Voir ce que je vois, voir ce que je m’attends à voir : degré zéro de l’écriture du voyage et écriture littéraire du voyage. En citant Henri Michaux et Michel Butor

Abstract: To see what I expect to see: travel writing's degree zero and literarytravel narratives. With references to Henri Michaux and Michel Butor. This essay examines what arguments can be put forward to explain why readers and critics view travel writing as literary. It offers an answer that does not imply any coded definition of literature and literary works: literary travel writing is the mimesis of the questioning which characterises any literary work. This questioning rests on: 1. The duality of travellers’ perceptions of the foreign lands they discover. They see what they see and what they expect to see; their perceptions are mediated and unmediated, and consequently reflexive and congruent with the cognitive undecipherability of the foreign lands. 2. The paradox of the situation of the traveller/writer. Abroad, the traveller is not viewed as a foreigner; the least difference he/she embodies highlights a paradoxical cognitive undecipherability. The effect of the auctorial enunciation is limited by this paradox. 3. The reflexive construction of the piece of travel writing. Because they bar any meta-description of the foreign land and its people, the duality of perceptions and the traveller’s paradox make the evocations of places and people at once autonomous and implicitly related. 4. The behaviourist approach to the people of the foreign land(s). These restrictions to the traveller’s power to interpret makes the behaviourist approach obligatory. People of foreign lands can be viewed as objective entities. 5. The implicit inferences that human objective entities motivate and suggest an overall questioning. These critical and theoretical views utilise references to Michaux’s and Butor’s travels abroad and their travel writing.       &nbsp

Contemporary International/World Novels’ Transmissibility from Partial Connections to Hermeneutics of Situation (With References to Glissant, Volpi, Murakami, and Rushdie)

Due to its formal and semantic flexibility, the novel is often viewed as exemplarily associated with globalization. Most interpretations of this view lead to a paradox – presentations that the genre of the novel offers can be specific, and yet, widely circulated – and refer it to transnationalism, to the worlding of many cultural identities, or to some kind of literary space. These interpretations leave open the questioning of the cultural denotations or literary features that empower novels to be widely circulated and universalized. This article identifies and analyzes this explicit questioning in Glissant’s Tout-monde, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Volpi’s In Search of Klingsor, and suggests a quadruple answer. 1. Contemporary novels, that are read as world novels, reflect the paradox that qualifies their world circulation: they designate and deconstruct the signs of the universal by offering totalizing and detotalizing perspective and by questioning their universalization potential. 2. This formal and semantic paradox is presented by means of “partial connec tions”, i.e. objective or imagined references to distant or non-identical cultural references that can be viewed as partially overlapping. Partial connections impose a metonymic view of all chains of cultural mentions, and, between the latter, delineate special kinds of union – differences coexist and unite, and their discontinuities invite to view them as equally real. Partial connections found world novels’ rhetoric and transmissibility. 3. Due to these partial connections, some kind of specific herme neutics is developed or implied – hermeneutics of situation. No overall inter pretation of their own universalizability is offered by world novels – they generate symptomatic readings. 4. Remarkably, these literary and cultural montages apply to canonical kinds of novel – investigation novel (In Search of Klingsor), historical novel (The Moor’s Last Sigh), Bildungsroman (Tout-monde, Kafka on the Shore), that are most often recognized as universal because of their canonicity and the readability they show. On the one hand, these montages alter the canonicity and readability of these kinds of novels, on the other, they trigger their wide circulation because they negate any rule of reading and any overall interpretation, and however suggest some kind of universal hermeneutics – the use of partial connections is of utmost importance

Notas sobre o estado da literatura e da crítica francesas contemporâneas a respeito de duas vias da criação literária hoje / Notes on the state of french literature and contemporary criticism about two ways of literary creation today

Propomos neste artigo a apresentação de um panorama da literatura e da crítica francesas contemporâneas. Esse panorama se baseia em duas constatações: de um lado, na constatação do apego dos escritores e dos críticos franceses a uma certa ideia da vanguarda, herdada dos anos 1920-1930, retomada nos anos 1960-1970 e hoje essencialmente cativa de uma tradição do novo, ou, em outras palavras, de uma repetição da vanguarda de uma forma convencional; de outro lado, na constatação de que toda uma parte da literatura e da crítica busca, entretanto, escapar a esse conformismo da vanguarda e tenta apresentar obras que contrariam as hipóteses que comandam a criação vinda dessa tradição da vanguarda.Traduzido por Adriana Santos Corrêa do original "Notes sur l’état de la littérature et de la critique françaises contemporaines ”” à propos de deux voies de la création littéraire aujourd’hui"

Notes sur l’état de la littérature et de la critique françaises contemporaines – à propos de deux voies de la création littéraire aujourd’hui1

On propose ici une mise en perspective de la littérature et de la critique françaises contemporaines. Cette mise en perspective repose sur deux constats: d’une part, le constat de l’attachement des écrivains et des critiques français à une certaine idée de l’avant-garde, héritée des années 1920-1930, reprise dans les années 1960-1970, et, aujourd’hui essentiellement captive d’une tradition du nouveau,ou, en d’autres termes, d’une répétition de l’avant-garde en une manière conventionnelle; d’autre part, le constat que toute une part de la littérature et de la critique entreprend cependant d’échapper à ce conformisme de l’avant-garde et tente de donner des oeuvres qui vont contre les hypothèses qui commandent la création issue de cette tradition de l’avant-garde

COSMO (“Communicating about Objects using Sensory–Motor Operations”): A Bayesian modeling framework for studying speech communication and the emergence of phonological systems

International audienceWhile the origin of language remains a somewhat mysterious process, understanding how human language takes specific forms appears to be accessible by the experimental method. Languages, despite their wide variety, display obvious regularities. In this paper, we attempt to derive some properties of phonological systems (the sound systems for human languages) from speech communication principles. We introduce a model of the cognitive architecture of a communicating agent, called COSMO (for “Communicating about Objects using Sensory–Motor Operations') that allows a probabilistic expression of the main theoretical trends found in the speech production and perception literature. This enables a computational comparison of these theoretical trends, which helps us to identify the conditions that favor the emergence of linguistic codes. We present realistic simulations of phonological system emergence showing that COSMO is able to predict the main regularities in vowel, stop consonant and syllable systems in human languages

Sensorimotor learning in a Bayesian computational model of speech communication

International audienceAlthough sensorimotor exploration is a basic process within child development, clear views on the underlying computational processes remain challenging. We propose to compare eight algorithms for sensorimotor exploration, based on three components: " accommodation " performing a compromise between goal babbling and social guidance by a master, " local extrapolation " simulating local exploration of the sensorimotor space to achieve motor generalizations and " idiosyncratic babbling " which favors already explored motor commands when they are efficient. We will show that a mix of these three components offers a good compromise enabling efficient learning while reducing exploration as much as possible

Emergence du langage par jeux déictiques dans une société d'agents sensori-moteurs en interaction

International audienceIn this paper, we show how some properties of human language could emerge from the primitive deixis function. For this aim, we model a society of sensori-motor agents able to produce vocalizations and to point to objects in their environnement. We show how principles of the Dispersion Theory [6] and the Quantal Theory [13] could emerge from the interaction between these agents

A computational model of perceptuo-motor processing in speech perception: learning to imitate and categorize synthetic CV syllables

International audienceThis paper presents COSMO, a Bayesian computational model, which is expressive enough to carry out syllable production, perception and imitation tasks using motor, auditory or perceptuo-motor information. An imitation algorithm enables to learn the articulatory-to-acoustic mapping and the link between syllables and correspond- ing articulatory gestures, from acoustic inputs only: syn- thetic CV syllables generated with a human vocal tract model. We compare purely auditory, purely motor and perceptuo-motor syllable categorization under various noise levels

Assessing Idiosyncrasies in a Bayesian Model of Speech Communication

International audienceAlthough speakers of one specific language share the same phoneme representations, their productions can differ. We propose to investigate the development of these differences in production , called idiosyncrasies, by using a Bayesian model of communication. Supposing that idiosyncrasies appear during the development of the motor system, we present two versions of the motor learning phase, both based on the guidance of an agent master: " a repetition model " where agents try to imitate the sounds produced by the master and " a communication model " where agents try to replicate the phonemes produced by the master. Our experimental results show that only the " communication model " provides production idiosyncrasies, suggesting that idiosyncrasies are a natural output of a motor learning process based on a communicative goal

A Unified Theoretical Bayesian Model of Speech Communication

International audienceBased on a review of models and theories in speech communication, this paper proposes an original Bayesian framework able to express each of them in a unified way. This framework allows to selectively incorporate motor processes in perception or auditory representations in production, thus implementing components of a perceptuo-motor link in speech communication processes. This provides a basis for future computational works on the joint study of perception, production and their coupling in speech communication