Discours/e Study Days · Contemporary Literary Practices: Communities and Convergences
March 20, 2024 · April 30 to May 2, 2025 · Université de Moncton
The Discours/e Study Days: Communities and Convergences in Contemporary Literature offer an opportunity to reflect on contemporary literary and cultural practices, particularly in Atlantic Canada. The annual programming, developed in partnership with the Frye Festival, the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, the Canada Research Chair in Translation and Colonialism (Université de Moncton), and the NT2 Lab (UQAM), has, in its first two editions, brought together scholars, writers, artists, and translators from Canada and beyond, both francophone and anglophone, to explore issues specific to contemporary literature as it moves between two or more languages and as it unfolds beyond the traditional book.
The Discours/e Study Days aim to serve as a driving force for collaboration between the artistic and scholarly communities of Atlantic Canada, with the goal of assessing the state of a rapidly evolving field and mapping the key themes animating a flourishing literary landscape. We therefore renew our invitation to writers and researchers to discuss topics such as issues related to translation or language of writing; the use of new dissemination platforms; the status of the “text” and the “literary community” (in Atlantic Canada); new reading practices in an increasingly digitized literary ecosystem; the emergence of hybrid literary forms and projects that challenge the traditional pragmatic boundaries of literary production; the impact of online presence on literary explorations of identity; the many ways in which “traditional” literary production adapts to an ever-evolving “new media” context; the effects of geolocation technologies and related possibilities for literary creation on ideas of local literary community; the transmediation of literary themes and techniques across other/newer “writing spaces”; other forms of local “spatialities” of writing such as exhibitions, websites, and archives; and the incorporation of new writing and/or reading technologies into literary production. What might these questions and contemporary manifestations reveal about today’s literary production? Do they contribute to the emergence of a distinct aesthetic sensibility?
This continually updated notebook gathers the articles produced during these study days, published by members of the Discours/e research community.
To cite this article:
Christophe Collard
Christophe Collard holds a doctorate in language and literature (Brussels, 2009) and has taught at universities and colleges in Belgium, Spain, China and the Philippines, as well as holding research fellowships in the USA and his second home, Canada.
Author of numerous journal articles, he has also written a monograph entitled Artist on the Make: David Mamet’s Work Across Media and Genres (2012), which was shortlisted for the 2014 biannual prize of the European Society for the Study of English.
Currently a professor at the Université de Moncton, he combines his academic activities with writing and translation work for the agance Prokopê, which he founded in 2019.
Geneviève Robichaud
Geneviève Robichaud’s research and writings focus mainly on the poetics of experimental writing and translation. With Erin Wunker and Sina Queyras, she is the co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (Coach House Books) and is the author of a chapbook, entitled Exit Text (Anstruther Press), and a book on translation poetics from McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure. She is the co-translator, alongside Danielle Leblanc, of Nous, Jane (Les Éditions Perce-Neige), a French translation of Aimee Wall’s novel We, Jane (Book*hug).
Geordie Miller
Geordie Miller is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison, with a specialization in Creative Writing. He has published two poetry collections: Re:union (Invisible, 2014) and Disharmonies (Hardscrabble Press, 2022). The latter book, co-authored with Marilyn Lerch, was one of the twenty “general selections” for the Frye Festival’s “I’m Buying an NB Book Day!” campaign in 2022. His writing on visual art and poetry has appeared in leading journals, such as Canadian Art and Canadian Poetry. He is a member of the Associate Editorial Board at The Dalhousie Review. In 2023, he co-founded an independent literary micropress—High Marsh Press—with a fellow poet, Keagan Hawthorne. One of the main goals of this press is to provide students of Mount Allison University direct work experience in the literary publishing sector through the administration of the annual Deborah Wills Chapbook Contest.
Matthew Cormier
Matthew Cormier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Université de Moncton. He obtained his MA in Canadian Comparative Literature from U de Moncton and his PhD in English from the University of Alberta before accepting a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto prior to his appointment. His work has appeared in numerous books and journals in Canada, the US, and Europe. His current research focuses on recent apocalyptic fiction in Canada.
