The complexity of the chain of processes involved in producing a work (from composition to reception) opens up many opportunities for failure to occur. This seminar invites papers to think about the various acceptations, modalities, and implications of failure in literary, critical, and theoretical practices. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.
Failure as a topos in fiction is not uncommon. Diegetically fertile, it can also structure a novel. One may think of the modern figure of the anti-hero, leading to reconsider and rewrite the Bildungsroman in the context of a loss of ideals. But failure depends on the point of view adopted, the different historical periods, epistemes, and cultures studied.
As the opposite of performance, failure may mean the inability of a work to produce expected effects, or may even be seen as a matter of language and writing. Finding one’s voice, for an American writer, for instance, could mean “dismantl[ing] the English language [...], rendering language convulsive” (Deleuze), indeed, making it fail. Linguistic and formal experimentation involves disregarding pre-existing standards, thus, potentially failing. Melville also suggests this when he writes about Hawthorne that “it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.” Isn’t genuine literary creation, then, truly a matter of failing, insofar as it seeks not to imitate but to make all criteria by which it can be judged falter, if not disappear?
Etymologically, failure, or “failing to perform a duty,” recalls the French verb faillir, gesturing towards the notion’s moral and ethical acceptation. Couldn’t the imperative to be innovative, the “anxiety of influence” that may derive from it, and perhaps, the “failure to fail,” also generate failure—the failure of writing, or the failure/impossibility to write?
Writers’ awareness of the inevitability of failure may fuel their creativity, forcing them to find new ways of expression, thereby keeping language and poetry alive, always leading to “a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure” (T.S. Eliot). If, for Eliot, “failure” is the impossible congruence between intention and expression, emotions and form, and if we take into account the chasm between the symbolic and the real, couldn’t all literary expression, then, be failure? In the modern era, the questioning of totality and authority renders failure in terms of literary creation and interpretation both inevitable and essential. How to successfully interpret a work and reconstruct a presumed unity when it is no longer possible to rely on the cosmic unity of the world and the work, and when, in the wake of post-structuralism, decoding the author’s intentions is no longer the only goal of interpretation?
Les propositions de communication (en anglais) doivent être déposées sur la plateforme avant le 21 septembre 2017: https://www.acla.org/seminar/composing-failure