Adina Balint-Babos

Adina Balint-Babos is Full Professor of 20th- and 21st-century French literature at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, and Research Associate at the Center for Research in Cultural Studies (University of Winnipeg, Canada). She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto and was recently Scholar in Residence at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London (England). She is scientific director of the J.-M. G. Le Clézio online dictionary, Éditions Passage(s). 

Her research and publications focus on French and francophone literature (Canada, Quebec); autobiographical writing, novels and essays; literature and the human sciences (philosophy, psychoanalysis); theories of the everyday and the ordinary (philosophy, sociology); concepts of interculturality and transculturality; the process of literary creation. Her research project "Poetics and issues of the everyday in contemporary literature in Quebec and France" is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The project

Title: Poetics and issues of everyday life in contemporary French and Quebec literature

"This project is based on a simple observation: we often have trouble seeing what's right in front of our eyes. In "La Parole quotidienne", Blanchot explores "the unnoticed" and "the insignificant", pointing out that "the everyday is what is most difficult to discover" (355). The ambition of this project is to answer the question: how has the word "quotidien", which - according to the Trésor de la langue française - has only negative connotations (train-train, banality, routine), been able to achieve a valued status in recent times? Under what conditions can the notion of the everyday find a positive meaning in literature? The valorization of the everyday, perceptible in the literature of the 1980s and 1990s (Perec, Turcotte), aimed at "rescuing" the commonplace and bearing witness to the small, has deepened since 2000, when a number of writers (Ernaux, Carrère, Jauffret, Pauly, Mavrikakis, Robin, Séguin) have supported the emergence of positive meanings of the word "quotidien", which has become a reference point. This project will examine the issues raised by everyday life in contemporary literature in Quebec and France since 2000. The corpus of texts will be multi-generic (autobiography, novels, essays) and chosen according to the dynamic interaction between everyday experience and reflection on the self and relationships with others. Our aim is to highlight the importance of writing about everyday life today, a fragility and anxiety that can tip it at any moment into a crisis or a creative project."

Hosting institution: Sorbonne Université

Selective Bibliography

• Balint, Adina et al. (dir.). Simone Chaput : espaces, cultures et identités, Ottawa, Éditions David, 2024.
• Balint, Adina. Imaginaires et représentations littéraires de la mobilité, New York, Peter Lang, 2020.
• Balint, Adina. « Poétique de la mobilité dans la littérature québécoise contemporaine », Échos des études romanes, vol. XVII, no 2, 2022, p. 229-240.
• Balint, Adina. « Identités narratives résiliences chez Simone Chaput et Ying Chen », dans Patrick Noël et Anne Sechin (dir.), Les représentations du réel et la réalité des représentations dans la francophonie de l’Ouest canadien, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Presses Universitaires de Saint-Boniface, 2022, p. 37-52.
• Balint, Adina. « Du recyclage culturel : la figure du médecin canadien Norman Bethune, entre récit biographique et fictionnel », dans Loula Abd-elrazad et Valérie Dusaillant-Fernandes (dir.), La Répétition dans les textes littéraires du Moyen-Âge à nos jours, New York, Peter Lang, 2020, p. 237-250.
• Balint, Adina. « Croisements de l’identitaire, du nomadisme et de l’environnement dans la littérature francophone contemporaine du Canada », Essays in French Literature and Culture, no 57, 2020, p. 47-62.