UFR LLASICLanguage, literature, performing arts, information and communication, journalism

The symposium "Lyric poetry in narrative form: On the arrangement of collections in the 15th and 16th centuries" aimed to highlight the tension between lyric poetry and narrative in certain collections of poetry, mainly love poetry, from the period. The aim was to understand the nature and implications of this particular feature. How do the poems and the narrative fit together? What are the procedures for storytelling?

The readings were based on an anthology compiled ad hoc from works by various authors (Christine de Pizan, Jean Marot, the anonymous author of Cent rondeaux et cinq avec, Pierre de Ronsard, etc.). The students read sequences from the collection or individual poems with a narrative dimension, selected in advance. Together with their supervisors, they chose to organize the performance according to the traditional stages of the male-female relationship in medieval lyric poetry: innamoramento, the lover's courtship, the joy of shared love, the quarrel following doubts caused by slanderers, and separation.

This enabled the students to read and understand French texts from the past. Their task was to make them accessible to today's audience by adding various theatrical elements (construction of a framework dialogue, projection of images sequencing the reconstructed narrative, musical accompaniment or singing of certain poems). For the supervisors, the experience provided an opportunity to combine creative production with the management of a scientific project. They had the opportunity to browse through a number of collections produced over nearly two centuries. This gave them an insight into how a collection is put together and how the metrical structure is used to highlight key passages or even to create a dialogue between successive poems.
 
Participants: Margaux Serafini, Rose-Victoire Garczynski, Amélie Doucet, Luna Gonzalez de Canales, Cadence Lucas (students of literature or performing arts). Supervisors: Ellen Delvallée and Pascale Mounier (teachers and researchers affiliated with Litt&arts)
Project led by Ellen Delvallée and Pascale Mounier