DE L’HISTOIRE LITTÉRAIRE (CONTEMPORAINE) EN RÉGIME INTERMÉDIAL
ON THE MODE OF INTERMEDIALITY IN (CONTEMPORARY) LITERARY HISTORY

INTERNAL PERSPECTIVE AND AN ATTEMPT TO REACH THE VISUAL BEYOND OF LITERATURE (20TH – 21ST CENTURIES)

Summary/Abstract: If “Literature” has lost its essentializing capital by joining the nexus of social and cultural phenomena which cross it and from which it emerges, and if the idea of nation and national identity is attenuated, debated, even condemned, in a world of globalized exchange and communication, what kind of literary history could still be written in the context of an essentially visual culture (cinema, graphic arts, digital media ecology)? This paper aims at emphasizing the difficulty of establishing national literary histories limited to a simple idea of exchange, mediation or translation in a space that has become intermedial and where cultural phenomena determine one another. Are we in the position to consider that the idea of a history of literature(s) became untenable? This question is relevant especially if we approach literature from either an internal perspective (taking into account its “autocentrism”), or from a national point of view (which focuses on a conservative and totalizing type of identitarian narration). The same question stands for the perspectives that underline the processes of fragmentarity and recomposition (according to the metaphors of the kaleidoscope or of the rhizome), since what is called, in contemporary culture, “Literature” has as a visual exterior the “video sphere” (Virillio) or the culture of the media “flow” (Bauman, Sadin). Consequently, this research is based mainly on LʼHistoire des poétiques, developed by J. Bessière and Ellen Kushner (1998), Franco Morettiʼs Graphs, Maps, Trees: The Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005), respectively Patrick Boucheronʼs new historiographic approach from The World History of France (2017).

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