The Body in Asian Literatures in the 20th et 21st Centuries :
Discourses, Representations, Intermediality
The thematic area of the body has occupied a central and significant place in East Asia’s literatures since the end of the 19th century. The body’s various images and representations indeed delineate the literary experience of the so-called modernity, when East Asia's respective traditions encounter with the Western Other.
At a global and local level, such representations and uses of the body in East Asian literature redefine cultural, gendered, individual and collective identities. They can be read as clues for these identity negotiations, but also refer to the rise of new aesthetic systems of the body, as well as of creative experiments on writing and language.
This literature of East Asia will be mainly approached from a multi-focal perspective, with the following questions as a start: which body do Asia’s modern literatures attempt at saying, and how? What for do such literary bodies serve as images and signs? What distinguishes the body’s literary discourses from the Western paradigms they simultaneously helped to import and translate? Other approaches may question the literary efficacy and "literary function" of this writing of the body, and hereby address the body in other forms of expression possibly interacting with literature. Last but not least, the hypothesis of specific regimes of literary representation will be explored, inasmuch as they are not only linked with East Asia’s cultures, and concerned in particular with the indifferentiation of the object and the subject in the body’s relationship to nature, but also provide us with a test for modernity, intermediality, and cross-cultural encounter.
Venue : Université Paris Diderot — Paris 7,
Halle aux farines, 10 rue Françoise Dolto, 75013 Paris,
Salle / Room 580F (« Salle des thèses ») 5e étage / 5th Floor.
L'accès se fait par l'ascenseur F / You must take the Lift F to access the room.
A PDF version of the program can be downloaded from this page.
