10th Congress of the ESCL/SELC “Le jeu: Gambling, Gaming and Play in Literature”

 “Le jeu: Gambling, Gaming and Play in Literature”

The 10th Congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature

Paris, Sorbonne-Université, 2-6 September 2024

This Congress will be co-organised by the European Society of Comparative Literature and the Faculty of Humanities of Sorbonne University. The subject of the Congress will be based on general reflections on play from sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, allowing the Congress to open up to transdisciplinary perspectives. However, a strictly literary basis is formed by the main critics who have developed a reflection on play (Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, Michel Picard). On this basis, the congress will explore a variety of literary texts from different cultures and periods, engaging with play in different ways – without neglecting the link between literature and other forms of artistic expression.

• The first is a thematic relationship, where literature evokes the game (in Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler or Stefan Zweig’s The Chess Player, for example, or even, in a different form, in Pascal’s famous wager).
• A second relationship consists in reading the literary work as a game, as illustrated by various experiments, such as the Oulipo, the comic novel (Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, or Hoffmann’s fantastic and comic stories): humour and irony have a special place in this.
• A third relationship consists in constructing the literary work as a game, in the manner of Beckett who reproduces in his theatre the structure of a chess game. The reflection could thus explore the various relationships that literature has with the game, whether it be the theatrical game (the notion of “play” could be questioned), the relationship to the rule, which is both contrary to the spirit of freedom of the game and a substance of the game itself.
• Finally, it could consist in questioning the hypothesis of a definition of literature as a game, in particular when it is approached in its relationship to society.

These different lines of research are simple suggestions, and are by no means restrictive; they in no way exclude intersemiotic or intermedial approaches.