What do we mean by “literature”? What are the hermeneutic, epistemological, methodological and pedagogical consequences of unbinding literature from its disciplinary confines? The research conducted within FLT, which covers the whole of the English-speaking area from the early modern to the ultra-contemporary, takes literature as an object of inquiry, not as a given.
Because it acknowledges that the literary only partially overlaps with the historically constructed label of “literature,” our research favors transversality and intermediality as well as other modes of what may be called “border thinking.”
To conceive of the literary as a frontier and to think on the border between literature and other modes of representation of, or knowledge about, the world (in particular those of the social sciences, or even of the hard sciences), to think of literature as always enmeshed in the world, is to turn our practice of literature (writing, reading, exegesis) into a locus of critique. As a team of specialists in anglophone literature in France, FLT intends to take advantage of its own border situation to contribute to the ongoing reflection in both the United States and Great Britain on new approaches to anglophone literature, and, more broadly, to the current debate around the practice and theory of literature.
Director:
For more on the group’s activities and project, see:
Related axis :
Related seminars:
- A19 Seminar
- Odela – Observatoire de la littérature américaine
- Victorian Persistence