Introduction: Response Events

Abstract

Developed within the context of the research project Response Event: Between Loss and Refusal,1 this special issue of the Interdisciplinary Literary Studies on the topic of response events seeks to share the diverse work of its authors, while opening the field of reader-response and aesthetics studies to new perspectives. Bringing together contributions from arts and humanities, its principal objective is to define the response event, which sits between literary studies and other disciplines. In this regard, we aim to develop an approach to a specific encounter with artworks and cultural productions, following a few considerations that we present here.The first of these considerations consists in following reader-response theories’ interest for the readers and how they react to literary texts but also in challenging the assumption of a Model Reader (Eco 1985) that would oppose a naïve one. Basing our perspective on the works of reader-response theorists like Michel Picard (1986), Annie Rouxel, and Gérard Langlade (2005), we advocate for an increased attention to the readers’ and viewers’ experience, one that draws on knowledge of their subjectivity and individuation process (Simondon 2017), and integrates an aesthetics of encounter (Morizot and Zhong Mengual 2018).In addition to this contribution from a subjective approach of reception theories to our understanding of response events, we believe that it is crucial to interrogate how events come to be for an individual, how they are narrated and potentially shared. The articles in this issue explore emergence from an ongoing process (Massumi 2013), where the event can simultaneously be an unpredictable irruption and the advent of a matured situation (Badiou 1983), whose retrospective apprehension gives it its meaning and scope (Cambron and Langlade 2015). In parallel to the “factual” understanding of the event, we can observe that its “evential” impact on an individual (or a group) that identifies it as such singles her/him out and “opens a world by (re)configuring its potentialities” (Romano 1998, 115).Based on these preliminary considerations, we seek to define the response event as an individual event that emerges from experiencing representations and affects irrevocably the receptor. The relationship between this type of event and its narrative is central to our interrogation, as the latter is responsible for bringing the former into existence. The response event’s significance and complexity derive, among other things, from the reactions and transformations that it can generate: its destructive dimension can cause a form of loss for the receptors, but it can also produce a resistance or a disconnection. Focusing on response events in various contexts, the articles in this issue address this transdisciplinary concept in the light of different approaches that expand its understanding built on reader-response theory and highlight central questions to change.In “Response Events Narratives: Between Research and Creation,” Sara Bédard-Goulet and Damien Beyrouthy present the results of their research about life-changing events triggered by cultural productions. They first present their specific research-creation methodology, then the results of their literary corpus analysis, and, thirdly, how they reflect on response events with an artistic practice.With “Affect and Attunement in Experimental Autofiction: Response Without an Event?,” Raili Marling focuses on a particular type and temporality of the response event, namely the “attunement” (Felski 2020). According to this author, it can be “a slow and stumbling process, a gradual coming into view of what we would otherwise fail to see.”In “The Premiere of Victor Hugo’s Les Burgraves (7th of March 1843) and the Narrative Construction of its Reception,” Agathe Giraud examines the effect of the persistent narrative about the allegedly failed first show of Hugo’s play on the audience attending its later productions. This erroneous narrative of a past reception conditions each ulterior one.With “Confused Forces: The Tree, Living Memory in Twenty-First Century Art,” Jean Arnaud focuses on a singular tree-event that he develops retrospectively through the works of three artists that address empathy with the living, and within a research-creation approach.In “The Suspension of Sight: The Reception of Graphic Design in Question,” Pierre Fournier questions the object of graphic design, which would be responsible for producing a response event by “suspending the sight” (Lyotard). The author discusses the difference between graphic design and graphic art, which do not share the same aesthetic and political objectives.