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Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire - ECLLA seminar - «Put to work: stories of bodies caught up in the machinery».
On The November 13, 2025
Video link available upon request from the organiser : sophie.chapuis[at]univ-st-etienne.fr
4.30-6.00 pm
Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire, researcher in residence at the Collegium, will present his research: ‘Put to work: stories of bodies in the machinery’ during the first session of the cross-disciplinary seminar entitled ‘The work of the rest’, organised by the ECLLA laboratory (Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne) and the Cultural Transfers team of the Cultural Identities, Texts and Theatricality (ICTT) laboratory, a research unit (UPR 4277) at Avignon University.
Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire is currently a 2025-2026 Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon. He holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University (2015). An associate professor at the University of British Columbia, his work focuses on spatial poetics and the imagery of ruin in French literature.
Put to work: stories of bodies in the machine.
How does contemporary literature speak to us about the most precarious forms of work? Does the legacy of the established remain palpable in a deindustrialised and outsourced France, where the gestures of work have been dispersed outside the factory? We will focus on the necessarily dissonant relationship between the depersonalisation of tasks and the legitimising power of writing. To examine this pivotal issue, we will pay particular attention to the problem of narrating cyclical tasks and boredom in jobs that include cleaning, butchering, moving, and prostitution.
Sophie Chapuis holds a PhD in American literature and is a lecturer at Jean Monnet University and a member of the ECLLA laboratory. Her recent research explores the links between literature and computer science, particularly their impact on literary creation.
When everything else comes to a standstill, recontextualising American conceptual poetry.
This presentation will examine the work of several American conceptual poets who, in recent decades and with the advent of the computer age, have taken note of the shift towards computing in literature and have fully integrated copying and pasting, appropriation and plagiarism into their writing practices. Starting with conceptual poetry, precisely because it has integrated the recycling of content, whatever it may be, into the heart of its practice, we will attempt to raise the ethical issues involved in order to ask ourselves whether all texts can be recovered and given poetic value. Our goal is to re-examine the decontextualised approach advocated by conceptual poetry.
