Parler en performant
Conferences directed by Jérôme Mauche.
« Speaking while performing » has as its ambition to question the act of speech during performances, in a period when this practice is meeting with increasing interest in more and more social and artistic domains.
Françoise Waquet, who is a historian of knowledge, is interested -among other subjects- in the place of orality in the contexts of scientific communication. She examines the role of speech from the Antiquity to the present, from improvised poetic sparring in eighteenth-century Italy to current practices at conferences (small conferences and poster sessions, for instance).
François Bon, a well-known writer, has always been concerned with expanding literary space in his novels, fictions, essays, plays, performances, and collective projects. His generous way of taking texts and literature into multiple social spaces led him to move to the Internet as early as the mid-1990s. Through a number of sites, but also a reflexion on this space, he has set up an exemplary network of knowledge, sociability, and publication which contributes to the renewal of literary forms.
The place of the digital tools of orality as a vector of creation and knowledge will be one of the issues discussed on the occasion of this encounter.
BIOGRAPHIES
François BON
After engineering studies and employment in the industrial sector, François Bon published his first book, Sortie d’usine, at Éditions de Minuit in 1982. Experimenting with narrative, voices, the dramatic text as well as the essay, moving away from the novel, his work recounts the dramatic changes taking place in the world, inscribing literary practices in the real.
He is the author of fictions such as Décor ciment, Minuit, 1986; Calvaire des chiens, Minuit, 1990; Temps machine, Verdier, 1992; C’était toute une vie, Verdier, 1995; Parking, Minuit, 1996; Paysage fer, Verdier, 2000; Mécanique, Verdier, 2001; Daewoo, Fayard, 2004; Tumulte, Fayard, 2006; L’incendie du Hilton, Albin Michel, 2009. He has also written essays on writers (La Folie Rabelais, Minuit, 1990; Pour Koltès, Solitaires Intempestifs, 2000) or on the social uses of writing (Tous les mots sont adultes, Fayard, 2000; Après le livre, Seuil and Publie.net, 2011). He is the author of a trilogy on rock music: Rolling Stones, une biographie, Fayard, 2002; Bob Dylan, Albin Michel, 2007; Rock’n roll, un portrait de Led Zeppelin, Albin Michel, 2008.
In the 1980s he developed a practice and a reflexion on writing workshops, later moving on to the web. In 1997 he created one of the first sites devoted to literature, remue.net, which he opened to other collaborators. After serving as editor of the collection “déplacement” at Éditions du Seuil, he set up publie.net, a cooperative of authors for the digital publication and distribution of contemporary literature. He collaborates with musicians such as Dominique Pifarély or Kasper T. Koeplitz, choreographers such as Emmanuelle Huynh, or visual artists. He also teaches literature at the ENSBA in Paris and at the UCL in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium).
Françoise WAQUET
An archivist and a paleographer, Françoise Waquet wrote her thesis at the École des chartes on royal celebrations under the Restoration. She then worked on the intellectual relations between French and Italian scientists. A research director at the CNRS, she is the assistant director of the Centre d’Étude de la Langue et de la Littérature Françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Her research focuses on the forms of sociability of scientists within the “Republic of letters” and intellectual circles. She has notably studied communication in that milieu, insisting on the importance of orality in written processes, but also and more generally on the processes at play in the transmission of knowledge.
She has authored countless scientific articles and contributions as well as important books: Les Fêtes royales sous la Restauration ou l’Ancien régime retrouvé, Droz, 1981; Le Modèle français et l’Italie savante. Conscience de soi et perception de l’autre dans la république des lettres (1660-1750), École française de Rome, 1989; La République des lettres (avec Hans Bots), Belin, 1997; Latin; or the Empire of a Sign, Verso, 2001; Parler comme un livre. L’oralité et le savoir (XVIe-XXe siècle), Albin Michel, 2003; Les Enfants de Socrate: filiation intellectuelle et transmission du savoir, XVIIe-XXIe siècle,Albin Michel, 2008. She was awarded the silver medal of the CNRS in 2003.
