Villa Gillet - Rhône-Alpes - recherches contemporaines

Literature is not made of great words. In fact, they’re mostly small, often simple, not always even very clever ones, like the word which best characterises the Forum on the Novel: pleasure. For the fourth year, these international meetings will be a time of enjoyment. The intense pleasure of being awakened by books and what they teach us about the world. The pleasure of being intrigued, delighted, shocked, terrified. The pleasure of sharing with others, with authors, with the public, the myriad issues raised by literature. Why do we choose to write in the first person? How does madness dig tunnels into a text? How can diary-writing add to literary work or even inspire it? In what way do novels represent urban space, and how are they structured by this space? These are some of the themes that will be discussed by the river Saône, in the magnificent setting of Les Subsistances. The Forum is organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde des Livres, with the support of the City of Lyon, the Rhône-Alpes region and the State. This event is also made possible by the collaboration with Les Subsistances and the presence of several valuable partners, notably France Inter and Christian Bourgois publishing, that publishes the contributions read during the Forum, as well as the Lexique Nomade, a collection of texts written by the guests.  Since 2007, each edition of the Forum has drawn an ever-bigger audience, always curious and attentive as listeners, but equally as participants in the debates. Nothing virtual here: people come to hear and to examine, to question those who practise literature (A. S. Byatt, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie Darrieussecq, Erri De Luca, Dany Laferrière, Richard Powers and many more), but also those who are passionate about it, like the journalist Bernard Pivot, the biologist Jean-Claude Ameisen and the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. And to discover or rediscover that literature does not merely reflect the world: it illuminates and attempts to penetrate its secrets. It is, above all, an instrument of freedom.