Cercles
Revue « TRANS- » n. 33
Published on Monday, April 28, 2025
Abstract
The circle has extensively been studied for its symbolic implications and the values assigned to it across various cultures and eras (see Alain Delaunay, Gilbert Durand, or Gaston Bachelard, for instance). However, its seminal role in the study of textual dynamics and literary reception can give rise to new critical approaches. Whether they spoke of perfection, ideal, confinement, involvement in initiatory journeys, writers have taken many approaches to exploring the circularity of literary works. Whether in narratology or hermeneutics, the circle challenges conventional definitions of literature, narrative structures, and temporality.
Announcement
Argument
The circle has extensively been studied for its symbolic implications and the values assigned to it across various cultures and eras (see Alain Delaunay, Gilbert Durand, or Gaston Bachelard, for instance). However, its seminal role in the study of textual dynamics and literary reception can give rise to new critical approaches. Whether they spoke of perfection, ideal, confinement, involvement in initiatory journeys, writers have taken many approaches to exploring the circularity of literary works. Whether in narratology or hermeneutics, the circle challenges conventional definitions of literature, narrative structures, and temporality.
This call for papers aims to bring together contributions that examine the circle from a comparative perspective, as a motif, a form, a rhetorical device, and/or as a narrative structure in literary works.
One may find that it is difficult to apply notions of circularity to traditional conceptions of literature and narrativity. Narratives are most often envisioned as linear dynamics—one might think of Paul Ricoeur or Raphaël Baroni. Yet Plato, in the Timaeus, asserts that the circle is the ideal form, “equidistant in all directions from the center to the extremities1” (Timaeus 33b). Meanwhile, in the 20th century, Georges Poulet applies the same idea to literary texts, framing the circle as a structuring concept of reality and writing, claiming that “there is no form more complete than the circle. No form is more durable either.2” In Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Plon, 1961), Poulet describes the circle as “the most constant form through which we imagine the mental or real space we inhabit, situating what surrounds us or what we surround ourselves with. Its simplicity, perfection, and universal applicability make it one of those privileged shapes which underlie all belief systems, serving as a foundational structure for the mind.3”
In this respect, it is noticeable that many texts embrace circular forms: what can we say, for instance, about classical tragedies or even Romantic fragments, in which literary absolutes are mirrored in both themes and textual structures4? Circularity may operate there at a macrostructural or a microstructural level. Macrostructure may govern narrative organization– as in Boccaccio’s Decameron or Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, in which the tales cyclically return to their starting point, suspending linear progression. One may also envision the circular structure of a story or the organization of a poetry collection– for example, in Japan’s oldest anthologies Kokin Waka shū, where the poems are arranged around seasonal cycles. Microstructurally, circularity is made prominent through repetitions, as in Cho Nam-joo’s novel Kim Ji-young, Born in 1982, where the recurrence of generational gender inequalities trap female characters in oppressed positions. A similar dynamic drives Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman (1975), in which repetitive gestures convey the protagonist’s alienation.
Circularity can also be particularly relevant in historical contexts which invite various forms of return. For example, in the aftermath of the World Wars of the 20th century, many texts have adopted a circular structure, or have been based on repeated motifs. As such, the circle became both the image and structure of writing styles or forms shaped by issues of collective memory. Obsessive patterns of repetition, as in Jorge Semprun’s works, map trauma onto narrative circularity– in narratives that never cease to return to themselves, to the memory. This was particularly noticed by Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster: “The circle, uncurled along a straight line rigorously prolonged, reforms a circle eternally bereft of a center5” (Gallimard, 1980, p. 8). Such image of a circle “eternally bereft of a center” is part of a wider reflection on emptiness, the loss of landmarks, uncertainty, and the pursuit of meaning in a world that hinders completion. Writing, now as an unfinished process, translates the impossibility of closure through its own circular form. Joanna Kotowska-Miziniak, for example, highlights that the circle is an essential key to reading Claude Simon's works, while Dominique Viart links this figure to an aesthetics of obsessive rumination and melancholy.
Finally, the circle plays a prominent part in the shaping of the experience of reception and interpretation. One thinks of Hans Robert Jauss’s “horizon of expectation” and Schleiermacher’s “hermeneutic circle”– a notion later adapted by Françoise Lavocat [2012] to consider the specificity of the comparative gesture. One may consider how these different approaches respond to the idea of textual circularity in the very dynamics of reading.
Non-exhaustive list of research topics:
- The circle as a literary symbol or archetype (perfection, infinity, ideal, return to origins)
- Interdisciplinary approaches (literature and religion, music, philosophy, mythology)
- Motifs (e.g., the Wheel of Fortune in Western or Persian literatures)
- Circular narrative structures
- Literature and circular temporalities
- Circle and intermediality (e.g. architecture: rose windows, or video games: Elden Ring…)
- Reception(-creation): literary circles and reading circles
- Literary cycles and logics of return
- Comparatism and circularity
Important information for authors
TRANS- is a comparative literature review: the comparative perspective is a crucial factor in the selection process. The Committee evaluates proposals according to their relevance to the call, the originality of their corpus, their comparative approach or the quality of their theoretical reflection on the proposed theme.
TRANS- accepts articles written in French, English, Spanish and Italian.
Papers that have been previously published (article, book, book chapter), including in another language, will not be considered for publication.
Submission guidelines
Proposals for articles (3000 signs), together with a brief bibliography, must be sent, in .DOC or .RTF format, to lgcrevue@gmail.com
by June 15, 2025 at the latest.
In a separate file, the author will send a short bio-bibliography.
Selected articles must be submitted by October 1, 2025.
Indicative bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, Boston, Beacon Press, 1994 [1957].
Baroni, Raphaël, La Tension narrative, Paris, Seuil, 2007.
Belloi Livio, Delville Michel, Levaux Christophe and Pirenne Christophe (dir.), Boucle et répétition. Musique, littérature, arts visuels, Liège, Presses universitaires de Liège, coll. « Clinamen », 2015.
Benoit, éric, Braud, Michel, Moussaron, Jean-Pierre, Poulin Isabelle and Rabaté Dominique (dir.), Écritures du ressassement, Modernités 15, Pessac, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001.
Blanchot, Maurice, The Book to Come, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002 [1959].
Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1992 [1969].
Braud, Michel (dir.) Poétiques de la durée, Modernités 30, Pessac, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2010.
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, New York, University of Columbia Press, 1994 [1968].
Deleuze, Gilles et Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980].
Genette, Gérard, « La Littérature et l’espace », Figures II, Paris, Seuil, 1969.
Hamel, Jean-François, Revenances de l’histoire : répétition, narrativité, modernité, Paris, Minuit, coll. « Paradoxe », 2006.
Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling / Repetition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983 [1843]
Lavocat, Françoise, « Le Comparatisme comme herméneutique de la défamiliarisation », Vox Poetica, en ligne, 2012. URL : https://vox-poetica.com/t/articles/lavocat2012.html
Munsch, Suzanne, « Une poétique de la durée pour une poétique de l’espace à travers les romans de Céline », in Michel Braud (dir.) Poétiques de la durée, Modernités 30, Pessac, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2010.
Papadopoulos, Athanase, « Mathématiques, musique et cosmologie : à partir du Timée de Platon », in Pierre Michel, Moreno Andreatta, José Luis Besada, Les Jeux subtils de la poétique, des nombres et de la phsilosophie, Paris, Hermann, 2021, p. 169-200.
Popelard Marie-Dominique (dir.), La Reprise en actes, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, coll. « Æsthetica », 2017.
Poulet, Georges, The Metamorphoses of the Circle, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967 [1961].
Poulet, Georges, « Le symbole du cercle infini dans la littérature et la philosophie », Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 64, n° 3, 1959, p. 257-275. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40900467.
Ricœur, Paul, Time and Narrative 3, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988 [1985].
Notes
1 Plato, Timaeus, in W.R.M. (trans.), Plato in Twelve Volumes, Cambridge, Harvard University press, 1925.
2 Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the circle, trans. Carley Dawson and Elliot Coleman, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.
3 Ibid.
4 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe et Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philippe Barnard and Cheryl Leser, New York, State University of New York Press, 1988.
5 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 2
Subjects
- Language (Main category)
- Mind and language > Language > Literature
Date(s)
- Sunday, June 15, 2025
Keywords
- cercle, littérature comparée
Information source
- Borys Carola
courriel : carola [dot] borys [at] unisi [dot] it
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Cercles », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, April 28, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/13trj
