Documents may be written words or images made with pen and paper, painted on parchment, typewritten, or recorded in various media, analogue or digital. What are the boundaries of documentation and what lies in the undocumented space beyond?
Central to this question is the definition of “document.” Documents are material–tangible and/or visible, and yet they are signs or representations of a point of origin, a source of power or authority, from which they are detached. Given this irreducible gap, the relationship among the documented, the documenter, and ultimately the document is slippery and unfixed. Therefore, the document itself is unstable, and yet we endow it with authority and authenticity, and even at times agency. Since our notions of authenticity are so often mediated by documents, to what extent can we trust them and what do we do in their absence?
Friday, November 17
8:45 – 9:15 a.m. Registration
9:15 – 9:30 a.m. Opening remarks: Jeff Fuller
9:30 - 10:45 a.m. Auctorial Monuments
Moderator: Aileen Christensen
Camilo Frias, New York University
Signes d’outre-langue: Chateaubriand’s poetics of afterlife
Julien Stout, Université de Montréal
Du document hagiographique à l’anti-monument auctorial : la fabrique de l’autorité dans la Vie de Sainte Elizabeth de Rutebeuf (manuscrit BNF fr. 837)
Caitlyn Garcia, New York University
A Failed Literary Courtship: Correspondence between J.H. Rosny aîné and Stéphane Mallarmé
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Archiving Absence
Moderator: Mimi Zhou
Maia Rodriguez, University of California, Berkeley
Johanna Gautier, École normale supérieure
Silence & Discordance: What if history laid between the lines of archives?
Nolan Gear, Columbia University
Immigration, La Maison du Mystère, and the Melodramatic Document
12:30 – 1:30 p.m. Keynote: "Object-ing (to) Documents"
Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak
Professor of History, NYU
Saturday, November 18
9:30 – 10:45 a.m. Staged Movement and Migration
Moderator: Nicolas Estournel
Camille Chanod, Duke University
Présence(s) de L’Affiche
Tommaso Manfredini, Columbia University
Trace and Trash: Documenting Transmediterranean Migration in Youssef Chebbi’s Babylon
Sam Teets, New York University
Archiving “Dance”
Thomas Ayouti, University of Toronto
Documenter la danse – archiver le désœuvrement
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Ethics and Testimony
Moderator: María Sanchez-Reyes
Nikhita Obeegadoo, Harvard University
Unraveling the non-documents of lost-lineages
Jason Hong, Yale University
On Bearing Witness for the Witness: Freeing the Dead in Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algerie
Miranda Dahlin, McGill University
Reading Bodies, Recording Rumor, Rewriting Testimony: A Discussion on the Modes and Forms of Documentation in Mexico’s State-Cartel Violence and the US Asylum System
1:30 – 2:45 p.m. Documents Across Borders
Moderator: Claire Reising
Jeanne Etelain, New York University
Anthropology and the aesthetics of (un)document: the case of existential territories
Maurice Tetne, University of New Mexico
Enjeu des frontières et réclusion identitaire, le statut documentaire du roman d’immigration dans la littérature maghrébine : Partir, de Tahar Ben Jelloun
Stephanie Tsakeu, University of Virginia
La question de la véracité du document (et /de l’écrit) dans Le Lys et le flamboyant de Henri Lopes : métissage ou domination ?
3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Keynote: “Economies of the Unseen: Brian De Palma's Redacted and the Steganography of Perception”
Professor Peter Szendy
Brown University, Department of Comparative Literature
Sponsored by Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture