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March 06, 2009
CfP Journal: You and Yours: The Second Person in Literature,
Deadline: March 25, 2009
TRANS- # 8 Est/Ouest: "You and Yours". The Second Person in Literature
"You and Yours"
The Second Person in Literature
The dialog with the reader inscribes itself in a secular tradition. Whether it be to seduce the reader by means of an erudite captatio benevolentiae (“Ah ! insensé, qui crois que je ne suis pas toi” [ Ah ! fool, who thinks that I am not you], Victor Hugo), or a line of argument that is either ironic (as in Cervantes’s Don Quijote and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) or perverse (as in the preliminary poem from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil]), or, on the contrary, to attack the reader (as in the narratives of Céline or Jean Genet), the literary text often explicitly puts forward the kind of relationship that it attempts to establish with its reader and without which it could not exist. A number of diverse genres, fictional or not, lend themselves to such representations of the second person, ranging from the manifesto to love poetry, epistolary, and the novel.
Since Blanchot a commonplace of criticism has been the affirmation according to which literature is based on the “infinite” interpellation of an other which it will never reach. An illustration of this idea of literary space can be found in the monologue of La nuit juste avant les forêts [The Night Just Before the Forests] by Bernard-Marie Koltès, in which a man calls to someone who will never respond to him until he exhausts himself. According to Paul Celan, the poem, dialogic in essence, stretches “towards a you that can be invoked, towards a reality to invoke.” This “you” becomes a witness of the Other and becomes a figure of alterity. The second person is also the place where a profound interrogation of identity occurs : that of the exile of interiority. If contemporary literature has exploited all modes of interpellation, it is not only as a celebration of this “essential space,” but also as a way of renovating their forms. From Apollinaire, who revolutionized poetry in “Zone” by substituting “you” for the lyric “I,” to Peter Handke, who in Kaspar corners the character on scene through the anguishing mechanism of persecutory voices, as well as novelists such as Faulkner, Fuentes, or Butor, who in La modification [The Modification] follows his character using the second personal plural, there are numerous devices that, thanks to interpellation, alter the traditional modes of enunciation. What are the stakes in these enunciatory displacements that create what could be called a vocative literature ?
These are some of the diverse configurations of interpellation that interest us, without privileging or excluding any form, period, or genre.
Proposals for submissions (3000 characters or about 500 words), accompanied by a short bibliography and a brief author’s note, should be sent in a Word or RTF document before Wednesday, March 25, 2009 to the following email address : lgcrevue@gmail.com
Authors of accepted proposals should send completed articles no later than Thursday, May 28, 2009. The editorial team would like to underscore that the journal Trans— accepts texts written in French, Spanish, and English.
Revue Trans-
Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle - Paris 3
Email: lgcrevue_at_gmail.com
Visit the website at http://trans.univ-paris3.fr
Posted by agripley at March 6, 2009 12:31 PM