Les premières rencontres Alain Viala, sur le thème “Que fait la littérature ?”, se sont tenues à Oxford en septembre 2022. On peut en trouver le programme complet ici.

En voici un bref compte-rendu rédigé par Gemma Tidman au nom des organisateurs (Jessica Goodman, Oxford; Simon Park, Oxford; Marine Roussillon, Artois; Gemma Tidman, Queen Mary London).

What does literature do? Rencontres autour d’Alain Viala.

On 22 and 23 September, the Maison française d’Oxford hosted two days of ‘Rencontres’ between an international group of researchers who have engaged with the work of Alain Viala, who passed away in July 2021. Participants came from France, Switzerland, the USA and the UK, and from the disciplines of cultural history, literature, sociology, theatre studies, and history of education.

The first day saw the launch of Viala’s posthumous publication, L’Adhésion littéraire (Paris: Le Temps des cerises, 2022). A roundtable offered four fascinating perspectives on the book. Speakers discussed Viala’s unique lexical choices, his selection of case studies, and the book’s appeal to multiple publics: from teachers concerned about crises in education, to readers wondering about the ‘point’ of literary study, to academics pondering the recent affective turn in criticism.

The second day took the form of a colloquium, in which speakers presented papers on the ways in which their research has drawn upon Viala’s work, focusing on a particular publication of his. Four panels grouped the papers into broad themes: ‘Literature and Politics’, ‘Acts of Authorship’, ‘Literature in Society’, and ‘Acts of Readership’. Speakers often engaged with Viala’s pioneering socio-literary studies of writers, readers, and cultural institutions in early modern France; with his work on galanterie; with his oversight of major reforms to literature teaching in French lycées, in the early 2000s; and with his innovative contributions to the methodology of doing literary history. There was also much interest in Viala’s archive (left to his former Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall), which promises to be a rich source for scholars studying the modern history of literary teaching reform in France, or the politics and polemics of writing French literary history.

Throughout the two days, discussion was lively and incisive, curious and kind: Alain’s influence was everywhere to be seen. Plans are underway for a volume of translations of some of his many publications, largely unavailable in English, to allow Anglophone readers to discover one of the most influential voices of his generation in French Studies. We hope this ‘Rencontre’ will be the first of many.

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