Discours/e: Communities and Convergences in Contemporary Literature

Discours/e: Communities and Convergences in Contemporary Literature

April 30 to May 2, 2025 · Salle Richelieu - Université de Moncton

In light of the discussions initiated last year during the study day Contemporary Practices in Literature: Communities and Convergences, the choice to focus on the material dimension of contemporary literary production along Gervais and Marcotte’s 2018 proposition proved so fruitful that it led to the conception of a dedicated online platform: Discours/e: Digital Catalogue for Atlantic literatures and cultures. Discours/e aims both to promote the contemporary literary and cultural practices, and to create a collection of articles and documents related to Atlantic literatures and cultures. Built with open access technologies, Discours/e’s goal is to generate discourse on contemporary practices by creating a bilingual (English and French), flexible publishing platform to enhance the digital discoverability of Atlantic authors, artists and organizations, and to open up to a diverse audience (general, scientific and artistic).

Following the conception of Discours/e, we also reimagined the format of last year’s one-day academic event. The Discours/e Study Days: Communities and Convergences in Contemporary Literature will take place over three days from April 30 to May 2, 2025. Organized by Christophe Collard, Arianne Des Rochers and Georgette LeBlanc of the Université de Moncton, in partnership with Bertrand Gervais of the Université du Québec à Montréal, these study days these sessions will provide an opportunity to continue last year’s reflection on contemporary literary and cultural practices, particularly in Atlantic Canada. This event, created in partnership with the Frye Festival, the Literary Translator's Association of Canada, the Canada Research Chair in Translation and Colonialism (Université de Moncton) and the NT2 Lab (UQAM), will bring together researchers, authors, and artists from Canada and abroad, Francophone and Anglophone, to explore the issues specific to contemporary literature as it navigates between two or more languages, and as it unfolds outside the traditional ways of book publishing.

The 2025 Discours/e study days will be embedded within the Frye Festival, which runs from April 25 to May 4, 2025. Researchers will accordingly be invited to take part in Festival activities in the afternoons and evenings. This collaboration aims to forge strong bonds between the academic community and the regional literary and cultural scene. The Frye Festival is the largest bilingual festival in Atlantic Canada, and its mission is to make literature accessible in order to encourage a rich culture of reading and writing in New Brunswick. For 25 years, the Frye has organized a 10-day festival at the end of April. It also assumes a leadership role in the arts and culture sector, and actively participates in the development of the local literary sector, in both official languages.

The Discours/e: Communities and Convergences in Contemporary Literature study days are intended to spearhead collaboration between the artistic and scientific communities of Atlantic Canada, with the aim of assessing the state of a changing field and mapping the themes driving a flourishing literary scene. We therefore renew our invitation to authors and researchers for discussions on topics such as: issues related to translation or the language of writing; the use of new distribution platforms; the status of the ‘text’ and the ‘literary community’ (in Atlantic Canada); new reading practices in an increasingly digitized literary landscape; the advent of new hybrid literary forms and projects that challenge the traditional pragmatic boundaries of literary production; the impact of online presence on literary explorations of questions of identity; the different ways in which ‘old-fashioned’ literary production adapts to an ever-changing ‘new media’ context; the effect of geolocation software and related literary production possibilities on the notion of local literary community; the transmediation of literary themes and techniques through other/more recent ‘writing spaces’; other ‘spatialities’ of local writing such as exhibitions, websites, archives; the intrusion of new writing and/or reading devices into literary production.

What can all these contemporary issues and events tell us about current literary production, particularly in Atlantic Canada? Do they contribute to the emergence of a distinct aesthetic sensibility?

The study days will be bilingual to reflect the region’s linguistic and cultural realities, and so extend the network of dissemination and mobilization of Moncton's literary community. The sessions will be recorded and broadcast on Discours/e: Digital Catalogue for Atlantic literatures and cultures.

Bibliography

Bertrand Gervais and Sophie Marcotte. “Literature and media devices: writing and reading practices in digital contexts”. Hybrid 5 (2018): 1-7.

https://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/288