Literary studies' contribution to existing scholarship on organised violence

Literary studies' contribution to existing scholarship on organised violence

After a seven-week series of insightful talks and intense discussions involving researchers from a wide range of disciplines - law, psychology, international relations and political economy, media and communication science, sociology and social work, history, visual culture, mathematics and statistical analysis, political philosophy, linguistics, performing arts and, last but not the least, gender studies - is there anything more that literary studies can add to this collective reflexion on organised violence? Compared to a short-time focus of media and political discourse, can a long-time perspective literature embraces allow us to shed a light on the transgenerational transformations of the collective memory of extreme violence? Does a system of literary genres and leitmotivs offer a set of narrative patterns that influence any narrative account of collective violence? Could a fictional and often polyphonic - and thus non assertive and non dogmatic - character of literature allow to reduce the risk of instrumentalising representations of violence? Frequently acting as a counter-discourse, written from the point of view of the vanquished (oppressed, exploited, abused, defeated, colonised), does literature strive to suggest new models of social and political organisation that could prevent organised violence? 
These are some of the uneasy questions the last session speakers will try to address next Friday.

Liudmyla Harmash is a Professor of comparative literature at H.S. Skovoroda National Pedagogical University and STUDIUM visiting fellow at the research centre Cultural and Discursive Interactions (ICD) of the University of Tours. Her research project, entitled "Fictional and Non-Fictional Ukrainian Literature of the Russian-Ukrainian War", examines Ukrainian wartime texts to investigate how they integrate documentary evidence, historical facts and personal accounts and how lsuch polymorphic texts engage with the issues of cultural reparation, collective memory and politically charged historical discourses. Liudmyla Harmash is particularly interested in literature’s role in psychological rehabilitation, resilience and social cohesion during conflict.

Emmanuelle Séjourné is a Professor of German literature and a fully accredited member of the research team Cultural and Discursive Interactions (ICD) at the University of Tours, as well as an active member of several higher education societies of German researchers in France and abroad. Her last book “Citoyennetés narratives” [Narrative citizenships] (2025) deals with the legacy of Arendtian political thought in German-speaking contemporary literature.

Roxana Ilasca is a lecturer in contemporary Spanish literature. Her research focuses on 21st-century Spanish fiction and especially the Spanish memory novel, rural literature and anthropocene fiction, while also exploring the novel as a genre, by analysing new aesthetic approaches to hybrid writing. In her publications, she examines the use of testimony and archive in the construction of memory and postmemory across a range of novels that investigate the past - whether of a family, a community, or a nation - in order to challenge official historical narratives and bring to light the experiences of marginalised individuals and groups. The literary works she usually comments on often blend fact and fiction, testimony, archives, and imagination, inviting readers to reflect on the ways memory and identity are constructed both on an individual and on a collective level.