Ambiences and writing about everyday life

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

Adina Balint is a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. Her research focuses on French and Francophone literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Recent publications include: Les ambiances dans les littératures de langue française du XIX^e siècle à nos jours (Presses de l'Université Laval, 2024, with Sara Buekens) and Simone Chaput : espaces, cultures et identités (David, 2024, co-edited). Her current research explores the poetics of ordinary life in contemporary French and Quebec literature.

Presentation of the project

"While the notion of ambiance in its broadest sense is currently attracting renewed interest in philosophy and the social sciences, particularly in Bruce Bégout's Le Concept d'ambiance (2020), French literary criticism in this field is still in its infancy. A novel like Une heure de ferveur (2022) by French writer Muriel Barbery examines the impregnating powers of ambience and the writing of the everyday. How do you approach atmosphere from a literary text? Are there any particular themes to capture it? What are the discourse figures that highlight it? By analyzing literary representations of ambience in relation to the writing of everyday life, this conference explores how contemporary literature attempts to blur the boundaries between art and life by creating texts that involve observations and displacements nourished by affects and emotions (which fall within the field of ambience), and where characters rethink their daily lives, perhaps inciting the reader to do the same."

Speaker

• Adina Balint-Babos is a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Winnipeg, Canada.