Association affiliated with the Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur, the national organization for English academics in France.

The Société des Amis d’Inter-textes (S.A.I.T.) was founded by specialists in Anglophone literature who were interested in the relationship between different texts, and wanted to expand their research to incorporate the intersection of literature and the arts, or between the arts. Specialists of other areas (French and Italian literature, music, aesthetics) have been invited to the many conferences organised with themes (“Le Tableau”, “Blancs”, “Passages”) allowing us to explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual (Henry James), or between the verbal and the musical (Benjamin Britten).

 

Current events

This year's annual conference will be devoted to "Untimely Art", and will take place at the Université de Paris III JunSeptember 9-10, 2010. You will find the call for papers below, or you can download the word document by clicking here:

The theme of untimely art is expected to help us reconsider art from the perspective of its specific mode of insertion in time. If art is untimely in the sense that it opens new vistas in our intellectual certitudes, and if, according to Nietsche in Untimely Meditations, art is « never on time but against time, in favour of times to come », then « untimely art » may help us reconsider our modes of thinking and of apprehending reality by challenging our traditional assumptions. We may be tempted to redefine art in the light of the event, which opens our perception and tears us away from clichés by offering us « powerful and direct revelations ». We may also wish to ponder over the apparent contradiction between art as a rupture in the continuity of time and art as a form of dialogical relation with the past. The relation of art and history may also be explored, through the capacity of art to address issues which were meant to excede their own times. The question of untimely art will thus provide us with an apt point of entry into the wider problem of esthetic truth which may be tackled from the angle of the prolonged destiny of art and of the different temporalities of artistic inscription, from the global approach to the painting which Nelson Goodman theorises, to the horizontal and more chronological reception of the linguistic text. The interdisciplinary nature of our conference will help us probe deeper into the mystery of artistic persistance and transhistoricity, so as to give a faithful account of the various facets of the inscription of art in time. Abstracts (300 words) should be sent to Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès (al.fortin-tournes@wanadoo.fr) or to Liliane Louvel (Liliane.Louvel@univ-poitiers.fr) by March 10 2010.

The SAIT recently published the latest edition of its revue Polysèmes, "Parcours, Détours". More information about Polysèmes is available here.