Le vendredi 17 mai à 16h, Christine Froula, professeur à Northwestern University et professeur invitée à l’ENS de Lyon ce printemps, donnera une conférence exceptionnelle à l’Institut du monde anglophone.
Make It Old New: Revolution and Return in 21st Century Art. Chance, Surprise, Wonder
As great modernist works emerged in dialogue with classical works (e. g., Joyce’s Ulysses with Homer’s Odyssey), so 21st-century artists enter into creative dialogue with modernist works. This talk brings together three conceptual artworks which carry modernist literary inspiration across media and into the 21st century: a faïence sculpture by French conceptual artist Pierre Buraglio, which, as exhibited in Tours (Réunion des Musées Nationaux) in 2008, sparks a jolt of recognition in dialogue with Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-27); the anagrammatic novella Of One Woman or So by Olivia N’Gowfri (2013), an installation by British artist Kabe Wilson that reassembles the words of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 A Room of One’s Own to narrate the experience of an Oxbridge student of colour radicalized by the American Civil Rights movement; and American Kaela Walker’s stream-of-consciousness narrative “Dilly Dedalus in the Day to Day” (2015), which brings Stephen Dedalus’s gifted, impoverished sister in Ulysses to life as a 21st-century teenage philosophy major immersed in social media.
Christine Froula is a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University, USA, a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and currently a visiting professor at ENS de Lyon. She has published widely on modernist literature and aesthetics, feminist theory, and genetic criticism, including Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde and Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture and Joyce (both Columbia UP), To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (Yale UP), and many articles and essays. She is currently working on twenty-first century adaptations of classic and modernist texts, from which this talk is drawn.