Interdisciplinary Conference
« Mauvais
genre » : l’énergie noire du système littéraire
‘Bad Kind’: The Dark Energy of the
Literary System
Amiens (France),
Logis du Roy, 15-17 March 2018
Organisation
The Centre
d’Études et de Recherches sur les Contacts Littéraires et Linguistiques (CERCLL,
EA 4283), Université de Picardie Jules Verne.
Coordinators: Kevin Perromat (Assoc. Pr. Latin
American Literature)
Georges
Bê Duc (Assoc. Pr. Modern Chinese Literature)
Bad literature is damned to oblivion. Focused mostly
on valuable texts, our academic knowledge of the literary world is restricted
to an extremely exclusive selection among its potential objects of research. Invariably,
good taste filters literary materials in spite of its proven versatility in the
course of history, and in spite of the instability not only of the canon of
‘great texts’, but also of the institutions in charge of its transmission. Consequently,
texts of different sorts are discarded into darkness: failed and amateur works,
venal writing, as well as literary forgeries and transgressions such as plagiarism.
Bad literature includes most often pulp and popular literature (paraliterature) as well. Nevertheless,
what if the rejected ‘bad taste’ was in fact similar to dark energy, which is
invisible but probably predominant in the Universe?
The literary space allows a plurality of possibilities
of existence, circulation and creation of value which are fundamental to the
aims and scope of this conference. In sharp contrast to the well-established
monumental landmarks of the High Literature, amorphous masses of neglected,
despised or forgotten texts fall into darkness. However, ‘good’ literature
seems to depend on the ‘bad kind’, at least as the necessary background –a dark,
anonymous and heteroclite one– to exist and be valued. Besides this obvious role
in the creation of value, what are the functions of bad literature in the whole
economy of the literary system? Concerning our aesthetic criteria, which rely
chiefly upon the available literary tradition, to what extent they are not the
result of our predecessors’ judgements?
Suggested Topics
Bad literature
-
‘Bad
genres’: pornography, pulp, teenager literature, best-sellers, chick lit, etc.
-
Historical evolution of offenses and literary
transgressions:
plagiarism, forgeries, ghost-writers,
testament betrayals, etc.
-
Individual case studies: rejected manuscripts, auteurs maudits, epigones, literary folly (fous littéraires), failed texts, minor
works...
Bad literature uses
-
Bad
literature uses within the strategies developed in the literary field: polemical,
critical, rhetorical, ideological, etc.
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Bad
literature uses in literary taste formation and writing learning.
-
Bad
literature as caution and boundary of literary norms and standards.
Bad literature values
-
Historiographical
gaps and forgotten territories: discourses/ literatures/ authors/ periods vanished,
banned, ignored by literary history.
-
(Re)valorisation
of bad literature: revision of literary values, (re)discovery and
(re)valorisation of ‘literary detritus’, procedures of recovery in literary
historiography.
-
Relationships
between bad literature, the Canon and the literary institutions.
