25th-26th April 2019
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Prof. Achille Mbembe, Dr Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Dr Claire White.
PRÉSENTATION
The ‘temporal turn’ of the last decade has witnessed the return of the concept of delay at the centre of literary and artistic production. These often focus on the deployment of time in works, for instance, the dyschronia of the contemporary (Agamben 2008). The disjuncture between lived and perceived time is echoed by the hermeneutics of ancient texts and contemporary literary theory. The propensity for anachronic readings (Bayard) in the 2000s, or studies of ‘queer temporalities’ (Allen, Time and Literature¸2018), make a compelling case for a re-reading of canonical texts and literary re-interpretations through ‘timely’ studies.
Whether by the use of hyperbaton, which dislocates the sentence and produces a delayed effect through the deferred appearance of a word, or by the deceleration of rhythms (through pauses in the narration or the aesthetics of slowness, such as the dyssynchronization between sound and image exhibited in Godard’s films or “slow cinema”), writers and filmmakers experiment with the rhythms of time. Sixteenth-century authors dwell on their perennial linguistic delay in relation to the ideal of Antiquity, which they are emulating, and the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” in the seventeenth-century solidifies two centuries of literary debates on the legitimacy of the present.
Time lag can become the marker of civilisations deemed inferior, of people and modes of living which elude heteronormative or so-called ‘normal’ rules as defined by dominant cultures. To be ‘passé’, ‘retarded’, ‘underdeveloped’, are amongst the many expressions which reduce alterity to an inferiority gestured to through temporality. Within this context, the use of the notion of delay to think of spatial differences is interrogated: one need only evoke the ‘backwardness’ of former French colonies in relation to France, or the gap between Anglo-American literary theoretical developments and French schools of thought.
We would warmly welcome presentations from doctoral students working on a range of periods in the French and Francophone world: from the Middle Ages to the Ultra-contemporary. The following is a non-exhaustive list of potential topics of interest:
- Delays in press and publications. Materiality of works and its delays
- Philosophical notions of dyschronia, anachronia, parachronia, the future of the past, and the impossibility of simultaneity
- Spatial and temporal disjuncture
- Spatial and temporal displacement, migrations
- Cinematic delays
- Queer temporalities
- Representations in time and the deconstruction of liminal/marginal characters and spaces
- Poetic delays (microsctructural and macrostructural)
- Dislocating stylistic figures
- Anachronic readings
- Aesthetics of delays/ tragedy
- Progress/’backwardness’
- Perceptions of historical time
- Causes and effects of delays
COMMUNICATIONS
The conference will take place at the University of Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) on 25th and 26th of April 2019. We invite proposals (250 words max) to be sent by 30th January 2019 to the following address : delaysretards2019@gmail.com. It is envisaged that a selection of the papers presented will be subsequently published.