Rabelais, écrire en temps de basculement

As part of course FRA1102 - Introduction à l'humanisme, François Bon will present a lecture entitled “Rabelais, écrire en temps de basculement” on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 at 10 a.m. at the Université de Montréal's Département des littératures de langue française (pavillon Jean Brillant, local B-4270). 

1532: in a Lyon printing house devoted to noble knowledge, a young doctor composes a collection of student pranks for the fairs, and links it to the old tradition of chronicles of giants, thus giving birth to Pantagruel. Then followed Gargantua, and, twelve years apart, the Tiers, then the Quart Livre. The concept of time? The conception of the body? The map of the world? The sky, night, religion, political power? Everything is in upheaval. Repression, wars, and no new certainty to compensate for the failure of ancient times. So, yes, literature: writing the mental leap itself, in a context of accelerated fixation of the French language, and the mutation enabled by the printing press. And as we think about the current digital transition of the written word, how can we not reopen these transitions themselves, relearn this language by confronting it with its invention, and with the world it transcribes?

François Bon was born in 1953 in Vendée, in the very land of Rabelais. He published his first book in 1982, and set up his digital laboratory on the Internet in 1997. He was a visiting professor at UdeM in 2009-2010. His current work focuses via Rabelais, Balzac and Lovecraft, and through digital ecosystems combining video, printed books and field performances, on the superposition of these privileged peaks of transitions in literature.

Visit his website here. 

No registration required, but places are limited!