International Colloquium
« L'invention littéraire des médias »
Would the media exist without literature? Could one indeed speak about television, photography or cinema without these devices were also built and institutionalized in our collective imagination by the literature and its speech? When Jules Verne , in The Kip Brothers (1902), the faces of the murderers Flig Balt and Vin Mod appear on a photograph of the corpse of Captain Gibson, whose retina has printed the image of his death (as if the eye worked like a camera!), he participates fully in the construction of the collective imagination of photography. This imagination of the medium is certainly largely fantasized, but it will influence for a long time the photographic practices and their reception, beginning with the power of revelation of the image and by its alleged testimonial value. Thus, it is clear that the media are not only technological realities, but also - and perhaps first - discursive constructions. But in a context of major technological and cultural upheavals initiated by the digital, it becomes essential to better understand the role and influence that literature plays in the construction and institutionalization of the media.
This is the goal of the international conference "The Literary Invention of the Media", born from the collaboration between the Canada Research Chair in Digital Writing and the Canada Research Chair in film and media studies, whose work is at the crossroads of ancient and modern media. This conference will bring together about twenty international researchers whose work questions this particular mode of the invention of the media that is literature.
Organization: Thomas Carrier-Lafleur, André Gaudreault, Servanne Monjour, and Marcello Vitali-Rosati.