The multiple voices of Philippe Soupault

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

Agnès Whitfield is a full professor at York University (Toronto, Canada) and founding director of the international scientific collection in translation, Vita Traductiva. A specialist in the socio-cultural and linguistic challenges of translation and intercultural communication, she has been a visiting professor at several Canadian (McGill, University of Ottawa, Carleton) and European (Bologna, Mainz) universities. His many publications focus on the theory and practice of translation, literary exchanges between French and English speakers in Canada, and the rights of the French language in a minority setting. Also a poet, her latest collection, Où te tiens-tu, poète, questions the role of poetry in a drifting world. An associate member of the Translation and Transcultural Communication (TRACT) research group at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, she is currently working on the translation issues surrounding the international influence of French surrealism.

Presentation of the project

"At a time marked by health and environmental crises, the resurgence of authoritarianism and the horrors of wars of aggression, surrealism, with its appreciation of the imagination, its liberating scope and its faith in humanity, is still asserting itself as a fertile current of reflection and artistic creation. As a fluid movement embracing a wide range of practices, Surrealism offers a particularly productive, yet little-exploited, field of study for translatology. Through its questioning of language, its reconceptualization of the subject and its multidisciplinary approach, among other things, it opens up new perspectives on the objectives and modalities of the translation process, as well as its aesthetic, social, epistemological and ethical implications. By giving new impetus to publications (reprints, correspondence, exegeses, biographies) on this complex movement, the centenary of Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) provides an opportune moment to attempt to pinpoint the whys and wherefores of this dynamic movement's significant international influence, and to explore the vast field of reflection it opens up on the linguistic, semiotic, ontological and even psychophysical boundaries of the translation process."

Speakers

 Agnès Whitfield & Jessica Stephens | TRACT - Sorbonne université