Diana Holmes
Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), and a founder-member of the feminist network Women in French-UK. She has published widely on French women’s writing and reading from the late nineteenth century to the present, ranging across the hierarchy of culture from ‘high’ to ‘low’ brow.
Her work includes studies of popular culture (e.g. Imagining the Popular: highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow in contemporary French culture, with David Looseley, 2013) and books and articles on Colette, Rachilde, women novelists from the Belle Époque to the present, and the enduring popularity of romantic fiction. Her latest book Middlebrow Matters: Women's Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle Époque (Liverpool University Press, 2018), won the American MLA Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, 2019. Her co-edited book Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975-2015 (with Margaret Atack, Alison Fell, Imogen Long) appeared with Liverpool University Press in 2020.
She also works on film and co-edits the Manchester University Press series French Film Directors, now approaching 50 volumes.
During her visit, Professor Holmes will give a public lecture entitled “Lost in a book – on the nature and value of immersive reading” (see below) as part of a study day on 15 June 2022 that focuses on French cultural studies. She is hosted by two 2021 Fellows: Dr. Isabelle Marc, Centre for research and experimentation on the artistic act (CREAA), and Professor Todd Reeser, Society, Stakeholders and Governments in Europe (SAGE).
Public lecture - Lost in a book – on the nature and value of immersive reading
June 15, 2022 | From 09:30 until 10:45 | Salle de Table Ronde, MISHA, Strasbourg (FR)
By Diana Holmes
Professor of French
University of Leeds (United Kingdom)
The lecture will be given in English. It is part of the study day "French Cultural Studies ?", everyone is welcome, but registration is required. See the full programme below.
In her book Middlebrow Matters (2018), Professor Holmes argued for the salutary power of immersive reading, that experience of being transported into an imaginary world that narrative fiction can (magically) produce out of a series of letters on a printed page. The qualities of deft plotting, empathetic characterisation and skilful make-believe have been little valued in the past century, dominated by a more formalist aesthetic, but they have remained central to the reasons why most ‘ordinary’ readers choose to read novels. In this talk Diana Holmes will examine further what immersive reading actually involves, by exploring scientific accounts of the brain’s activity during fictional reading, and some psychological and literary theories of the value of a type of reading often dismissed as merely ‘escapist’. What actually happens in our brains and bodies when we read fiction immersively? and why does it matter?
Examples will be drawn from French novels that attract a wide and enthusiastic readership - albeit in some cases straddling the frontier between popular and critical acclaim. They will include Colette’s fiction, and the interesting case of the return of the family saga in recent bestsellers by (among others) Leila Slimani and Alice Zeniter.
French Cultural Studies ? The stakes and politics of knowledge
June 15, 2022 | From 09:30 until 17:30 | Salle de Table Ronde, MISHA, Strasbourg (FR)
Study day
Although cultural studies constitutes one of the major academic turning pointsthat has influenced and transformed research in the humanities and social sciences over the last sixty years, it has long been marginal in France. Today, it is gaining ground among researchers from various disciplines (languages and civilisations, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, information and communication). In the public debate, Anglo-Saxon cultural studies hs recently been identified as the source of 'wokism'. Imported from American universities, it supposedly threatens the universalism of which France is a cultural pillar.
The specific aim of this event is to reflect on the challenges of research in cultural studies in the French academic context. Can we speak of "cultural studies" in France? To what extent is it (or could it be) independent -- epistemologically and beyond-- from Anglo-Saxon cultural studies?
Who does "cultural studies" in France? Under what conditions? How does it differ from what is done in other cultural contexts? What do the current controversies surrounding "wokism" say about the preconceptions that prevail in French academic spaces and the relationships between knowledge and power?
Are there (im)possible subjects or objects of research for the human and social sciences in France? If such (im)possibilities can be observed, what is at stake and what is political about treating them?
Although we will likely not answer all these questions, asking them and responding to them in a variety of ways will be our focus for the day.
The day is co-organised by several USIAS Fellows.
Programme
09:30 Welcome coffee
Session I : Broadening the scope of cultural studies
09:45 Lost in a book – on the nature and value of immersive reading
Diana Holmes, Professor of French literature and cinema, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds (United Kingdom)
10:45 Round Table : French Cultural Studies here and elsewhere, with:
- Diana Holmes (University of Leeds)
- Isabelle Marc (Complutense University of Madrid, USIAS Fellow 2021)
- Anthony Mangeon (University of Strasbourg, USIAS Fellow 2017)
- Todd Reeser (University of Pittsburgh, USIAS Fellow 2021)
- Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg)
12:30 End of session I
Session II
14:30 The savages of civilisation: A look at the Zone, past and present
Jérôme Beauchez (University of Strasbourg, USIAS Fellow 2018) will present his new book on "the Zone". The Zone is located between the centre of Paris and the suburbs; it was a very particular kind of no-man's-land, born in the 1840s, which brought together a whole lumpenproletariat excluded from the bourgeois centre as well as from the working-class suburbs. The book examines the different ways in which marginalized populations are designated, despised or dominated. It also examines the violence that is attributed to them, often in order to better hide the violence done to them.
17:30 End of session II
