Responsables de l’atelier
Helen MUNDLER-ARANTES (Université Paris-Est Créteil)
Sara GREAVES (Aix-Marseille Université)
Anthony-Gerroldt, Laure-Hélène, enseignante du secondaire, laurehelene.anthony@free.fr
Creative writing as an emancipatory approach to teaching poetry in English
Pupils and students are often intimidated by poetry – their struggles and fears are amplified by the idea of studying it in a foreign language such as English. Their anticipation creates a taught dynamic in the classroom: the teacher can feel frustrated that the students do not engage with the material; the students may be disconnected, discouraged and bored. In both cases, the situation can lead learners and teachers alike to give up on poetry. Having noticed this tendency, I decided to attempt a different approach to teaching poetry in English, using creative writing instead of more conventional methods like close readings. In this paper, I would therefore like to present the results of a series of creative workshops that I am going to set up with my première LLCE pupils between January and March. The workshops, which will engage with a different type of poems each week and share the common theme “Liberté, force vive, déployée”, will indeed be an opportunity to test the emancipatory potential of creative writing in teaching both poetry and specific concepts such as emancipation and freedom.
Bouhmid, Alison, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3, alison.bouhmid@univ-montp3.fr
A Learning Memoir. Let’s Play Ball
Working within a research-creation framework of embodied practice and experience, I am currently writing a learning memoir that is both literary creation and creative writing in the sense of writing for and through learning. Differing from Claire Kramsch’s definition of a language memoir as “the writing of former language learners about their experience in their acquired language” (5, my italics) my learning memoir situates and recounts actual learning within the writing. The writing in turn is dependent upon the gradual learning that takes place. In the process of narrating my learning of Moroccan Arabic (from scratch) I explore themes such as identity, voice and memory.
The epistemological framework of research-creation posits that knowledge is generated by experience and creative process. Echoing Manning and Massumi’s vision of research-creation as thinking-in-action, I approach creative writing as learning-in-action. It puts into practice John Dewey’s understanding that ‘there is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing’ (321). This understanding that language learning is embodied experience has long been a central tenet of creative writing. Sara Greaves and Marie-Laure Schultze have shown how its exploration of the “bilingual overlap” for example can enable writer/learners “to experience their own physicality and sensibility in[..] a new mind set and a new culture” (61, my italics).
Creative writing’s invitation to engage with the foreign language in an imaginative manner, emancipates the learner/writer to embrace lack of language mastery as source of creative practice. As I write my learning memoir, I explore how the recounting of my experience of learning reconstructs and enriches the experience of learning as I reflect upon the possibly process of learning a third language. How does the process make me feel? How do I find my voice in Darija and what does this voice sound like? How is it received? How does finding a voice change not only how I hear but also how I listen to other voices? What new vistas and possibilities are revealed?
These interrogations seem particularly relevant in the context of an encounter mediated through French, between the dominant language English, my mother tongue and the non-dominant language Darija, my husband’s tongue. As a speaker of an imperial language learning a minority language, questions of linguistic emancipation and power imbalances are quickly raised, but more slowly—if ever—resolved, in the (embodied) creative writing process and research of language learning. The potential for transformation in the explorations that creative writing ‘authorises’, echoes bell hooks’s vision of pedagogical empowerment and self-actualisation as outlined in Teaching to Transgress (1994), which necessitates bringing the whole self (embodied, but also spiritually awakened) to the learning experience, for both the teacher and the learner that I am. This learning experience is emancipatory in the sense of creating new and transformational symbolic power relations (Bourdieu, 1991), as new experiences are created from and expressed in new words.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Langage et pouvoir symbolique. Editions du Seuil (1991, 2001).
Dewey, John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. The Macmillan Company, 1916.
Greaves, Sara, and Monique de Mattia-Viviès. Language Learning and the Mother Tongue: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.
Kramsch, Claire J. The Multilingual Subject: What Foreign Language Learners Say about Their Experience and Why It Matters. Oxford University Press, 2010, 2019.
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Chamayou-Douglas, Dominic, Universités de Kent (UK) et de Lille, dominicdouglas@protonmail.com
Choosing my words: writing creatively as an emancipation from academia
The strictures of academic writing are apparent to any undergraduate and deeply understood by all to have progressed into the realms of the post-doctoral. A certain intellectual masochism may be necessary for some writers to willingly submit themselves to the formal, semantic, linguistic and evidentiary restrictions necessary to succeed in academia. Despite the necessity of such communal rules, their imposition may be experienced as a form of creative amputation on the individual, no longer permitted to exercise the inventive, free associative and structurally supple experience of writing artistically. Even when freely chosen and willing engaged in, academic writing bounds the individual in a practice of constricted, object-orientated production at odds with the creative practice involved in developing a short story, a novel, a poem or a play.
Since beginning my PhD three years ago, I have maintained a strict regime of only producing academic writing in the form of abstracts, articles and chapters of my thesis. The decision was self-evident, neither fully questioned nor fully taken, as the necessity of producing a doctoral thesis in the shortest time possible imposed a dedication to academic prose at the expense of other forms. However, as time and the thesis progressed, this bifurcation in practice appeared necessary to maintain an intellectual and emotional distinction between the two experiences of writing. The possibility of passing between the two styles appeared not only an almost painful challenge but would ultimately be to the detriment of both as to achieve the cohesion and focus needed to sustain such engaging and draining projects, a unidirectional purpose was required. The estrangement of my creative practice was therefore never seriously questioned but rather implicitly accepted as a temporary obligation to achieve an ulterior goal.
As the terminus of the thesis approaches, a vision of creative liberation is appearing over the horizon, charged with hope, potential, pleasure and possibility. In this thesis-free utopic fantasy, I will be reborn with the productivity of Emile Zola, the fluidity of John Updike and the cultural impact of Margaret Atwood. The more prosaic reality will surely disappoint but will contain the prose of a long-sidelined project to write a comic novel reflecting on the diffraction of the shelf when living between the UK and France. In this paper, I hope to reflect on the themes outlined above and perhaps share a section of the embryonic text which will hopefully soon appear.
Crowell, Michelle, Université d’Orléans et Université de Tours, michelle.crowell@univ-orleans.fr
Negotiating biases: between legitimacy and transgression
When I was thirteen, I volunteered to go on a one-month Evangelical mission trip to South Africa. After raising thousands of dollars with my church, I joined a group of teenagers, all of them strangers, and, ready to convert anyone we might cross, we flew to Africa. In that group of “missionaries,” if such a term can indeed be used, there was one African American. The rest of us were white. At such a young age, I remember being so convinced that I was right about my beliefs and that the people awaiting us in the remote village of Qwa-Qwa were wrong. Through the help of an interpreter, I spent a month going door-to-door, accompanied by three other teenagers, telling the inhabitants of the village that, regardless of their beliefs about the power of their ancestors, Jesus was the only way to heaven.
Fifteen years later, I began to write a book, somewhere on the threshold of fiction and nonfiction, in an attempt to process the indoctrination of my childhood. When I shared excerpts of it in a writing group, some members questioned how I had represented certain experiences, evoking the tokenism of one passage, or the choice to describe the Sesotho language in a particular way in another. It was the opposite of what I had set out to do. In short, in trying to deconstruct some of the teachings that I had assimilated as a child, I found myself clinging to their scaffolding, without even realizing it.
As time went by, questions related to representation continued to grow in my mind. As a white woman originally from a predominantly white town in Missouri, what right did I have to attempt to depict a group of people of which I knew next to nothing? As a white person from the United States, wasn’t I part of the problem of white privilege?
When I discovered Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in 2020, I began to understand that the extent of the problem was much greater than I had initially anticipated. Indeed, this societal issue was insidious, and in part embedded in the foundation of American entertainment, between Tom Shows and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. It was a nostalgia for the Confederate South that continues to fuel certain political, white supremacist and masculinist agendas. Despite noble intentions, my attempts to talk about race were, at least up to a certain extent, the inheritance of white literary traditions. These traditions, like most, had not been spared the binarity of masculine and feminine spheres, and I found that female writers, who historically had also been served a heavy dose of marginalization had, intentionally or not, propagated such oppression in their depictions of the Other.
These observations have shaped my doctoral research, prompting me to wonder where the line lies between legitimacy and transgression. As a writer myself, how can I do my best to ensure that I am not offending demographics other than my own? How can I deconstruct my own worldview in both creative and academic frameworks, in order to prevent myself from propagating biases?
Doulut, Sophie, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, sophie.doulut@univ-perp.fr
Creative Writing in English as a Second Language seen by Law students at the Law School of Perpignan, France : a study of emancipation thanks to the law and/or from the law?
While teaching Legal English through professional-based fiction, a project on Emancipation in Creative Writing with all my classes, be they Bachelor Degree courses or Master Degree courses, was launched in order to have the students exploit the contents of the movies they had studied in class through the prism of Law. Therefore, the Bachelor and Master students will have to answer the following questions through Creative Writing activities done both at home and outside the class: Thelma and Louise: American Women’s Emancipation thanks to the Law or from the Law? The Devil Wears Prada: Emancipation thanks to Work or from Work?, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: American Women’s Emancipation through the Law?, Philadelphia: Minorities’ Emancipation thanks to the Law or from the Law? Giving the students permission to use whatever medium they like, and whatever type of work they would like to hand in, be it in the form of a diary, poems, short stories, drawings, handcrafted objects bearing mottoes or sentences painted on them, the goal is to enable them to give way to their own creativity and learn Legal English with confidence and more motivation. My presentation will focus on the messages the students will deliver through the project, an analysis of their work and a tentative answer to the question as to whether they will have improved or not through this new project through the use of questionnaires.
Greaves, Sara, Aix-Marseille Université, sara.greaves@univ-amu.fr
(Creative) translation: a hall of mirrors of interpellation and counter-interpellation
Translation can be described as a negotiation (cf. Umberto Eco) between a complex interplay of constraints and literary inventiveness. “Creative translation”, as a taught academic course or a literary-linguistic activity, offers a process of subjective empowerment that can lead to emancipation from the source text and, through plurilingual hybridity for instance, to an extent from the target language. But this does not mean it amounts to a free-for-all or that “anything goes”. This paper will consider the complex dialectics of interpellation and counter-interpellation, as defined by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in De l’interpellation (2019) and Système et Style : une linguistique alternative (2023, with a postface by Monique De Mattia-Viviès), in translation and in creative translation, with a view to shedding light on the nature of this particular form of subjective emancipation within and through language.
Mundler-Arantes, Helen, Université Paris Est-Créteil, mundler.students@gmail.com
“How can I say I?” Life writing between constraint and emancipation
In the third volume of A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower, Frederica Potter, confronted with the impossibility of a novel she cannot complete yet cannot abandon, turns to cut-ups in the style of William Burroughs, physically rearranging correspondence surrounding her divorce—material that has destabilized her sense of self and her own version of events. This project extends from her earlier Laminations, an intradiegetic work assembling without hierarchy a nearly infinite number of observational fragments. While not the primary focus of this paper, Frederica’s approach offers a productive lens for thinking about life writing today: the tension between narrative coherence and the inherent discontinuities of experience, and the ethical and aesthetic stakes involved in rendering personal life in text.
The paper traces the trajectory from purely academic literary criticism to the writing of novels and ultimately to memoir. It examines how sustained engagement with narrative, structure, and character in critical work informed the development of fiction, and how moving from interpreting others’ texts to constructing one’s own reshapes approaches to voice, form, and ethical representation. Short stories, novelistic experimentation, and hybrid life writing emerge as strategies for negotiating the boundaries between invention and fidelity, coherence and fragmentation, and the observed and narrated self.
By following this arc, the paper situates life writing as a space where multiplicity of selfhood, memory, and perception can be explored both formally and ethically. It demonstrates how the tools of literary criticism provide a foundation for creative experimentation, and how fragmentation, non-linearity, and hybrid forms allow for the articulation of complex lived realities in fiction and memoir. In this way, life writing is approached not merely as recording events but as a rigorous and imaginative engagement with the self in language.
Scriptunas, Tess, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, tscriptunas@gmail.com
The Emancipatory Power of Self-Expression: Potentials and Limits
“I confess to a growing belief that the best thing any one can do, when occasion serves, is to tell us what he himself knows,” writes Barrett Wendell in his 1891 treatise English Composition (9). “Every man is a revelation,” said Bronson Alcott, “and ought to write his record” (Richardson 228). This emphasis on self-expression recurs persistently across the works of both the founders of creative writing and those of the transcendentalists, who, I argue, inspired the fathers of this pedagogy. This accent on self-expression has a number of emancipatory corollaries, including increased freedom for students in terms of subject matter and form (Myers 38, Mearns 42) and a devaluing of strict linguistic rules in favor of inspiration from lived experience (Wendell 2, Emerson 61). Ultimately, however, there is a fundamental tension between the egalitarian aspect of this insistence on self-expression—in which refined perception, available to everyone, offers greater rewards than riches or power (Emerson 45)—and the limits to the systemic change that can come from cultivating individual creativity (Dahlstrand 139, Mearns 154). It is this tension that I propose to explore in my speech, thereby engaging with multiple aspects of your intriguing Call for Papers, including the notions that “the act of writing the self might both constrain and liberate,” and “Emancipation through subjectivity—restoring or renewing subjectivity in language—is essential to our approach to creative writing.”
Séguin, Émilie, Aix-Marseille Université, emilie.seguin@univ-amu.fr
From The Book of Dead Animals to The Transcreators’ Society: emancipation from translation rules and introducing university students to transcreation
Tartu Museum, Estonia. Dead animals and a couple of fish in a tank. An artistic project led by Damien Beyrouthy to create The Book of Dead Animals without any human intervention (more details here: https://damienbeyrouthy.com/furomancy/). Texts were produced thanks to new technologies and AI. To bring the project back to France, I was asked by its creator to translate these texts.
The problem is that AI partly did what it was asked to do: produce texts in English. Even with this language constraint, Estonian words found their way to the final version, resulting in plurilingual texts. Besides, as it was never specified that the text had to have a meaning, The Book of Dead Animals is a collection of hundreds of plurilingual and meaningless texts, or at least, texts that humans can’t really make sense of.
Therefore, I suggested to Damien Beyrouthy to work on the project in transcreation workshops with my students. As the concept of AI translation is omnipresent nowadays, I thought of this project as the opposite situation: meaningless and impersonal texts produced by AI are given meaning and translated by students. Starting in October 2025, the transcreation workshops allow students to discover another aspect of translation, to use it as a self-expression tool and to emancipate themselves from the usual constraints: emancipation from numerous translation constraints, such as fidelity to the original, as the source text is apparently meaningless and doesn’t have a real author(ity); emancipation from academic writing in general, as they are not expected to follow any outline or problématique. Nevertheless, emancipation is not proving an easy process for many of them, who find it difficult not to follow the usual instructions, which are comforting and make them feel in control.
Still, Taylor, Université de Rennes 2, taylor.still@univ-rennes2.fr
“Keep the ‘I’ at the heart of all you write”: Creative Writing and Cultural Collisions
This paper will address the pragmatics of working with cross-cultural youth groups on creative writing as a shared methodology of emancipation. Through the prism of practice-led research, it will rely on the case study of the Connexions project, which took place in the twinned cities of Rennes (France) and Cork (Ireland) in 2021-24. During a series of participatory workshops, Connexions orchestrated a unique collaboration between secondary school students and youth theatre members, using creative writing as a way to establish common ground between French and Irish youth. Following the research project, this paper will draw on the results of qualitative research methods including participant observation, semi-guided interviews with teachers, and youth questionnaires.
Within Connexions, key questions emerged surrounding the underlying cultural and creative differences at stake in international collaboration, and I shall therefore address the distinct pedagogical approaches at play within Literature in contemporary French and Irish curricula. Important socio-cultural factors have indeed shaped the perception of creative writing in particular as a mode of meaningful artistic emancipation for students in Literature. These kinds of cultural discourses have also influenced whether such creative practices should be formally included in national assessments.
Our analysis will also propose a brief cross-cultural comparison of school textbooks, demonstrating how creative literary approaches have been shaped and (re-)framed in both Ireland and France in recent years. We question, for instance, why Irish textbooks explicitly encourage students to “keep the ‘I’ at the heart of all you write”*, whilst their French counterparts are taught to treat texts in a strict, methodical manner, purely as “objects of study”**. This gives rise to further questions regarding wider perceptions of academic rigour, tensions between the critical and the creative, and self-perception of creative aptitude.
*EDCO: The Educational Company of Ireland, Leaving Certificate Examination Papers: English – Higher Level – 2024, Edition, Dublin, EDCO, 2023, p.vi.
**BERNARD, Hélène. DAUVIN, Sylvie (et al.). Annabac sujets et corrigés 2024 : Français – 1ère Générale, Paris, Hatier, 2023, p.40. Translation mine.
Walezak, Émilie, Université de Nantes, emiliewalezak@yahoo.fr
Ekphrastic Becoming in Practice. Metamorphosing into Words.
Defined by James Heffernan as “the verbal representation of graphic representation” (299), the ekphrasis’ transposition of the visual into the verbal hyphenates the like-unlike analogy implied in the Horatian ekphrastic motto: “ut pictura poesis”: as is painting, so is poetry. Today new conceptual apprehensions and sensitive attunements to lifeforms redistribute the web of resemblances implied by “as/like”. I am proposing an ekphrasis of the works of French artist Edi Dubien whose retrospective exhibition was hosted last year at Le Musée de la chasse et de la nature in Paris. Edi Dubien works with portraiture in pencil drawing and watercolour on paper. His portraits of young boys and adolescents peopled with various critters read as an intimate exploration of transformative kinships. It is a restorative endeavour at personal reconnections through faunal and floral metamorphoses. My ekphrastic proposal is meant to ask what kind of relationship between the sayable and the visible is being reconfigured in 21st century re-readings of the art as impacted by what philosopher Baptiste Morizot has diagnosed as a “crisis of sensibility”. Thus, I aim to relate the creative practice of morphing images into words to the posthuman feminist interpretation of the Deleuzian theory of becoming by using as an example the metamorphoses portrayed in Dubien’s works.