Last year's lecture focused on building mental libraries, finding lost works and editing texts. But once the texts and corpora are there, what can we do with them ? New ways of reading and interpreting texts seem to be taking hold, giving readers the upper hand. Inquisitorial reading has become de rigueur. Whole swathes of literary history now provoke incomprehension, if not revolt.
It's important to place this recent evolution within a historical and cultural panorama of modes of reading and interpretation. Is it possible to maintain a relationship with texts that avoids the simplistic alternative of indignant condemnation or full approval ? Here, other more subtle and perhaps ultimately more emancipating modes of reading come into play : catharsis, allegory, philology, benevolence, admiration (Harold Bloom), epiphany (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht) or pleasure, in the sense given to it by Roland Barthes. The question is, quite simply (although the deceptiveness of this simplicity is obvious) : how do we read ?
The seminar will illustrate the thinking behind the lecture by giving the floor to various practitioners and theorists of reading and interpretation.