Rethinking the novel from the perspective of Modernity

The Maison Suger is pleased to host the workshop "Rethinking the novel from the perspective of modernity", organised under the direction of Risa Matsuo (Waseda University, Japan) and Lina Guo (Sun Yat-sen University, China), researchers in residence.

"What is a novel? Where are the boundaries between the novel, poetry, and prose? As a popular literary genre, is the novel defined differently among national literatures? Thus, how to read and criticize a novel from the perspective of Universal Literature?

This workshop will begin by fundamentally rethinking the concept of "novel," which we take for granted. Prof. Lina Sylvie Guo, our keynote speaker and an expert on Chinese literature and its influential relationship with Japanese literature, and Prof. Jean-Luc Nardone, leading expert on Italian literature, will shed light on the history and concept of "novel" respectively in Asia and Europe.

In response, Prof. Stefan Buchenberger, a world expert in comics studies, will point out the modern expansion of the concept of "novel" by dealing with novels that are mainly based on graphics. Therefore, the organizing committee welcomes presenters who deal with "novel" from an interdisciplinary perspective, not only from literary scholars but also from the fields of social science and natural science, such as: politics, economy, society and novels, novelists / ecocriticism / natural disasters and novels (both fiction and non-fiction) etc."

→ Discover the programme in french