Montreal ideal for literary research
On the initiative of Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science, 26 professors from three Montreal universities held a bilingual study day April 20 in the Hall Building.
After some words of welcome from Dean David Graham, the participants broke up into three workshops, where discussion was lively. Researchers who shared the subjects of their projects were obviously gratified at how well they were received, and intrigued to hear about the projects of others.
One workshop was devoted to the question of a national literary history, one to cross-cultural analysis of the literary traditions written in English and French, and one was on Montreal as a site for literary exchange.
Ollivier Dyens, chair of Études françaises, was a co-organizer with Marcie Frank, of the English Department. He said the whole day was marked by a remarkable spirit of openness.
“Everyone agreed on the need for full-scale academic partnership,” he said later. “We have not only to rethink categories, but reformulate the very idea of categories."
A lot of the terms his colleagues commonly use are up for discussion in the light of this kind of discussion, such as traversée, intersection, multilinguisme, textes polyglottes, citoyenneté littéraire and contamination.
In fact, the study day seemed to prove these scholars had more in common than they thought.
Participants agreed that Montreal is an ideal research laboratory, and before the day wound up, they had some recommendations.
They would like to see an inter-university cluster of undergraduate courses on the topic of Montreal. It would be drawn from various disciplines, including literary studies in English and French, but also possibly urban studies, art history and film.
They also foresee inter-university graduate seminars to exploit the intersections of language and culture in Montreal.
“There was a strong interest in having a colloquium or conference,” Frank reported. This could be on literary history before and after “the nation,” or it could be a dialogue between the universalism of la litérature mondiale and the minoritism of postcolonialism.
Participants were enthusiastic about holding another such study day, and it’s likely that a website will be developed as a virtual meeting-place for colleagues in the various literature departments in town.