Mardi 21 novembre 2023 18h Salle 126 Saint-Charles 1
Dans le cadre des activités de son thème 3 « Faire commun », EMMA a le plaisir d’accueillir Laurent Alibert (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, ReSO) pour une intervention au séminaire régulier d’EMMA le mardi 21 novembre à 18h, salle 126. La séance sera animée par Théo Maligeay.
Il sera possible de rejoindre le séminaire en visioconférence via zoom : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/91654686842?pwd=UGVKazkvYUJkR0pub0NPWm5LM0Judz09
For a contemporary poetics of Middle Earth: Recovery and presence in the world
John Garth's recent work, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020) responds to an expectation. With the proliferation of developments of tolkienian’s legendarium oriented towards a largely autotelic fantasy, it was time to recall how Tolkien's writing is rooted above all in an attentive look at reality and that, in many aspects, this work is of another type of imagination, where the frame of reference of the points of view from which the story is considered – whether it is the Shire for the Lord of the Rings or Beleriand for the Silmarillion(s) – is marked by attention to the surrounding world (parsimony of the uses of magic, largely contemplative narration or, on the contrary, narration focusing on the historical and political mechanisms and their consequences on the oikouménē [Letters, p.283]) which holds many respects of a culture of presence in the world, thereby joining a central theme in European poetry since the second half of the 20th century.
« What use are poets in times of need? (« wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? ») wrote Hölderlin a century earlier. Did Tolkien have the answer, he who laid the foundations of The Silmarillion during the Great War and wrote a considerable part of The Lord of the Rings during the Second World War? As an extension of this questioning, we will ask here why we should read Tolkien in our time of disintegration of the link to the world, whether ecological, social, human or poetic. Why, then, read Tolkien in the 21st century? We know that his criticism of the dangers of technical society is not without parallel with the work of Bergson and Ellul (but also Berdyaev) and can poetically accompany a degrowthist model. But the contemporary strength of Tolkien's work goes beyond the sole environmental concern to raise the question of presence in the world: sense of collective necessity but also sensitive presence, of attention to the place where the living is incarnated.
We will indeed seek to see how, contrary to another type of escapism which feeds itself on the model of entertainment in the Pascalian sense, this work continues to speak to our time and can help us to live in it. For this we will partly rely on the work of John Garth but we will parallel Tolkien's approach with the questioning of the French poet Yves Bonnefoy on the relationship between presence in the world on the one hand and the role or lure of the image of a « somewhere else ». On this point, Tolkien's approach is both radically distinct, even opposed to that of the French poet, but he paradoxically joins him by in fact renewing a poetics of reality through myth.
Indeed, Middle Earth presents itself as the construction of a poet and a philologist for whom language and myth are inescapably linked and who uses myth as language in order to offer us what he calls recovery: “regaining of a clear view […], seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves") whose first function is to innervate our gaze – amazed, but not illusioned – on the world around us.
Laurent Alibert is a PRCE teacher in Occitan Language and Literature at University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3 and Ossetian Language and Civilization at the French National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). He wrote Le Roman de Jaufré et les Narty Kaddjytæ (Honoré Champion, 2015), La mimesis et son refus dans la littérature occitane (L’Harmattan, 2021) and directed "Archéologie et praxis du conte occitan"(Revue des langues romanes, Tome CXXVII n°1 | 2023) . He is a qualified MCF in sections 10 (comparative literature), 15 (other languages) and 73 (regional languages and cultures) of the CNU. In addition to his work on the occitan and ossetian fields, he has regularly written and published on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Some of his papers and conferences on Tolkien’s work:
- « Le Moyen Age comme matière linguistique et structurelle dans le Seigneur des Anneaux : quelques jeux littéraires, historiques et culturels comme source du renouvellement narratif » conference at the Crest Medieval Festival (Drôme), 27th of may 2023
- Translation of the critical review of The People of Middle-Earth (History of Middle-Earth vol. 12) par Charles Noad, in J.R.R. Tolkien, « L’effigie des Elfes, La feuille de la Compagnie », Cahiers d’études tolkieniennes n°3, dir. Michael Devaux, Bragelonne, collection essais, 2014, p. 475-99
- 8 entries in Dictionnaire Tolkien, (dir. Vincent Ferré,), CNRS Editions, Paris, 2012 : « Amour », « Géants », « Fermier Gilles de Ham », « Exodus », « Lúthien », « Livre de Jonas, (traduction par Tolkien) », « Mandos », « Tolkien (Edith) »
- « L’héroïsme chez Tolkien : une étude de Farmer Giles of Ham », seminary in the Symposium “Tolkien aujourd’hui” (13th-15th of june 2008, Rambures). Published in M. Devaux, V. Ferré, Ch. Ridoux, Tolkien aujourd’hui, Valenciennes, Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2011
- La place de l’héroïsme amoureux, de l’amour chevaleresque et du merveilleux dans les Lais (Marie de France), Jaufre (anonyme occitan, XIIème/XIIIème siècle) et The Lay of Leithian (Tolkien), (Master 2)
- « Farmer Gilles of Ham, The Lord of the Rings, The Lay of Leithian, trois éclairages pour l’esquisse d’un héroïsme tolkienien », (with Emeric Moriau) invited to S. Provini’s seminary on heroism, 15th of june 2006, Université Paris VII. Published as « The Lay of Leithian ou l’héroïsme du couple », in Camenae, n°4, juin 2008, the online journal of Paris IV-Sorbonne University
- « L’influence indo-européenne en Arda et ses limites », seminary in the Tolkien Symposium at Rennes II University (2 avril 2003), published in Tolkien, Trente ans après (1973-2003), Vincent Ferré (dir.), Paris, Christian Bourgois, 2004
- « J.R.R. Tolkien, de la Terre-du-Milieu à notre histoire » in Aventures de l’Histoire, Janvier 2003, Hors série n°5, p. 88-92
- Imaginaire médiéval et mythologique dans l’oeuvre de Tolkien, Maîtrise de lettres (dir. Armand Strubel) Paris X-Nanterre/Warwick University, 2002.