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Homo Mimeticus 2.0 in Art, Philosophy and Technics
Volume Editor:
It is tempting to affirm that on and about November 2022 (post)human character changed. The revolution in A.I. simulations certainly calls for an update of the ancient realization that humans are imitative animals, or homo mimeticus. But the mimetic turn in posthuman studies is not limited to A.I.: from simulation to identification, affective contagion to viral mimesis, robotics to hypermimesis, the essays collected in this volume articulate the multiple facets of homo mimeticus 2.0. Challenging rationalist accounts of autonomous originality internal to the history of Homo sapiens, this volume argues from different—artistic, philosophical, technological—perspectives that the all too human tendency to imitate is, paradoxically, central to our ongoing process of becoming posthuman.
Volume Editor:
Depuis le romantisme, la littérature a annexé les innombrables formes d’impuissance inhérentes à la complexité du monde moderne. Le présent ouvrage réfléchit sur les raisons et les modalités qui ont transformé la déclinaison de l’impuissance en objet littéraire, de Balzac à Huysmans, de Proust à Queneau, de Malraux à Michaux, en passant par Tinan, Amiel, Beckett pour arriver à Chaillou, Senges, aux écrivains de la postmémoire et de l’extrême contemporain. Il montre notamment comment la littérature française du XIXe au XXIe siècle s’est construite à partir de l’énonciation de ses limites et de celles de l’homme face à la réalité et à l’histoire. Une incitation à reconsidérer les discours contemporains sur le déclin du littéraire et à repenser la fictionnalisation de l’impuissance en termes de relance.

Since Romanticism, literature has embraced the myriad forms of powerlessness inherent in the complexity of the modern world. This book examines the reasons and methods that have transformed powerlessness into a literary object, from Balzac to Huysmans, from Proust to Queneau, from Malraux to Michaux, via Tinan, Amiel and Beckett to Chaillou, Senges, and the writers of post-mémoire and extrême contemporain. In particular, it shows how French literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has been built on the enunciation of its own limits and those of man in the face of reality and history. It constitutes an invitation to reconsider contemporary discourses on the decline of the literary and to rethink the fictionalisation of powerlessness in terms of revival.
Volume Editor:
Ce volume interroge les conditions de l’interprétation des textes littéraires, à la lumière des propositions de Stanley Fish sur L’autorité des communautés interprétatives (1980): leurs présupposés, leurs compétences et croyances, conditionnent l’activité herméneutique, interrogée ici par des spécialistes de littérature française, espagnole ou comparée. Réfléchir au fonctionnement concret de telles communautés – création, renouvellement, adhésion, dissidence, relation concurrentielle entre communautés, volonté d’imposer une interprétation… –, amène à envisager des implications en termes de libre arbitre et d’individualité essentielles pour nos disciplines, et à repenser les relations entre texte, auteur et lecteurs, parfois en opposant des objections nouvelles aux postulats de Fish, parfois en proposant des alternatives.
Essays on Bajazet and Mithridate
Volume Editors: and
In Bajazet and Mithridate Racine depicts the tragedies of characters who either wield tyrannic power or are subjected to tyranny. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts.

The contributors to this volume examine Racine’s stagecraft, his exploration of space, sound and silence, his language, and the psychology of those who exercise power or who attempt to maintain their freedom in the face of oppression. The reception and reworking of his plays by contemporaries and subsequent generations round off this wide-ranging study.
The bestselling, contemporary Swiss author Christian Kracht is as widely celebrated as he is a source of controversy. This introduction to his work suggests locating his writings in discourses that range beyond the labels that have been traditionally assigned to them, namely “postmodernism,” camp,” and “Popliteratur.” Instead, this volume considers Kracht’s work through the lenses of “authorship,” “irony,” and “globalism.” This volume argues that there is no fixed or uniform author represented in Kracht’s corpus, explores the ironic strategies involved in Kracht’s various authorial representations, and engages the cultural exchange inherent in Kracht’s work.
Author:
Dreamwork for Dramatic Writing: Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen teaches you how to use your dreams, content, form, and structure, to write surprisingly unique new drama for film and stage. It is an exciting departure from traditional linear, dramatic technique, and addresses both playwriting and screenwriting, as the profession is increasingly populated by writers who work in both stage and screen. Developed through 25 years of teaching award-winning playwrights in the University of Missouri’s Writing for Performance Program, and based upon the phenomenological research of renowned performance theorist Bert O. States, this book offers a foundational, step-by-step organic guide to non-traditional, non-linear technique that will help writers beat clichéd, tired dramatic writing and provides stimulating new exercises to transform their work.
Capter la texture du monde : du geste esthétique au geste politique
Author:
« J’écris avec la géographie » explique Maylis de Kerangal, ou avec les géographies a-t-on envie d’ajouter, tant ses textes explorent les divers aspects de cette discipline en s’attachant aussi bien à la beauté des espaces qu’à la manière de les habiter. Cette première étude monographique consacrée à l’œuvre montre que les lieux construisent la narration, influencent l’écriture et permettent à l’esthétique et à l’éthique de se joindre en une « poéthique » qui exalte le monde et sublime les personnages dans des socio-épopées d’une grande puissance narrative. Sans être naïf, cet élan créateur est le fruit d’une réflexion politique proche du care et des nouvelles formes d’engagement littéraire par l’attention portée aux autres comme au respect des fondamentaux démocratiques.

“I write with geography” Maylis de Kerangal explains. With geographies would be more accurate as her texts encompass the different aspects of this discipline showing the beauty of spaces as well as the way they are inhabited. This first monographic study of the work demonstrates the way places build the narration, influence the writing and allows aesthetics and ethics to join into a “poethics” which glorifies the world and sublimates the characters in socio-epics with a great narrative power. Escaping a naive vision, this creative impulse was born out of a political reflection that is close to the care theories and the new forms of literary commitment, thanks to the attention it pays to others as well as the respect for democratic fundamentals.
Literary, Cultural and Political Essays, 2009–2021
Author:
Crisis and Criticism is a series of interventions from 2009 to 2021 engaging with the literary, cultural and political responses to the capitalist crisis of 2007–8. Challenging the tendency to treat crisis as natural and beyond human control, this book interrogates our cultural understanding of crisis and suggests the necessity of ruthless criticism of the existing world. While responses to crisis have retreated from the critical, choosing to inhabit apocalyptic fantasies instead, only a critical understanding of the causes of crisis within capitalism itself can promise their eventual overcoming.
Troisième homme de la négritude, Léon Damas s’alignait sur la Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay) et Richard Wright, sur des surréalistes comme Apollinaire et G. Luca pour transmettre son message d’urgence : ‘a ti pa’, la France opère sa mue décoloniale. Damas est « l’antillectuel transfuge » qui, traversant les Lignes de couleur, de classe, de genre, annonce la « Cité de demain » où les différences de tout genre sont tolérées et respectées.

Third man of négritude, Léon Damas aligned himself with the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay), and Richard Wright, as well as with the surrealists like Apollinaire and G. Luca to transmit his urgent message: “a ti pa”, France is little by little undergoing its decolonial transformation. Damas is the “antillectuel transfuge” who crosses boundaries of color, “race”, class and gender. Hereby he announces the “City of tomorrow” where differences of all kind are tolerated and respected.
Écologie du roman africain francophone
Cohabiter l’espace postcolonial s’interroge essentiellement sur les enjeux écologiques dans le roman africain en français. Cet ouvrage met en lumière les stratégies complexes et diverses par lesquelles les questions environnementales s’inscrivent dans la fiction. Recourant à l’écocritique, aux théories postcoloniales et posthumanistes pour analyser un corpus romanesque large et varié, il mène le lecteur, à travers la diversité des problématiques abordés, à la découverte des nuances contextuelles du rapport entre l’humain et le non-humain. De la précarité du monde rural à la survie en milieu urbain et autres écosystèmes hostiles, en passant par l’altérité animale, l’importance du végétal, le racisme environnemental et la justice environnementale, ce livre montre comment, à l’échelle de la localité, les questions écologiques se déclinent en réels défis socioculturels et politiques.

Cohabiter l’espace postcolonial focuses on the importance of ecological issues in African fiction. The book highlights the complex and diverse strategies deployed in French speaking Africa to incorporate environmental subjects in literary productions. Using ecocriticism, postcolonial and posthumanist theories to analyse a wide variety of novels, it brings to the fore, through the diversity of the issues it addresses, some contextual inflections of the relationship between the human and the non-human. From its discussion of animal otherness, cultural significance of plants, environmental racism, environmental justice, the fragility of the rural world and the survival in urban environments, the book demonstrates how ecological issues translate into socio-cultural and political challenges for local communities in Africa.