Carole BOURNE-TAYLOR | MaCI - Université Grenoble Alpes

Carole BOURNE-TAYLOR

Carole Bourne-Taylor was trained at the Centre de Recherches sur l’Imaginaire (UGA) where she did her PhD ̶ published as L’univers imaginaire de Virginia Woolf with a postface by Gilbert Durand. She was allocataire de recherche and monitrice d’enseignement supérieur at UGA and ATER at Montpellier before going to Oxford. A lecturer and Fellow of Brasenose College, she was subsequently recognized by the University as Associate Professor. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Vilnius University.

She teaches literature in French to undergraduates and supervises Masters’ and Doctoral theses in French and comparative studies. Her research interests and publications encompass literature in French and English, phenomenology, environmental humanities, and the performing arts. In parallel to her project on poéthique she is writing a biography of Alice Sapritch (to be published by Garnier)

►Projet à la MaCI

A Poethics of Attention, Attunement and Attachment: Emmanuel Merle’s Commitment to the Living World

The fertile field of environmental humanities and relational thinking calls for a fresh take on poéthique via the concepts of ‘geosolidarities’ (Olivier Remaud), ‘ways of being alive’ (Baptiste Morizot), and ‘resonance’ (Hartmut Rosa), amongst others, with a view to redefining the imperative of ‘poetic dwelling’. This project consists in reframing poéthique by delineating a space of interconnectedness and foregrounding elemental expressivity. Poetry’s ability to tune into ‘ways of being alive’ and negotiate memories, histories, territorialities and legacies, reveals its ethical vocation. Pervaded by a sense of grief – from the intimate to the climate – it also generates a new imaginarium of the world through cultivating wonder and vigilance and designing its own mindful rhythms, which makes it a major contributor to the ‘uses of literature’ (Rita Felski) and relational thinking. If all the resources of science and the humanities have to be harnessed in the elaboration of an ideal of inhabitability, it is her contention that poetry, with its unique critico-creative power to challenge and imagine, should be given more visibility.

Her main motivation is to pursue and bolster her work on poéthique (with a focus on Emmanuel Merle alongside some of his predecessors and contemporaries), with a view to promoting poetry as a valid discourse in discussions about the living world and a vital ally in the search for truth, solidarity and justice.

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Funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030