Non-Themed Issue:
Volume 29, Issue 1
June 2024
The journal Philobiblon - Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in the Humanities, indexed in international databases (DOAJ, Clarivate Analitics – Master Journal List, Emerging Citation Index, Erih+, ProQuest, Scopus SciVerse, EBSCO, WorldCat), is published biannually by The “Lucian Blaga” Central University Library of Cluj-Napoca (Romania). The first issue was published in 1996. Philobiblon welcomes scholarly articles and book reviews for its upcoming issues, particularly for the June issue: Vol. 29, Issue 1 (2024).
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We welcome scholarly articles and book reviews from a great variety of scientific research in the humanities. The profile of the journal is multidisciplinary; therefore we encourage approaches of original and daring subjects that include congruent directions in the humanities. Articles submitted should be multidisciplinary in their approach, and deal with subjects in the areas of (including, but not limited to) history, history of culture, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, literary theory and criticism, linguistics, art history, and library and information science.
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Submission deadline: 30 April 2024
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Contact: philobiblon.cluj@gmail.com
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26424/philobib
OCLC Number 271188595
ISSN: 1224 - 7448
ISSN (online): 2247 - 8442
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Special Issue: December 2023
Modernism and Bruno Latour: For a Resumption of Modernity
Issue guest editors: Amalia COTOI (Universitatea "Babeș-Bolyai" Cluj-Napoca) and Alexandru MATEI (Universitatea Transilvania, Brașov)
Who is interested in modernity today when there are so many reasons why it has fallen out of fashion? It has disappointed so many times, politically, ideologically, economically - even literarily - that its destiny, as our destiny, has been that of a no-go area for a long time. This is why the relationship of Bruno Latour's writings with "modernity" and "modernism" (terms that he interchanges freely) is as complex as it is urgent to be addressed today, when Modernist Studies are gaining momentum and when ecological stakes are theoretical stakes as well. Based on a "genuine anxiety" (Ross 2009), caused by the risk of losing the very object of study, namely literary modernism, in rethinking the relationship that it maintains with industrial/capitalist/global modernity, Modernist Studies have proposed in the last three decades a departure from the comfort zone of traditional modernist chronology and geography. The way we ponder the modern, modernism and modernity has begun to be marked more and more deeply by the contemporary rapport between us as individuals, institutions, and everything related to the world – both beings and objects.
Our call invites scholars interested in Latourian modernity and debates focused on modernism in literary studies for contributions that consider the various ways in which, on the one hand, Latour's work resituates the binomial modern/modernity, and on the other, the meanings thusly acquired by modernism. Therefore, starting from the idea that being Latourian does not necessarily mean being "non-modern" or "post-critical" (Anker-Felski 2017), in order to avoid any further confusion between the spirit and letter of Bruno Latour's writings, we propose two main strands.
1) First of all, it is essential to resume the thought and practices of modernity, characterized by "an extraordinary capacity to give itself a mystified image" (Maniglier 2022). This resumption comes at a time when in literary studies postmodernism is almost out of the picture and a non-chronological contemporary takes center stage, to escape the "traditional" modern temporality of advance and progression (Cotoi 2022). Last but not least, we have to interrogate how the modes of existence of the moderns can be recognized in literature and can be redescribed (Latour 2013) within a literary anthropology that questions the distinction between human nature, supposedly subjective and the supposedly objective Nature, as well as the discourses that account for them. We can talk here about the complex and varied relationship between the literary imaginary and the scientific imaginary, but also about the vocabulary that circulates between literature and science (Ait-Touati 2011), which shows that there is something common to experience and scientific language, on the one hand, and experience and language of the imagination, on the other. The same literary anthropology can demonstrate how different regimes of temporality communicate in modernist literary discourse (Rabaté, Spiropoulou 2022), similar to how Latourian modes of existence articulate to produce networks of "reality".
2) Often consigned to the gray area of ahistoricity and aestheticism, literary modernism demands a revision today, due to the rapidly expanding Modernist studies and to the advent of a new concept − contemporariness (Agamben, Ruffel, Osborne). This is why it must be revisited in all its historical and historicized dimensions − from the religious, to the aesthetic, to the political and technological etc. − in an attempt to give modernism the contingency it lacked in the postwar readings. In doing so, we must avoid two missteps: firstly, a metaphysical and psychological one, the reading of modernism in arts and literature in terms of an inward turn, and secondly, the risk of isomorphic realism, the depiction of modernism as a socially negative representation of reality. Literary modernism has never been Cartesian, therefore what we are looking for when it comes to modernism in literature are not the antithetical or politically reprehensible reactions to industrial and scientific modernity, but its contradictions (Anderson 1984). In order to restore neglected dimensions of literary modernism and modernity, our issue is also interested in the way life is represented in literature, in all its aspects, human and non-human, fictional and non-fictional. We consider essential to show here that the actors which populate modern/modernist and contemporary literature are not only human beings and that ecological consciousness has become apparent long before the militant and theoretical discourse of ecology was put forth (Matei 2022).
Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Modern Epistemology and Modern Aesthetics;
- 21st Century Literary Modernism and the Long Modernity;
- Presentism and Contemporariness between Modernization and Ecologization;
- Environmentality and the Modern;
- Literary Modernism and Actor-Network Theory;
- Resumption of Modernism as Literary Anthropology;
- Resuming Modernism/Modernity as Style;
- Historical Modernisms;
- Modernism / Postmodernism and Contemporariness.
Further Readings
ANDERSON, Perry 1984. “Modernism and Revolution”, New Left Review, I/144: 96-113.
ANKER, Elizabeth S. and Rita FELSKI (eds.) 2017. Critique and postcritique. Durham: Duke University Press.
ARDOIN, Paul 2014. Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury.
ARNOULD-BLOOMFIELD, Elisabeth and Claire CHI-AH LYU 2020. Nonmodern Practices. Latour and Literary Studies, London: Bloomsbury.
AZOUVI, François 2007. La gloire de Bergson : Essai sur le magistère philosophique. Paris : Gallimard.
BARTHES, Roland 2016. “Politicization of Science in Romania”, in Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts. New York: Columbia University Press: 118-123.
CHOLLET, A. 1907. Le modernisme dans la religion. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library.
COTOI, Amalia 2022. “Modernismele secolului 21. Problema periodizării și cazul românesc”, Vatra, no. 10-11: 83-89.
FRIEDMAN, Susan Stanford 2015. Planetary Modernisms. Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press
FRIEDRICH, Hugo 1956. Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik: Von der Mitte des neunzehnten bis zur Mitte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Hamburg : Rowohlt.
GEFEN, Alexandre 2017. Réparer le monde. La Littérature française face au XXIe siècle. Paris : José Corti.
LATOUR Bruno and Paolo FABRI 2000 [1977] “The Rhetoric of Science: Authority and Duty in an Article from the Exact Sciences”, Technostyle vol. 16, n° 1 Hiver: 115-134
LATOUR, Bruno 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique, Paris: La Découverte.
LATOUR, Bruno 2004a. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry no. 30 (2): 225-248.
LATOUR, Bruno 2004. Politiques de la nature. Comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie ? Paris : La Découverte.
LATOUR, Bruno 2012. Enquête sur les modes d'existence. Une anthropologie des Modernes. Paris : La Découverte.
LATOUR, Bruno 2015. Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris : La Découverte.
LATOUR, Bruno 2017. Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique. Paris : La Découverte.
LYOTARD, Jean-François 1979. La Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir. Paris : Minuit.
MACÉ, Marielle 2016. Styles. Critique de nos formes de vie. Paris : Gallimard.
MANIGLIER, Patrice 2021. Le philosophe, la terre et le virus : Bruno Latour expliqué par l'actualité. Paris : Les Liens Qui Libèrent.
MANIGLIER, Patrice 2022. « Bruno Latour : une mort à contre-temps, une œuvre pour l’avenir », revue AOC, 11 octobre 2022.
MAO, Douglas, and Rebecca L. WALKOWITZ (eds.) 2008. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.3: 737–48.
MARX, William 2008. Les arrière-gardes au XXe siècle: L'autre face de la modernité esthétique, Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.
MATEI, Alexandru 2022. “Littérature orientée objet et puissances d’agir. Art et littérature française contemporaine”, in Timea GYIMESI (dir.), Paradigmes en littérature. La littérature comme paradigme, dans Acta Romanica, tomus XXXIII, 2022, Szeged, pp. 73-90.
POLANYI, Michael 1958. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
RABATÉ, Jean-Michel and Angeliki SPIROPOULOU (eds.) 2022, Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
ROSS, Stephen 2009. “Uncanny Modernism, or Analysis Interminable” in Pamela L. CAUGHIE (ed.), Disciplining Modernism, New York: Palgrave MacMilan
SERRES, Michel 2021. La Fontaine. Paris : Le Pommier.
VIART, Dominique 2019. “Les Littératures de terrain”, dans Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, no. 18 : 1-13.
de VRIES, Gerard 2012. Bruno Latour. New York: Polity Press
ZENETTI, Marie-Jeanne 2014. Factographies. L’enregistrement littéraire à l’époque contemporaine. Paris : Classiques Garnier.
Submission Deadline: 15 October 2023
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