Dernières publications

David Vann - publié le 04/04/2014

Chaque année, les invités des Assises Internationales du Roman rédigent la définition d'un mot de leur choix : il s'agit ici du mot "landscape", défini par l'auteur américain David Vann.

Jonathan Dee - publié le 04/04/2014

Chaque année, les invités des Assises Internationales du Roman rédigent la définition d'un mot de leur choix : il s'agit ici du mot "judgement", défini par l'auteur américain Jonathan Dee.

Susan Neiman - publié le 01/04/2014

"It’s not an accident that the term role model was invented in 1957 as a substitute, for the first half of the 20th century provided one long assault on the very idea of heroism. The courage once exemplified by military service was first undermined by the changing nature of warfare; it was hard to view the business of cowering in cold, stinking trenches with the same elan that surrounded hand to hand sword-fighting."

Marita Sturken, Claire Richard - publié le 31/03/2014

One of the reasons I was interested in trying to unpack the meanings of kitsch memory culture, say for instance in relationship to 9/11, is precisely the ways in which it creates this culture of comfort, that allows us to feel reassured. And that allows us to not confront the larger questions, about the project of American empire, about the project of national identity, about our priorities and our values as a nation, and about the kind of sacrifices that we have demanded on those serving in the (...)

Douglas Kennedy - publié le 25/03/2014

Chaque année, les invités des Assises Internationales du Roman rédigent la définition d'un mot de leur choix : il s'agit ici du mot "on verra", défini par l'auteur américain Douglas Kennedy.

Gunnar Olsson - publié le 17/03/2014

Gunnar Olsson explore l'influence du vocabulaire et des méthodes des géographes sur la pensée, la création littéraire, la religion et les arts. "How do I find my way in the power-filled world of hopes and fears, truths and lies, love and hate, freedom and repression? By approaching it as if it was made of sticks and stones, mountains and rivers, as if it could be captured in a coordinate net of up and down, front and back, left and right."

Will Self - publié le 07/03/2014

Masha Gessen - publié le 21/02/2014

A great work of art is also often not immediately recognizable. Five young women entered the enormous Cathedral of Christ the Savior early in the morning on February 21, 2012, took off their overcoats to expose differently colored dresses and neon-colored tights, pulled on similarly neon-colored balaclavas, climbed up on the soleas (having lost one of their number in the process—she had been grabbed by a security guard), and proceeded to dance, play air guitar, and sing a song they called a (...)

Clifford Armion, Jonathan Coe - publié le 18/02/2014

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include ((The Rotters' Club)), ((The Accidental Woman)), ((A Touch of Love)), ((The Dwarves of Death)), ((What a Carve Up!)), which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and ((The Rain Before it Falls)). His latest novel is ((Expo 58)).

Tim Ingold - publié le 11/02/2014

"Anthropology, for me, is philosophy with the people in. It is philosophy, because its concern is with the conditions and possibilities of human being and knowing in the one world we all inhabit."

Randall Kennedy - publié le 06/02/2014

There are several good justifications for racial affirmative action in a society that has long been a pigmentocracy in which white people have been privileged and people of color oppressed. Affirmative action can ameliorate debilitating scars left by past racial mistreatment – scars (such as educational deprivation) that handicap racial minorities as they seek to compete with whites who have been free of racial subordination. Affirmative action can also counter racially prejudiced misconduct. (...)

Barbie Zelizer - publié le 24/01/2014

For as long as pictures have been among us, they have generated an uneasy mix of suspicion and awe. Perhaps nowhere is that as much the case as with journalism, where pictures are implicated in the larger truth-claims associated with the news. Aligned with a certain version of modernity, pictures are expected to establish and maintain journalism as the legitimate platform for giving shape to events of the real world. Consider how public response to acts of terror, war and natural disaster is (...)

Clifford Armion, Susan Neiman - publié le 20/01/2014

I think we’re very confused about the subject of heroism. I began to get interested in the subject when I realised that we are actually at a historical cesure since the end of the Second World War. It used to be the case although there were many different conceptions of heroism. It used to be unquestioned that everyone wanted to be a hero, and everybody wanted to be a better hero than the next person. What has happened in the last fifty years or so is that the notion of the hero has in many (...)

Clifford Armion - publié le 20/01/2014

En adaptant cette comédie de Shakespeare, Joss Whedon marche dans les pas de l’illustre Kenneth Branagh qui avait fait de ((Much Ado)) un film remarqué en 1993. Le pari pouvait sembler ambitieux, même prétentieux, et pourtant le résultat est une comédie de mœurs toute en finesse qui respecte et met en valeur l’œuvre du dramaturge élisabéthain.

Siddhartha Deb - publié le 17/01/2014

In 1916, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore delivered a series of lectures that would eventually be collected into the book, ((Nationalism)). Tagore was writing in the glow of his own celebrity (he had just won the Nobel Prize for literature) and from within the heart of the crisis engulfing the modern world, two years into the slow, grim war that had converted Europe into a labyrinth of trenches covered over with clouds of poison gas.

Randall Kennedy, Kédem Ferré - publié le 10/01/2014

Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy answered Aiguerande 11th graders before a conference at the Hôtel de Région for the Villa Gillet Mode d'Emploi festival, on 24 November 2013 in Lyon, France. The meeting was organised by the Villa Gillet and La Clé des Langues, and was prepared by Kédem Ferré and his students.

Clifford Armion, Barbie Zelizer - publié le 06/01/2014

Barbie Zelizer is a Professor of Communication, and holds the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and is Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. A former journalist, Professor Zelizer's work focuses on the cultural dimensions of journalism, with a specific interest in journalistic authority, collective memory, and journalistic images in times of crisis and war. She also works on the impact of (...)

Peter Szendy - publié le 19/12/2013

"To comfortably acquire, so to speak, as many fingers as needed," said one of Bach’s sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, in his Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard (1753). And these words are remarkable, as long as we are prepared to take them literally, and not hastily consider them as one of the metaphors that adorn discourse about music and on the bodies that it evokes.

Elena Mannes - publié le 19/12/2013

Our relationship with sound is an intimate one – arguably the most intimate with any of our five senses. We live in a visual society. Many people would say that sight is our primary sense. We hear before we see. In the womb, the fetus begins to develop an auditory system between seventeen and nineteen weeks. Already we are in a world of sound, of breath and heartbeat, of rhythm and vibration. Already, we are feeling the sound with our bodies.

Ian Buruma - publié le 16/12/2013

"When I was at primary school in the Netherlands in the late 1950s and early 1960s, history was still taught as a story of great men, kings, generals, national heroes, and of course great villains, mostly foreigners. In our case, this meant a succession of Williams of Orange, Admiral Tromp, Philip II, the Duke of Alva, Napoleon, Hitler, and so on."

Cynthia Carr - publié le 12/12/2013

Two black men were lynched in Marion, Indiana, on the night of August 7, 1930. That was my father’s hometown, the town where I have my roots, and I heard this story when I was a little girl: The night it happened someone called my grandfather, whose shift at the Post Office began at three in the morning. "Don’t walk through the courthouse square tonight on your way to work," the caller said. "You might see something you don’t want to see." Apparently that was the punchline, which puzzled (...)

Clifford Armion, Doug Saunders - publié le 05/12/2013

Migration almost always follows the same pattern. It doesn’t go from one country to another country. It goes from a cluster of villages or a sub-rural region to specific urban neighbourhoods. Those urban neighbourhoods which are usually low-income, with low housing cost, serve as the bottom rung of the ladder for people arriving in a new country.

Siddhartha Deb - publié le 03/12/2013

One afternoon a few years ago, while on my way back from interviewing some factory workers, I was asked by a very neatly dressed young man if I had read the economist Amartya Sen’s work on famine. He’d first wanted to know if I could get him a job, then if I could help him immigrate to the United States, but when he realized that neither was a possibility, he began a discussion of Sen’s work. Democracies don’t have famines, Sen has written, whereas authoritarian regimes do; hence the (...)

Robyn Creswell - publié le 22/11/2013

Like Jewish and Christian commentators, Muslim exegetes understood the Babel story to be a parable of how mankind’s hubris, in the form of a desire for knowledge or an attempt to reach the heavens, leads to divine punishment. The subsequent confusion of human idioms and scattering of peoples is a second fall from grace, an expulsion from the paradise of monolingualism. Henceforth, translation becomes at once necessary and impossible—impossible in the sense that no translation could ever (...)

Keith Gessen - publié le 19/11/2013

What is the place of the writer in the literary field of the home country? What contribution can this writer make to the literary field of the target or host country? It's important to understand that the answers to these questions will often be different: a writer can be a marginal figure in his home country and become a vital figure in another country. More often, of course, the reverse is true.

Esther Allen - publié le 15/11/2013

As our language ceases to dominate cyberspace (our share of the Web has fallen to about 27%), we English speakers are hesitantly stepping out of our monolingual sphere and evincing renewed interest in foreign tongues. Language learning websites like Livemocha and Matador Network seem to crop up like mushrooms, Rosetta Stone is a publicly traded company whose stock is up 41% year to date, and last year’s top-rated YouTube video — remember? —was in Korean (with a few repetitions of “hey (...)

Mary Jo Bang - publié le 15/11/2013

how can reading not add to one’s experience, and in turn influence a person’s writing? And wouldn’t translation especially affect the brain, since translation involves the closest sort of reading, one where the mind simultaneously reads for meaning and tries to access the equivalent word or expression in another language. Wouldn’t reading the word “pelle” in Italian similarly send a message to the brain to access the synaptic record of all past sensory experience having to do with (...)

Jerry Schatzberg - publié le 15/11/2013

Jerry Schatzberg started his career as a photographer and made his debut as a film director with ((Puzzle of a Downfall Child)) in 1970. Three years later he won the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix for ((Scarecrow)) with Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. He was invited by the Festival Lumière to present ((Reunion)) (1989) which was screened in Lyon on 18 october 2013.

Estelle Rivier, Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine, Delphine Lemonnier-Texier - publié le 04/11/2013

Mettre en scène une pièce, dit Jean-François Sivadier interrogé sur le processus de création, c’est poser une hypothèse, et la mettre à l’épreuve du plateau, poursuivre le rêve que l’on a sur la pièce, et franchir le pas de son adaptation, accepter d’être confronté à l’écart entre le rêve et le plateau, tout en réussissant à ne pas perdre son rêve. Mettre en scène une pièce de Shakespeare, comme toute autre pièce de répertoire, c’est aussi se confronter à ses (...)

David Vann - publié le 07/10/2013

" Of the twenty or so countries I’ve visited for book launches and interviews, France is the best home for a book, and the United States is one of the worst."