appel
29 mai-1 juin 2025
Prière de contacter les organisateurs:
Prof. Didier Coste didier.coste@gmail.com
Dr. Eli Park Sorensen eliparks@cuhk.edu.hk
Date limite de dépôt des propositions de communications sur le site du congrès 13 octobre 2024, mais il est vivement conseillé de ne pas attendre la dernière minute!
Une sélection d'articles développés à partir des communications pourra être publiée dans un ou plusieurs numéros de Migrating Minds Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism https://migratingminds.georgetown.edu/
Plusieurs membres de la SFLGC ont déjà publié ou vont publier prochainement dans le colume collectif Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism ainsi que dans la revue soutenue aussi par l'UR Plurielles (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) qui en prend le relais depuis l'automne 2023.
https://migratingminds.georgetown.edu/
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Realism, Globalization, and Cosmopolis
Organizer: Didier COSTE (Prof. Émérite U. Bordeaux Montaigne)
Co-Organizer: Eli Park SORENSEN (Associate Prof. Chinese U. of Hong Kong)
Contact the Seminar Organizers (didier.coste@gmail.com, eliparks@cuhk.edu.hk)
This seminar addresses questions about realism’s aesthetic and political implications from
a global perspective. The genre of the novel is said to have spread all over the world at the time
of the rise of realism or some years or generations later as a result of the second colonial wave
and the global expansion of the capitalist economy. However, this is certainly not true of all non-
Western cultures. On the other hand, modern realist aesthetics developed and theorized in the
West from the mid-18th to the early 20th century often informed other genres than the novel
(e,g. autobiography, travelogues, ethnography) in the “non-West.” Moreover, the compromise
formation of “magic realism” deviated markedly from both mainstream realism and fantasy,
while the historical novel and short story often played with myth (and still do).
Our first questions are:
What role does realism play in the age of globalization? Why does it persist, and why do
authors, readers, and scholars keep returning to this aesthetic mode?
Does globalization entail standardization or an increased diversity of mimetic modes?
Are these phenomena constitutive of a literary/aesthetic cosmopolis or an impediment to it?
A subsequent question must be raised: Is realist aesthetics apt to give an account of
globalization?
If it was primarily European in the 19th century, purporting to react to socio-political situations
linked to capitalist development, urbanization, and encounters with the “other,” capitalism,
megalopolises, and extreme class disparities now seem to reign unhindered all over the world.
Why is it that non-European cultures subjected to these imported changes often adopt other
modes such as magic realism, the picaresque, lyricism, the epic, or even dystopian, apocalyptic
projections? Compromise formations appear, and more ancient modes reappear in the non-West
or the Global South, not as transitory processes towards realism but towards new
representational modes that build on, expand, and deviate from mainstream realist aesthetics.
Does it mean that mainstream realism was never sufficiently critical in the first place? Or is the
resurgence and mixing of other modes an ill-placed, reactionary, anti-cosmopolitan
Occidentalism? Or yet, should literary aesthetics be thoroughly rethought in a globalized
world?
Selected papers given in this seminar can be expanded into full articles to be published in one or
more later issues of the Migrating Minds Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism
https://migratingminds.georgetown.edu/
