Literary studies’ contribution to existing scholarship on organised violence
Date : 10/04/2026Lieu : En distanciel
Webinaire “Representing violence: (meta)narratives – memories – commitments”
After a seven-week series of insightful talks and intense discussions involving researchers from a wide range of disciplines – law, psychology, international relations and political economy, media and communication science, sociology and social work, history, visual culture, mathematics and statistical analysis, political philosophy, linguistics, performing arts and, last but not the least, gender studies – is there anything more that literary studies can add to this collective reflexion on organised violence? Compared to a short-time focus of media and political discourse, can a long-time perspective literature embraces allow us to shed a light on the transgenerational transformations of the collective memory of extreme violence? Does a system of literary genres and leitmotivs offer a set of narrative patterns that influence any narrative account of collective violence? Could a fictional and often polyphonic – and thus non assertive and non dogmatic – character of literature allow to reduce the risk of instrumentalising representations of violence? Frequently acting as a counter-discourse, written from the point of view of the vanquished (oppressed, exploited, abused, defeated, colonised), does literature strive to suggest new models of social and political organisation that could prevent organised violence?
These are some of the uneasy questions the last session speakers will try to address next Friday.