French Literature in a Global Perspective 2014
It was an experience that can only be called déroutant...
Having just finished a two-week tour de force on The Geneva Summer School of Criticism: French Literature in a Global Perspective, I can finally catch my breath. It was an experience that can only be called déroutant, for I was invited, along with 19 fellow students, to leave behind all preconceived ideas about what French literature is, especially the notion that it is essentially related to the French territory and nation, to French history and language. Luckily, we were in Geneva. It would be hard to imagine such an agenda to take place in Paris!
As a PhD student in French literature at New York University, it was an enlightening experience to compare Swiss approaches and intellectual traditions with my own background in the U.S. and France. Between the American tradition of discussion-based seminars and the French lecture-oriented cours magistral, the summer school achieved a compelling juste milieu between the two approaches. The organizer’s approach to literary
research also seemed to bridge the gap between theory-oriented practice of the U.S. with France’s tradition of the explication de texte. Classes thus often involved integrating close textual analysis with methodologies borrowed from sociology, philosophy, history, and anthropology.
Chronologically and geographically, it was an extremely expansive two weeks: leading from Marco Polo’s travels to fluttering Haiku; from the Sierra Morena mountains in Spain to the coasts of Chile; from Dadaist cabarets in Zurich to the first European description of the Taj Mahal. This diversity led us to question the evolution of literary and cultural forms. As the closing lecture by Franco Moretti made clear, our conceptions of literature itself change by using the genealogy of “trees” or the resonances of “waves”. In other words, simply by altering the scale of analysis – by utilizing the perspective of the globe rather than the nation, by deterritorializing literature, by re-reading the intellectual heritage of France against itself – literature acquires a new relevance in today’s techno-scientific and increasingly globalized world. All of these ideas were discussed with verve and insight from the professors and spirited questions and critique from the students, creating a truly dynamic intellectual space. Indeed, the most appealing and lasting aspect of the program was the unique and unorthodox pedagogical experiment it provided.
By gathering students from universities on four continents, from cities as diverse as New Delhi, Porto Alegre, New York, New Orleans, London, Paris, and Lausanne, among many others, the Summer School easily earned its “Global” moniker. It was fitting that Geneva is where this global diversity met, given the city’s history of international openness and its extremely cosmopolitan population. This international element enlivened collaboration in a distinctive setting of egalitarian learning, and it was truly an honor to share such an environment with the amazing scholars and thinkers that were part of this year’s program.
Daniel Benson, NYU
