Keynote Speakers

Sylvie Servoise

Le Mans Université

Sylvie Servoise is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Le Mans-Université and Director of the 3L. AM laboratory (Languages, Literatures, Linguistics at the Universities of Angers and Le Mans). Her research focuses on the notion of literary engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the relationship between literature and politics, writing history, memory and fiction in French, Italian and American literature. Her most recent works on these themes are Le Roman face à l’histoire. La Littérature engagée en France et en Italie dans la seconde moitié du XXe siècle (PUR, 2011); Politiques du temps : Le Guépard de Lampedusa dans l’histoire (PUR, 2018); Démocratie et roman. Explorations littéraires de la crise de la représentation au XXIe siècle (Hermann, 2022); La Littérature engagée (Que Sais-je?, 2023).

Lecture

Old and New Regimes of Literary Engagement

Contrary to a reductive conception of literary commitment—often associated, particularly in the French context, with the Sartrian model—this lecture will propose to define engaged literature as a historically situated form-meaning. Rather than a fixed category, literary engagement will be approached as a dynamic configuration that evolves in response to the literary and intellectual fields, as well as to the political, cultural, and social contexts in which it is embedded. Engaged literature mobilises a particular vision of the role of literature in society, drawing upon both the concrete and symbolic conditions that legitimise the writer’s voice. It participates in a broader history—one that encompasses not only literary forms but also reading practices. Situated at the intersection of multiple forces, literary engagement cannot be dissociated from the evolving relationship between literature and its publics. Attending to the historicity of the notion, to the tensions it harbours, and to the plurality of forms it may assume, offers the most productive way of understanding what characterises literary engagement in the early twenty-first century.