L’auteur en question

Venue: CY Cergy Paris Université - Gennevilliers site

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the figure of the author is subject to the vicissitudes of literary history, of the arts and techniques - of history in short. Roland Barthes dedicates in 1968 a famous article to "The death of the author", before giving to his own work a more and more subjective and personal dimension. Announced as moribund, the author resurfaces thanks to the development of mass culture before being reinvented by the entertainment industry or the passion of testimony. Associated with the individual, even with the demiurge, the author is mistreated by the totalitarian regimes which distrust him.

His loss of aura continues on the social networks where the author is invited to become a speaker like the others, sociology has well shown this game between necessary singularity of the author and will to anchor his voice in the common space. Condemned in favor of the reader or rehabilitated as a creator who spares his posterity, benefiting from a specific right or threatened to lose it on the Internet, using the pen or the computer keyboard, locked up in solitude or adept at collective writing, the author never ceases to metamorphose, always on the verge of disappearing, re-emerging in new forms linked to the evolution of technology and humanism.

This scientific event aims to question the complex relationships between intermediaries, such as the publisher and the translator. This conference will be an opportunity to propose a reflection on the figure of the author in Europe today. Each speaker will be able to communicate in his or her own language, with an English translation projected on a screen. In order to carry out this reflection, we propose to decline different forms that irradiate this portrait of the protean author in three main parts: the fragile or uncertain author, the author - mediator, passer, translator, and finally the committed, forbidden author.