The necessity of examining international cultural transfers has become more and more pressing. The calls to denationalize history – US and Irish history – have been numerous and transatlantic, transnational, diasporic, interconnected or global approaches to history have flourished. Culture itself has become a privileged vantage point from which to assess the extent of the globalization process. Most often, however, the circulation of items of popular culture has been taken for granted or not been studied on its own terms. This volume is both ambitious and limited in its approach. It does not pretend to offer a new theory or methodology of intercultural transfers at the global level. The focus is narrowed to the circulation of popular culture between Ireland and the US. Our goal in this respect is to weave together a constantly shifting object of study and various and sometimes diverging streams of research: cultural history and the study of popular culture, the history of nations and global history, immigration, diaspora or ethnic studies and the study of circulating commercial products through music, images and more recently the internet. By taking into account the international context of cultural nation-building, the volume is an attempt to contribute to a renewed understanding of how the circulation of goods and people reached a momentum at the same time as states were engaged in an-going process of nation-building-deconstructing-and-redefining, in the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries.

Une œuvre marquante procède souvent d’une rupture ou de plusieurs ruptures avec son époque, ce qui amène son auteur à reconfigurer son regard sur le monde, à ré-inventer son approche de la langue, à modifier un genre, ou même à concevoir une nouvelle théorie. Mais l’œuvre elle-même se constitue aussi autour de flux et de rythmes qui font et défont les existences d’individus ou de communautés, détruisent des structures pour que d’autres prennent forme ou bien s‘anéantissent à jamais. En d’autres termes, l’œuvre d’art ne serait-elle pas un lieu de rupture en soi ?

Au premier regard, le lieu particulier où se déroule la rupture s’identifie comme une « zone de rupture » (selon le terme technique), dont l’esthétique annonce ou dissimule les seuils critiques et les brisures à venir.  Mais ce fond qui donne la forme s’ouvre bientôt à de multiples interprétations : croisée de désirs, antagonismes, structures spatio-temporelles ouvrantes ou fermantes dans un espace psychique, virtuel ou imaginaire traversé par des tensions.

La notion de rupture, — et plus précisément, celles de seuil critique et point de rupture —, offre les apparences les plus diverses allant de la non-rupture au moment ultime de la destruction et de la mort. Entre ces deux extrêmes, quelles sont les autres définitions possibles de ces notions ? L’on peut aussi se demander comment se re-nouvellent les thèmes classiques du suspense, de la peur, de la menace, du risque etc., et quelles questions inattendues, encore informulées, peuvent se poser. Qu’advient-il alors du concept d’identité, parfois galvaudé ? Comment se déploient temporalité et narration dans une œuvre de fiction ou de non-fiction ?  Quelles nou-velles métaphores vont écrire le lieu de la déchirure ?

Les contributions devront faire l’objet d’une méditation théorique approfondie qui s’appuiera sur de nombreux exemples ou bien donner lieu à l’analyse d’une œuvre précise littéraire, picturale ou cinématographique.

Les articles seront rédigés en français ou en anglais et comporteront entre 6000 et 10 000 mots. La date limite de réception est le 1er septembre 2018. Prière d’envoyer vos propositions d’articles à catherine.chauche@sfr.fr et à daniel.thomieres@univ-reims.fr.

Major works of art are often the result of a break or of several breaks with their time, which leads their authors to reconfigure their worldviews, reinvent their use of language, modify a genre, or conceive a new theory. But a work itself is also made up of flows and rhythms that delineate or destroy the main features of a man’s existence, a community or a territory for others to take form or be wiped out for ever. In other words, could we say that a work is a place of rupture in itself?

At first glance, the particular place where the rupture happens can be identified as a “rupture zone,” in technical terms, whose aesthetics conceals or anticipates critical thresholds or breaks to come. But the play between form and content also gives rise to multiple interpretations: antagonisms at the crossroads of desires, opening or closing spacetime structures, in psychic, imaginary or concrete places full of internal tensions.

The notion of rupture — as well as the notions of critical threshold and breaking-point — takes on diverse appearances ranging from non-rupture and continuity to disruption and death. Between these two extremes, other definitions of these notions may be brought out. We may wonder how the classical themes of suspense, fear, menace, risk, good and evil, etc., are renewed and whether yet unspoken issues are about to be formulated. Then, what becomes of the overused concept of identity? How does temporality unfold in fictional and non-fictional works? What new metaphors will conjure up places of rupture?

Papers of 6 000-10 000 words, written in French or English, are expected  to  develop a theoretical in-depth reflection supported by converging examples or the careful analysis of a literary, cinematographic or pictorial work. The submission deadline for proposals is 1 September 2018. Please send your draft proposals to catherine.chauche@sfr.fr or daniel.thomieres@univ-reims.fr.