Writing, taking action, resisting: reconfigurations of literary engagement

6th and 7th November 2025

The inquiry into the role of the writer in the polis, which reached a turning point with the Romantic paradigm of the visionary poet and the writer in exile, has recently taken on a new and heightened sense of urgency. A genealogy of literary engagement over time can be mapped out and further re-examined. From Victor Hugo’s Les Châtiments (1853), a complex articulation between political combat and poetic imperative written during his exile in Jersey, to Sartre’s radical proposition, almost a century later, that «L’écrivain est en situation dans son époque: chaque parole a des retentissements. Chaque silence aussi. Je tiens Flaubert et Goncourt pour responsables de la répression qui suivit la Commune» (Situations II, 1948), this lineage deserves to be critically re-assessed.

Jean-Marie Le Clézio’s insightful diagnosis in his Nobel speech – ‘Alors, pourquoi écrire ? L’écrivain, depuis quelque temps déjà, n’a plus l’outrecuidance de croire qu’il va changer le monde […] Plus simplement, il se veut témoin’ (Le Clézio, 2008) marks a significant shift in the very perception of the writer’s social and political role.

This shift in perspective from the militant writer to the witness writer does not, however, equate with withdrawal from committed writing. In fact, expressions of literary engagement have been multiplying, with Annie Ernaux’s questioning of social structures through militant auto-socio-biographies, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (Nigeria/USA) reinvention of transnational feminism, and Paul B. Preciado’s (Spain) problematisation of contemporary identity politics. In the digital space, Teju Cole (USA/Nigeria) and Rupi Kaur (Canada) have been turning social media platforms into laboratories for militant writing, thus significantly expanding the reach of engagement. In contemporary French poetry, Michel Deguy, Marielle Macé and Jean-Christophe Pinson question the writer’s ecological responsibility. In German-language literature, Elfriede Jelinek, Juli Zeh and Eva Menasse, as well as the authors of the so-called 1968 generation, such as Peter Schneider and Uwe Timm, are often associated with an “engagierte Literatur”, bringing the author’s social responsibility to the fore. In Portugal, Lídia Jorge and Valter Hugo Mãe have combined historical memory and present moment intervention in an innovate way, thus opening new paths to literary engagement. At the same time, Roberto Saviano (Italy) and Édouard Louis (France) embody a new generation of public intellectuals who, through various media, combine literary creation and political protest, lending a voice to the margins of society. No less important is the work of Dmytro Pavlytchko (1929-2023) in Ukraine, exemplifying a poetry of resistance, deploying language as a cry against violence and oppression, while championing the preservation of cultural identity and freedom in times of war.

This conference takes a comparative and transnational approach to examining the evolution of literary engagement in response to the challenges of the 21st century. It asks in particular: what reconfigurations does engagement undergo today in a context of far-reaching societal changes? How do national and linguistic contexts intersect with global challenges? Which new poetics of resistance are emerging in this scenario of transformed literary practices?

We invite proposals that address the following issues:

• Trajectories of literary engagement, from Romanticism to contemporaneity: displacements and transformations
• Poetics of resistance: violence, trauma and denunciation
• Literature in politics, politics in literature
• (Inter)Discourses and (re)configurations of engagement in literary writing
• Ethics and/in writing: responsibility and testimony
• Post-colonialism, resistance and the reconfiguration of memory
• Literature and ecocriticism: challenges of environmental justice
• Gender (in)equality: writing, representation and intervention
• Literature between the arts: modes of engagement in literary writing
• Literary translation and activism
• Literature, resistance and intervention in a digital context