French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Trouvé, Chr. Chollier, M.-M. Gladieu and J.-M. Pottier (eds.), La Lecture littéraire dans tous ses états
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics
Bibliographic reference: Alain Trouvé in collaboration with Christine Chollier, Marie-Madeleine Gladieu and Jean-Michel Pottier (eds.), La Lecture littéraire dans tous ses états, Paris, L'Improviste, coll. "Les aéronautes de l'esprit", 2019.
262 pages
ISBN 978-2-913764-66-8,
24.00 €
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www.limproviste.com
Publisher's presentation:
The "Rencontres internationales de Reims: la lecture littéraire dans tous ses états" held in May 2018 brought together twenty-five papers by researchers and artists from Europe, Japan, and South America. They paid tribute to Michel Picard, who in the 1970s established the first Research Center on Literary Reading at the University of Reims. Foregrounding the reader's activity, his essay La lecture comme jeu (1986) proposed thinking about the literary relationship through the dialectical notion of play—a play founded on the interaction between participation and distancing, emotions (conscious / unconscious) and the intellect. This model, which aroused the interest of theorists and literature educators and gave rise to various variants, engages in a dialogue here with more recent work, particularly emphasizing the intersection of creative spheres, both authorial and lectoral (the back-text), and the role of language and speech in the writing-reading mechanisms. Part of these reflections has been developed over the past decade by the Reims-based team of the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Reading seminar, the event's organizers. Both early-career and established researchers, combining their insights, demonstrate the enduring interest sparked by the notion of literary reading and open up new avenues that associate the dimensions of plurilingualism and performance with play, declined in sometimes surprising ways.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LITERARY READING: FROM PLAY TO SPEECH
Fiction and Play
Michel PICARD — A Literary Reading
Hélène CROMBET — Literary Reading in a Hallucinatory State
Marika PIVA — Autofiction as the Creation and Reception of Non-Tautological Identities
Nicolas GARAYALDE — Towards a Poethic of Un-Reading
Franc SCHUEREWEGEN — Fable of the Fountain (Balzac)
From Play to Speech, Tested by Contexts
Nathalie ROELENS and Cristabel MARRAMA — The Meaning of Reading
Marion LATA — Ludic Reading Texts: Between User Manual and Rules of the Game
Tomás KOBLÍZEK — Literary Reading of Visual Poetry
Isabelle TURCAN — Readings of Jean Racine by Ancien Régime Lexicographers
LITERARY READING AND PLURILINGUALISM
Acts of Translation
Christine PAGNOULLE — In Parenthesis / Entre parenthèses: Labyrinths Between Reading and Translation
Anikó ÁDÁM — Translating from the Perspective of the Back-Text
Misako NEMOTO — Destroying and Creating Around Translation: A Japanese Practice of Literature
Ahmed KHARAZ — Aesthetics of Poetic Translation
Translating and Reading the Plural Voice
Greta KOMUR-THILLOIS and Nikol DZIUB — Reading Put to the Test of Multi-Author and Plurilingual Texts
Amanda MURPHY — Reading Between Languages: An Overview of an Empirical Investigation
Coralie PRESSACCO — The Challenges and Strategies of Translating Northern Speech
Olivier HERCEND — The Elusive Speech: The Said and the Unsaid in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
LITERARY READING AS PERFORMANCE
Speaking and Teaching the Literary in Polyphony, in a Classroom,
Jean-Louis DUFAYS — Literary Reading: A Notion, A Model, Performances
Aurore PROMONET — School Scenes of Literary Reading
Adèle GODEFROY — Using the Image as a Pretext to Teach Literary Reading
Literary Speech, Reading Bodies, and Institutional Places
Marion COSTE — Votre Faust, Participatory Opera
Romain BIONDA — What Is a Stage Reading?
Maria CABRAL — The Play/Game of Speech in Medical Reading Scene(s)
PERSPECTIVES FROM LATIN AMERICAN NOVELISTS
Harry BELEVAN — Back-Text, Pheno-Text, Other Texts
Polibio ALVES — Reading: An Amorous Rumination with the Author
The volume gathers twenty-five papers stemming from international meetings held in Reims in May 2018, bringing together researchers and artists from diverse geographic areas. It pays tribute to the work of Michel Picard, whose foundational research in the 1970s established the study of literary reading at the University of Reims. Picard's approach proposed understanding the literary relationship through the concept of play, balancing participation and distancing, emotional response and intellectual engagement. The contributions collected here place this framework in dialogue with more recent theoretical developments concerning the interaction between writing and reading.
The collected essays explore various dimensions of reading practices, including translation, plurilingualism, performance, and pedagogical contexts. Contributors examine how creative spheres intersect and how language and speech operate within writing-reading mechanisms. The volume incorporates perspectives from both established and early-career scholars, alongside contributions from novelists. Readers interested in reception theory, the dynamics of literary communication, and contemporary approaches to textual engagement may find this collection relevant to their inquiries.