[New-Poetry] Tours France - November 27-28 2009

[Anny Ballardini]

Tours France - November 27-28 2009



IMMODERATION IN LITERATURE



GRAAT, université François-Rabelais de Tours, France, November 27-28, 2009



Reading great philosophical texts too hastily might induce one to consider

moderation to be an ideal of life‹while Protagoras maintains that "man is

the measure of all things," Epictetus stresses that "once beyond the measure

there is no limit," and in his Thoughts Pascal asserts that "to leave the

mean is to abandon humanity." Yet, as early as Kant, the excess inherent in

immoderation became the necessary condition of beauty‹"That is sublime which

even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that

surpasses every measure of the senses." The imagination thus overtakes the

sense, which might partly explain why literature is drawn to immoderation.

Could one not consider that this is specifically the very basis of all

literary consideration of the world and what precisely makes literature a

site of subjectivity? If measure is equivalent to objectivity, immoderation

represents what enables the literary text to exceed mere discursiveness and

formalist conventions by opening up the real to hesitation, affect and

inconclusiveness.



One may assess that literary writing finds its reason and its raison d¹être

in its perpetually going beyond models and, more simply, its own means of

implementation. "A novel is a novel so long as it shows an intention of

being more than a novel, to such an extent that it exhausts the reader,"

Tiphaine Samoyault maintains. One may thus inquire into the way writers,

through whatever textual infringement they generate, can be led to reconcile

excess, disproportion, deformity and disharmony. In this context, form is to

be considered an "instrument of knowledge" (Samoyault) by which each writer

may wonder "how a formless form can be formalised" (Samoyault). The answer

may be found halfway between philosophy and literature, in the Camusian

paradox according to which "[t]he real madness of excess dies or creates its

own moderation."



Taking the immoderate into consideration offers an opportunity to think

about the relationship between quantity and quality. Why is "surplus [in

literature] [Š] not numerical" (Derrida)? Literary excess is a phenomenon

that also implies that the role of temporality in the text should be taken

into account. How does the text integrate in its poetic economy continuity,

incompletion, digression, transition and suspension? How does the literary

text inevitably go beyond the formal, generic, representational and/or

thematic territory already mapped out by its predecessors? What are the

signifiers, syntactic markers and figures of speech proper to the

immoderate? All the answers to these non-restrictive questions should enable

one to question, or perhaps even go beyond, Calvino¹s maxim according to

which "literature cannot live unless it is set an excessive, even

unattainable, goal."







Abstract of approximately 200 words should be sent to both Éric Athenot

(eric.athenot at orange.fr) and Sébastien Salbayre

(sebastien.salbayre at univ-tours.fr) by August 31, 2009.




-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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