Join us for the lecture series "European Popular Literature and Culture from a Comparative-Historical Perspective"
October 20, 5 pm, Matthieu Letourneux (Université Paris Nanterre), Popular Fiction and European Culture: A Shared History?
This lecture will explore the emergence of a European popular culture through the circulation of serialized media fictions during the 19th and 20th centuries. It argues that what circulates internationally is not simply individual works, but genres, formats, narrative conventions, and media imaginaries, which are constantly reconfigured within local cultural and industrial contexts. Drawing on different case studies (the urban-mystery genre, the American dime novels, postwar crime fiction, and European spy fiction) the paper examines the role of serialization, media formats, and the industrial networks that enable cultural circulation. Particular attention will be paid to the mediations through which imported forms acquire new meanings: German distribution networks, British intermediaries, French publishing, and Italian film coproduction. The paper ultimately argues that the globalization of popular culture is neither a simple process of Americanization nor a diffusion from cultural centres to passive receivers, but a complex process of negotiation that contributed to the emergence of shared European imaginaries.
October 21, 5 pm, Matthieu Letourneux (Université Paris Nanterre), An Aesthetics of Consumption: Literature, Media, and Cultural Industries
This paper proposes to rethink literature through the concept of an aesthetics of consumption. Drawing on recent approaches to aesthetics as a form of sensory and affective experience, it combines aesthetic theory with a materialist perspective on the production and distribution of fiction and with historical poetics.
The paper argues that literary works cannot be fully understood independently of the commercial and media environments in which they are produced, distributed, and consumed. A historical survey traces this relationship from the nineteenth-century commercial press and the rise of serial fiction, through the industrialization of popular publishing and the Fordist organization of literary production, to the post-Fordist valorization of generic and authorial singularity. The final section examines contemporary digital culture, where genres increasingly intersect with lifestyles, “aesthetics,” keywords, and algorithmic recommendation systems. The paper ultimately argues for an expanded conception of literary studies capable of addressing the broader cultural imaginaries shaped by media, markets, and consumption.
Matthieu Letourneux is a Professor at Université Paris Nanterre. His research focuses on serial cultures and cultural imaginaries, with a current focus on the relationship between literature and consumerism. His books include Fictions à la chaîne (2017), Aux origines de la pop culture (2022), and La culture de masse en France (2026). He co-edits the journal Belphégor (https://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/).
November 5, 5 pm, Clive Bloom (Middlesex University),Witches, Poltergeists and Cheap Thrills: How the Gothic Conquered Europe
Gothic culture is said to have begun when the eighteenth century aristocrat Horace Walpole redesigned his modest home into a Disney-style abbey. The craze caught on, and gothic mansions, rebuilt castles and ornate churches sprang up all over Europe. Gothic influences may still be seen in the Jugenstil architecture of Vienna, the gothic architecture of London, the castellated fantasies of Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria, Haut Koenigsbourg in Orschwiller and the Church of the Assumption in Buda. The sublime new architecture was also, ironically, the scene for the dark night of the European soul, especially once the Revolution in France had officialy 'abolished' belief in the salvation of Heaven.
The craze for gothic thrills which had gripped Britain and Germany, through a love of Shakespeare and a fear of the dark side of the psyche, soon spread to Spain, America and France and then beyond, to Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and the Czech Republic. It was the beginning of a craze for all things dark and mysterious that sprang from the creation of British gothic fiction which was itself obsessed with the delights of European travel to Italy, Germany and Spain. Ann Radcliffe, a Londoner, who only went abroad at the end of her life, set her stories in Italy. She was the most popular female European author of her time.
The Gothic pointed to the ecstacy of Heaven or the horrors of pit of Hell. Authors searched for the tropes of sublime terror in the 'Sturm und Drang' of stormy nights, of ruins and fearful mountain peaks, the eerie unquiet of graveyards, the psychotic nightmares of drug addiction and the erotic dreams of perversion. If the British had vampires and mad scientists, so Europeans had secret societies, poltergeists and witches. In the 1970s Italian cinema discoved the psychopathic killer recreated in neo-classical landscapes. Opera adopted gothic tropes as did European philosophers; film expanded the gothic into visual language and pop culture has given us fashion and television shows from Twin Peaks to The Traitors. The gothic is both nightmare and exaltation, but always offers cheap thrills.
Clive Bloom is Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies at Middlesex University (London), Professor in Residence at the Larkin Centre for Poetry and Writing at the University of Hull, Research Fellow at the West University of Timisoara (Romania), former Research Fellow at New York University and Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is an author and broadcaster specialising in books on gothic culture and alternative politics. His two recent books have both been finalists at the World Fantasy Awards. He also received a Bram Stoker Award and has recently been invited to join the judging panel for the Eiffel Awards for cinema. He is quoted in the Columbia Book of World Quotations.
Moderator dr. Taisija Oral
The lectures will be held in English.
Organizers:
Lithuanian Comparative Literature Association
Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore
This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-ACO-26-20.
