Laurie-Anne Laget

2022-2023

Délégation accompagnée d’un enseignant-chercheur vers les EFE – Casa de Velázquez

Sorbonne Université, IUF

Literary life as social practice: intellectual networks and sociabilities in the 1920s and 1930s

Currently a Senior Lecturer at Sorbonne Université where she has been Deputy Director of the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies (2018-2022), Laurie-Anne Laget trained at École normale supérieure (Fontenay Saint-Cloud, 1999-2003), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III and Casa de Velázquez (2007-2009). She was admitted to a position of “agrégée” in 2002 (1st/81) and helds a Ph.D. from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III (2009). Between 2011 and 2017, she has participated in two funded research projects in France and in Spain. Since 2018, she also has been Secretary of Société des Hispanistes français. Finally, in 2019, she became a “junior member” of the Institut universitaire de France.

Laurie-Anne’s research interests include avant-garde literature, intellectual networks, literary sociability and cultural mediations, translation and literary transfers, literature and (mass) printed media.

 

The project is driven by the idea that the process of elaboration of the literary work is surrounded by multiple forms of mediation and mediatization. While traditional literary history would focus on a textualist approach which considers the literary text —associated with the more or less problematic figure of the author— as its sole object, new methodologies have been developed since the second half of the 20th century, such as Sociology of Literature (Escarpit, 1958; Bourdieu, 1966, 1992), the Art worlds theory (Becker, 1982) and, more recently, that of literary networks (de Marneffe & Denis, 2006). These approaches consider literature and/or art as a collective work and aim at understanding the social interactions at work in the literary and artistic life. Exploring the social inner workings of literature implies a change of perspective: instead of constructing literary history as a narrative centred on the result (the published work of a given author at a given time), it is about situating oneself in the logic of the functioning of literary life as a collective work, which also should invite us to adopt a transnational perspective.

The objective of the project is to rethink the interwar literary life by focusing on its social practices and the dissemination of specific discourses on literary creation within Europe and the Americas. The aim is to analyse and make visible not only cultural agents other than creators, such as the multiple figures of cultural mediators —publishers, critics, journalists, translators, booksellers, etc.—, but also the inner workings of literary life in its social spaces, its printed media and its networks, all of which are determining factors in the social work of cultural production, and which, despite their relevance in creative processes, have been underestimated in the discourse of more traditional historiographies.

 

- “‘Bienvenue soyez-vous, messieurs’: la modernidad literaria española en la crítica francófona de los años veinte”, en Jordi Gracia y Domingo Ródenas de Moya (eds.), Las dos modernidades. Edad de Plata y transición cultural en España, Madrid, Visor Libros, 2021, pp. 105-136.

- “The Spanish Center of the International PEN through its first Sumiller: from a project of international solidarity to an expression of the tensions of the literary society of Madrid”, en Diana Roig-Sanz y Jaume Subirana (eds.), Cultural Organisations, Networks and Mediators in Contemporary Ibero-America, New York, Routledge, 2020, pp. 200-212.

- “El “verdadero portaestandarte ultraico”: Guillermo de Torre como artífice de una red transnacional del ultraísmo”, Ínsula, nº 876 (Dosier “Ultra, al siglo”, coord. Domingo Ródenas de Moya), 2019, pp. 14-18.

- “Cómo Gómez de la Serna se hizo RAMÓN. Trayectoria de un proyecto estético”, Les Ateliers du SAL, nº 13, 2018, pp. 109-127.

- “Entrer en collection pour devenir écrivain professionnel : le cas des romanciers espagnols dans les collections de nouvelles du début du XXe siècle”, en Christine Rivalan Guégo y Miriam Nicoli (eds.), La collection, essor et affirmation d’un objet éditorial, Rennes, PUR, 2014, pp. 61-72.

- La fabrique de l’écrivain. Les premières “greguerías” de Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1910-1923), Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, 2012.

 




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