A New Normal?

One day, the virtual world might win over the real world.

— Paul Virilio (1994; quoted in Wilson)

The film is therefore a form of science fiction in which humans, beasts, and machines are on the verge of extinction—“sacred motors” linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which visible machines, reals experiences and actions are gradually disappearing.

— Leos Carax (2012; quoted in Brooks).

There is sex in heaven, you just can’t feel it.

— Anonymous (2022).

This is the second collection of essays that emerged from the thirty-eighth annual Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium. This issue, like the first, is organized around the conference’s theme, “A New Normal?” (“Vers une nouvelle normalité?”), a theme that reflected the exigencies of our circumstances and our anticipation of a new sociocultural landscape in the eventual post-pandemic era. It is a theme that also served as a comment on the conference’s fully virtual format, a first in the history of the event. Beyond the immediate context of the colloquium and its format, this introduction could be considered a commentary on the ongoing trend towards the virtual that, for better or for worse—as the above epigraphs echo—is occurring on a planetary level.

Given the novel coronavirus and its implications for the conference, it was decided to proceed with a new way to assemble the program itself, using some formats that were either innovative for this conference and others that are only rarely used. The common denominator to all formats is that they were all… virtual. The possible formats from which participants could choose were as follows: roundtables, reading groups, discussion groups, flash presentations, and traditional panels. The last category speaks for itself: these were panels of three to four participants, each delivering a paper between fifteen and twenty minutes long, followed by twenty or so minutes of Q&A. The fact that they were called “traditional panels” rather than just “panels” is illustrative of our departure from the norm for this colloquium. Indeed, of seventy-seven total panels at the 2021 event, just fifteen were “traditional,” even in their virtual configuration. We presume that this number illustrates the fact that a substantial number of colleagues believed audiences to have a shorter attention span in the virtual format: listening to a twenty-minute paper in a virtual mode is not the same as doing so in the presence of the speaker. Of course, this is not to say that these panels were unsuccessful or poorly attended. Attendance levels were quite high, and the same can be said of the quality of the interventions. Still, Zoom seems to lend itself to formats that privilege shorter talks, and the fact that the majority of participants chose new or rarely used panel formats appears to play to the strengths of the virtual. The medium shapes the message, as it were. That having been said, the advantages of face to face, in carne e ossa meetings also seem to remain intact.

The flash presentations—a format entirely new to the colloquium—also clocked in at fifteen. This format is an innovative take on the traditional conference talk: papers were designed to be three to five minutes in length, followed by discussion and Q&A. One of the obvious advantages of flash presentations is what we might call their extensible property: several of these flash-presentation panels went well beyond the traditional three-presenter format. Three of these panels had eight participants, a number that would be impossible, or at least highly undesirable, with papers of a standard length. Panel organizers thus took advantage of flash presentations to increase the number of scholars who could intervene on the topic at hand, thus bolstering the conference’s inclusivity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its familiarity, the roundtable format was the colloquium’s most popular choice. There were twenty-seven in all, ranging from three to nine participants each. Discussion groups (of which there were eleven) were a sort of hybrid between “traditional” panels and roundtables. The idea here was to have a panel where the papers were available in advance for those interested in attending. Participants gave very brief overviews of their papers, followed by discussion and Q&A. Finally, the least popular of all the formats was the reading group, of which there were nine. These panels were organized a bit like book clubs: brief presentations and discussions were centered around a single book. These reading groups, too, were well attended and surprisingly accessible even for audience members who had not read the work at hand. We may well want to take note of the potential of this format for future conferences, virtual or not.

To compensate for the reduced interpersonal engagement characteristic of Zooming, the organizers also held regular virtual social hours, hosted primarily by members of the colloquium steering committee. These were moderately successful—socializing by Zoom is difficult, given conversations do not flow in the same way as at in-person gatherings. Martinis and assorted beverages only seen but not shared in the same place seem to lose their flavor…

In total there were three hundred and thirty-one registered participants at the conference, quite a respectable number. In addition, members of the public were allowed to attend if they had access to the link, which is an advantage over the in-person format, as it increased the visibility of our work. Some participants shared their Zoom links on social media, with at times very impressive results, including one panel that had nearly one hundred and fifty audience members. The colloquium’s Twitter feed (@20thand21st) promotes a wide variety of panels. Thankfully, we are aware of no instances of “Zoombombing,” one of the drawbacks of the virtual.

Money and finances are, as always, an issue to contend with, and, in this respect, the virtual format of the virtual colloquium generated a number of advantages: in short, it was extremely cost-effective. The sole financial outlay amounted to token expenses for the production of the conference program (which was only available in digital format).¹ Everything else was “free” in a sense. While we all benefited from university subscriptions to Zoom, these were not direct expenditures for those of us who participated in or organized the event. This lack of direct expenses made it possible to not charge a registration fee; a first for the colloquium. This is a stark departure from “normality.” Recent in-person colloquia have been quite pricey affairs, with the overall cost of organizing a conference in the high five-figures (with the bulk of the expenses paid by participants’ registration fees). Other direct costs were avoided as well: expenditures on hotels, meals, and airfare were eliminated entirely. It follows that the carbon footprint of our colloquium was also radically reduced, limited to only what it took to power our personal computers.

As the following essays make clear, the dramatic change in format for the conference did not in any way diminish the quality of the interventions. This special issue is a wide-ranging one, with articles on detective fiction, literary fiction, the pandemic (the term “doomscrolling” appears in two of the following articles), edited collections, social media, food culture and food studies. We are particularly pleased to include a dossier on the work of the award-winning contemporary writer, Christine Montalbetti. Assembled by Warren Motte, the dossier includes a fascinating essay by Montalbetti on her experience as a writer living through the pandemic. It is particularly fitting to end the volume with this dossier, since the colloquium was, surprisingly, a highly literary event. Despite the ever-changing shape of French and Francophone studies (which we referenced in the introduction to the first volume of “A New Normal?”), the colloquium was the site of some delightful panels on contemporary literature and literary figures. In addition to the panel around Montalbetti’s work, there were several sessions on national and regional traditions, including Asian, Caribbean, and sub-Saharan African literatures. There were also a host of panels on the work of individual writers and theorists, including Amadou Koné, Annie Ernaux, Georges Bataille, Kim Thúy, Chloé Delaume, Samuel Beckett, Leslie Kaplan, Édouard Glissant, and the recently departed Michel Deguy, friend and colleague to whom this issue is dedicated.

Like everybody else in the profession and on the planet, we have been affected by the pandemic for the past two years. While we might have had our fill of “pivoting” and being “nimble” in our approach to the shifting conditions of the pandemic, we are nevertheless delighted to offer the following articles, which represent the continued successful collaboration between the editors of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES and the colloquium. Is it too optimistic to say: see you all in carne e ossa next year?

Guest Co-Editor Editors

Andrew Sobanet Roger Célestin, Eliane Dalmolin

Notes on Contributors

Roger Célestin is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France from 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin is Professor of French at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France from 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Andrew Sobanet is a Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of politics and literature. His research interests include the twentieth-century novel, testimony, mass media, and European history. He is the author of Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (U of Nebraska P, 2008) and Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana UP, 2018).

Notes

1 We thank our colleague Julia Frengs who produced the program with the assistance of a graduate student; the work was generously funded by the University of Nebraska.