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Dossier Université Invitée : University of Leeds

Doctoral research at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies of The University of Leeds

Francesca Del Zoppo

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1The School of Languages, Cultures and Societies (LCS) is one of the eleven schools that are part of the broader Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Culture (AHC) of the University of Leeds (UK). With 85 active postgraduate researchers (PGRs) from all over the world in 2021, the research activities conducted within LCS cover a wide range of topics and approaches. Doctoral students within LCS specialise in many different areas, both spatially and temporally, from medieval to contemporary European literature, from the Arabic-speaking world to Asian cultures and Latin American countries, and more. Multiple approaches are adopted by LCS PGRs to research their topics, including gender, translation, religion, ecology, migration, and postcolonial studies. Although in large measure focused on literature, the subjects of study are not restricted to it, but include many different artistic expressions, such as cinema and music.

2There are many research centres and networks that populate LCS and connect it with the other schools and faculties of the University, making it a collaborative and interdisciplinary environment. Some of these network and centres, and the research that has been carried out within them, are represented by some of the articles included in this dossier, namely the Centre for Dante Studies, the Centre for World Literatures, the Leeds Animal Studies Network, and the Centre for Translation Studies. This is not to say that those articles featured in the dossier are here to officially represent those research centres and networks, but that the main approaches and interests shared in LCS spread naturally within the work of the doctoral researchers, creating a diverse environment.

3The Centre for Dante Studies promotes a multidisciplinary study of Dante and his works from different methodological perspectives. It includes, amongst others, distant reading approaches to the translations of Dante’s Commedia, Dante’s engagement with the multiple experiences of theology in late-medieval Italy, and urbanistic and architectural studies applied to Dante’s poetry. In her article “Two poetic laboratories in comparison: Dante’s rime and Pasolini’s Poesie a Casarsa”, Maddalena Moretti focuses on Dante’s rime as a long-lasting poetic laboratory and, by adopting a comparative approach, relates them to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Poesie a Casarsa. For both Dante and Pasolini, the textual strategies adopted to re-semanticise their early poems represent a way to rehabilitate them, and also to perform and develop their own authorship. The strength and dissemination of comparative perspectives through LCS, and more broadly the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Culture, ensure that comparative literature is not only approached across national frontiers, but also across cultural and temporal ones. Moretti’s work does indeed combine the textual analysis typical of Italian studies and the exceptionally broad perspective of comparative literature, in a piece that enhances the best qualities of both approaches.

4In his “A melancholy republic of letters? The dominance of melancholy in European literary space”, Ian Ellison introduces melancholy as one of the main characteristics of European literature. By putting the analysis of melancholy as an integral part of the idea of European literature itself into dialogue with Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des Lettres (1999), Ellison opens up his reflections to world literature. Indeed, Casanova’s work is undoubtedly one of the most famous and acclaimed works in the field of world literature, and this brings us to Leeds’ Centre for World Literatures. This centre fosters a pluralistic approach to the study of literature from around the world, together with its twin, the Centre for World Cinema and Digital Cultures, which applies the same approach to cinema and digital cultures. The Centre for World Literatures promotes research on literature produced in different ages and places, taking into account different perspectives and focusing on specific areas, in particular cosmopolitanism, law, memory, postcolonialism, transnationalism, trauma, and reception. The Centre’s polycentric and multidisciplinary view of literature(s) inspires most of the literary research conducted within LCS and throughout the University.

5The Leeds Animal Studies Network, started in 2016, promotes collaborative research with diverse approaches to the ‘animal’ in the arts, humanities, and sciences. In his article “World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question”, Dominic O’Key, co-director of the network and part of the Centre for World Literatures as well, broadens the horizons of world-ecological literary criticism by focusing on industrialised animal agriculture and the global expansion of meat production. It analyses the 2016 novel by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Règne animal, a work that turns to an old novelistic mode, literary naturalism, to depict human and animal exploitation over two centuries of meatification in France. O’Key’s article well represents the interest within LCS, and generally within humanities in Leeds, towards the analysis of literature from an ecological point of view. Ecocriticism is indeed one of the most interesting areas of study and research that the University is fostering, with a new and almost unique BA in English and Environment that combines English literature and environmental studies.

6One of the main fields of research within LCS is translation studies, often from a sociological perspective. The Centre for Translation Studies and the work on literary translation that is carried out in LCS is here represented by the work of Peter Freeth, “Conceptualising the role of the translator in the global circulation of literature: The case of Look Who’s Back and Jamie Bulloch’s translatorship”. Freeth focuses on the often-undermined role of the translator in the contemporary Anglophone context. Freeth proposes the case study of the translator Jamie Bulloch and his translation from German of Timur Vermes’ novel Er ist wieder, approaching the topic from a sociological perspective. This allows Freeth to take into account multiple actors and institutions involved in the production and circulation of literature, and to re-discover the role of the translator not only as the one who translates the book, but also as an agent that is fully involved in the selection of books to be translated.

7Elizabeth Purdy’s article, “The Weight of Water: Some Implications of Textual Fluidity for the Study of Comparative Literature”, can be more traditionally inscribed in the domain of comparative literature. However, her approach proposes an innovative point of view in this research field. Purdy addresses the issue of water and fluidity within comparative literature. She uses a new approach to literary texts and a new way to perform comparative literary analysis by applying three features of water – its perpetual motion, its shapelessness, and its connective potential – that belong to literature as well. Purdy chooses two novels, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under and Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot’s Plonger, as examples of fluid texts, demonstrating how their ‘wateriness’ encourages us to compare texts that have no apparent connection, crossing borders like water does.

8What conclusion can be drawn from this sample of five different articles by five different researchers about the directions and approaches of research within LCS and, more broadly, about literary research at the University of Leeds? First, a pluralistic and polycentric environment broadens the horizons of doctoral research in Leeds. A strong comparative approach spans different times and places, taking into account ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary literatures from all over the world, and their fluid, transnational relationships. The plurality of literatures and ages is also addressed with different theoretical and methodological approaches, from ‘distant’ – like the sociology of literature – to ‘close’, like textual analysis, to use Franco Moretti’s terms. Another aspect which is just as important is that literary research in Leeds engages the main global challenges that the world is facing, such as environmental issues. All these different perspectives and fields of study make doctoral research with LCS a strong and always forward-facing environment that new researchers contribute to shape every year.

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Francesca Del Zoppo, « Doctoral research at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies of The University of Leeds »TRANS- [En ligne], 27 | 2021, mis en ligne le 29 décembre 2021, consulté le 17 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/trans/6569 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/trans.6569

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