocabulary of literary criticism. But new theories have exploded the lexicon of criticism in the 1960's onwards. There was a need in 1989 when the Observatory was transferred to Limoges to record the many terms coined by structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, feminism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, postmodernism at large. Those terms with their emergent as well as canonical acceptations are now admitted in the thesaurus. The new DITL maintains the general format of the original printed edition, adding cross-references and nomenclatures to the constitution of the articles. The innovation is extensive lemmatization. The thesaurus admits as many terms as the lexicographical survey did identify with some substantial difference from neighboring notions.
The DITL thus mirrors the evolution of literary science. More than a simple reference document, it becomes a dynamic research tool by and for the international scholar.