Ça (ne) se fait pas: on Margins in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature
University of Edinburgh, Friday 9 October 2026
We are pleased to invite proposals for papers (in English or French; duration 20 minutes) and/or for panel sessions on the following topics: 

• Taboo and Transgression: (Re)assessing the boundaries of literary discourse.
• Alternative and Intermedial Modernities: Literature’s dialogue with film, visual art, and digital media. Alternative in ‘unconvincing’ modernities and reflections on the detours of modernity in the sense of Svetlana Boym’s off-modern.
• Censorship and Visibility: LGBTQIA+, feminist, and marginalized voices in French writing.
• In-Between Spaces: Exile, hybridity, and linguistic and/or disciplinary crossings – for instance, phenomenology and prose poetry as modes of lived experience and perception.
• Travelling and Feminist Literatures: Writing across borders and identities.
• Nostalgia: Temporalities of loss, recovery, and resistance.
• Forgotten or Hidden Controversies: Rediscovering forgotten debates and silenced authors.
• New Canons: Rethinking literary value and the idea of the ‘great’ in French studies.

Since the 20th century, literary production has continuously negotiated spaces of exclusion and transformation: taboo topics and controversial readings of canonical writers, censored LGBTQIA+ narratives, intermedial experiments that unsettle traditional modernities, and feminist travel writing that reconsider the borders of literature and philosophy. By revisiting nostalgia, travel, censorship, and forgotten controversies, we aim to reimagine how contemporary literature records the alternative and unstable dynamics of modernity, identity, and memory. 
The conference seeks to question what remains unspoken or unacknowledged within the literary canon – and to propose new perspectives, new theories or new ‘greats’ that reflect a more inclusive, plural, and dynamic understanding of the literary field. We welcome proposals for papers, or panels, that address the proposed topics though interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives, drawing on literary theory, gender studies, postcolonial critique, media studies, and cultural memory, in French and Francophone contexts. 
Topics outlined are deliberately open to broad interpretation and are designed to include as extensive an historical span as may be relevant. Please provide a short abstract (250-300 words maximum, in English or French) pointing to the topic you have chosen and outlining the argument of the proposed paper. Submissions should present abstracts accessible to both specialists and non-specialists. All must include a short bio-bibliography (100 words): author information, including name, affiliation and contact details.
Please submit your proposal + bio in one word doc or pdf file to [email protected] by Friday 16 January 2026. For queries relating to the conference, please contact via email [email protected] and [email protected].
Conference organisers: Madeleine Banatvala and Fabien Arribert-Narce