Hannah Van Hove, together with colleagues Amanda Murphy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Maria Gil-Ulldemolins (Hasselt university), has been succesful in gaining funding for their FWO Tournesol scientific exchange programme entitled “Mapping performative writing and the page as an expanded field (1966- the present): experimental, exophonic and ecstatic literatures in transcultural Anglophone spheres”.
This project (2024-2025) aims to study how experimental, multilingual, and autotheoretical writing practices perform the self and/or language and, in doing so, broaden our understanding of what literature is or can be. Performative writing is “meaningful in the material, dis/continuous act of writing” (Pollock,75). Engaging both form and content, it mixes critical and creative possibilities. This experimental textual materiality can transmit complex realities where fact and affect, scholarship and art, overlap and contaminate each other.
This project will map performative writing practices since 1966 to this day in transcultural, Anglophone spheres. It works across the span of this timeline in order to 1) investigate precedents and identify what historical and theoretical factors lead to them, 2) analyse performative writing strategies to determine how they help process an ever-increasingly complex reality and the diverse subjectivities that inhabit it, and 3) develop a theoretical framework which explores the idea of the page as an expanded field. In order to do so, the project pursues three interlocking lines of enquiry, focusing on: a) Experimental fiction, b) Exophonic literature and c) Ecstatic writing. A series of seminars and research stays in Flanders and France, as well as concluding symposium will be organised, providing opportunities for junior researchers, including PhD students, to share their research, think collectively and develop forms of dissemination.
Project team:
Flemish PI: Hannah Van Hove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Flemish Co-PI: Maria Gil-Ulldemolins (Universiteit Hasselt)
French PI: Amanda Murphy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
PhD students : Tessel Veneboer (Universiteit Gent) and Christopher Mole (Université Côte d’Azur)