Actualités

Colloque international - Community in the English-Speaking World - 26-27 September 2019

community progCommunity in the English-Speaking World

The concept and its uses in social and political discourses

International conference, organised by Mathilde Bertrand, Trevor Harris and Sophie Koppe

26-27 September 2019

MSHA, Salle Jean Borde [Getting there]

 

The term “community” is widely used in the English language, in everyday conversation, in the vocabulary of social workers and political leaders, in the analyses of social scientists. The term is encountered in many different fields of research, though one is right to wonder if it refers to the same object. “Community” is often used and invoked to the point of being naturalized as unquestioned common sense, and its usage and implications are seldom consciously examined or interrogated. It elicits positive, reassuring associations with what is familiar, close, recognizable. “Community”, as Raymond Williams underlines, is both "the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of 
relationships; or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships” (“Community”, Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1983, p.75.) Community is used by scholars, as a conceptual tool defining a social group interacting on the basis of shared interests, values, representations, language, cultural practices, with or without being bound to a specific geographic space; it is also used in an empirical manner as a descriptive tool which seems to conjure up an ideal level of social organisation characterized by closeness. It seems to articulate the levels of local and global, especially with the rise of the internet which has strengthened the possibility for new “imagined communities” to flourish, beyond the national community whose symbolic representations were examined by Benedict Anderson.
What makes “community” such a successful and enduring concept? Is it always satisfactory and pertinent, or can it be an easy and fashionable word which may be reductive, generalizing, and even manipulative? The conference seeks precisely to interrogate the uses made of the term in political discourse, in the social sciences, in the terminology of organisations. The conference will explore the historical and contemporary uses of the term, from the utopian socialist communities imagined by Owen to uses of the term today, in relation with minorities or with online social networks. It aims at charting the course of a concept which seems to be equally present both in progressive and conservative political discourses.

Download the programme as a PDF

Les traducteurs de bande dessinée - Véronique Béghain et Isabelle Licari-Guillaume

traducteurs bd 1

Les traducteurs de bande dessinée, sous la direction de Véronique Béghain et d'Isabelle Licari-Guillaume, PUB.

Au milieu des années 2000, la consolidation des études sur la bande dessinée au sein de l’université coïncide avec un intérêt nouveau pour les questions de traduction. L’étude de la bande dessinée est en effet à cette époque-là devenue, non sans difficulté, une discipline disposant d’un langage partagé et d’un corpus de textes centraux, ce qui lui permet d’aborder des questions jusqu’alors inexplorées, telles la narratologie, l’adaptation et, bien sûr, la traduction. En d’autres termes, la recherche cesse de considérer la bande dessinée sous le seul angle formel et historique, pour au contraire interroger sa dimension sociale, en tant qu’objet dont l’usage et la définition sont construits par celles et ceux qui la lisent, en parlent ou la traduisent.
À travers sept contributions portant sur différentes aires linguistiques, ce volume vise à souligner la diversité des rôles endossés par celles et ceux qui traduisent, adaptent et transmettent la bande dessinée, dans des contextes marqués par de multiples contraintes techniques, économiques et culturelles. Amateurs ou professionnels, auteurs, artisans, créateurs, ces traducteurs et traductrices agissent comme les relais d’une norme collective, à l’échelle nationale ou à celle, plus réduite, d’un éditeur ou d’une communauté de fans. L’ambition de cet ouvrage est donc de poser les jalons d’une approche sociale et pragmatique de la traduction de bande dessinée, par une attention soutenue à ses enjeux, mais aussi à ses acteurs.

  • ISBN : 979-10-300-0438-0
  • Nombre de pages : 154
  • Format : 13,5 x 19

Collective Participation and Audience Engagement in Rap Music - David Diallo

Diallo MacMillanDavid Diallo, Collective Participation and Audience Engagement in Rap Music, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

La table des matières est accessible en ligne : https://www.palgrave.com/fr/book/9783030253769

 

"Why do rap MCs present their studio recorded lyrics as “live and direct”? Why do they so insistently define abilities or actions, theirs or someone else’s, against a pre-existing signifier? This book examines the compositional practice of rap lyricists and offers compelling answers to these questions. Through a 40 year-span analysis of the music, it argues that whether through the privileging of chanted call-and-response phrases or through rhetorical strategies meant to assist in getting one’s listening audience open, the focus of the first rap MCs on community building and successful performer-audience cooperation has remained prevalent on rap records with lyrics and production techniques encouraging the listener to become physically and emotionally involved in recorded performances. Relating rap’s rhetorical strategy of posing inferences through intertextuality to early call-and-response routines and crowd-controlling techniques, this study emphasizes how the dynamic and collective elements from the stage performances and battles of the formative years of rap have remained relevant in the creative process behind this music. It contends that the customary use of identifiable references and similes by rap lyricists works as a fluid interchange designed to keep the listener involved in the performance. Like call-and-response in live performances, it involves a dynamic form of communication and places MCs in a position where they activate the shared knowledge of their audience, making sure that they “know what they mean,” thus transforming their mediated lyrics into a collective and engaging performance."

CFP - Suspicion - 9-10 April 2020 & 8-9 April 2021

cfp suspicion loose lipsProposals are sought for papers to be given at an international conference on Suspicion. The first part of the conference will take place on 9-10 April 2020 at Bordeaux Montaigne University (France), and the second part on 8-9 April 2021 at the University of Verona (Italy).

 

The first part of the conference, in Bordeaux, will focus on suspicion in politics, cultural studies, and linguistics; the second part, in Verona, will be concerned with suspicion in literature, film, and visual studies in general.

The conference seeks to explore the ways in which Anglo-American cultural practices and Anglo-American literature define, re-define, and question the notion of suspicion.

Etymologically suspicion—from the Latin sub-specere, to look up at, to regard with awe, to suspect—refers to the way someone or something is looked at. But suspicion has become a synonym for mistrust—whether or not there is proof of wrongdoing. Hence the recurrence of the word in the titles of works belonging to the genres of crime fiction and cinema: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 movie, Suspicion, starring Gary Grant and Joan Fontaine, is one example. In 2015, two books bearing the same title were published in the United States: Suspicion by Alexandra Monir and Suspicion by Joseph Finder. While Finder is considered a “master of the modern thriller” (Boston Globe), Monir, a young Iranian-American writer, specializes in science fiction and thrillers for young adults. Since popular culture often feeds on suspense, the result of mystery (or merely uncertainty), suspicion reigns supreme in popular culture—in novels, comics, and movies.

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