Joep LEERSSEN

Le labex TransferS et l’UMR Pays germaniques invitent en mai 2015 le Professeur Joep LEERSSEN - Professeur de Littérature Moderne à l’Université d’Amsterdam.

ERNIE, Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe,

un programme de publication on-line

le 6 mai 2015, 15h-17h, ENS (salle 235C, 29 rue d’Ulm)

La présentation aura lieu en français

« The Romantic preoccupation with the national past and with vernacular culture involved various cultural fields, from folklore to history-writing, from opera to philology and from painting to literature.
What is more, this complex and intermedial « cultivation of culture » spread across Europe in a remarkable, multipolar process of interlinked cultural transfers, involving, within a few decades, countries as widely different and as far apart as Iceland and Bulgaria, the Basque Country and Finland.
These two processes, the intermedial and the cross-national, mutually reinforce each other’s complexity : from Icelandic folklore to Bulgarian history-writing and from Basque paintings to Finnish poetry...
How can we map and analyse the transnational and intermedial dynamics of this « cultivation of culture » in its European spread between 1790 and 1890 ?
The « Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms » (SPIN, www.spinnet.eu) has over the last years elaborated a network-analytical method to historically trace these remediations, transfers and connections. SPIN has accumulated on-line databases covering paintings, statues, texts, the travels of composers like Chopin and Liszt, and some 40.000 letters exchanged between intellectuals such as Prosper Mérimée, Walter Scott and Jacob Grimm. These databases are analysed and presented by means of newly-developed online visualization technologies, allowing users to chart iconographical repertories, geographical mapping of the spatial diffusion of intellectual trends and contacts, and a social visualization of networks.
Users can obtain a preliminary impression by going to http://spin.spinnet.eu/viewer
This entire collection is arranged around a reticular online Encyclopedia tracing the cultural connections within and between Europe’s National Romantic movements. This Encyclopedia is now moving towards completion. I look forward to present this encyclopedic database and to explain its « reticular » structure to the Labex TransferS partners and to discuss it with them : how to attempt a non-linear analysis of the transnational history of complex cultural systems.
My approach to the history of ideas of National Romanticism in Europe has been exemplified in various articles (e.g. « Nationalism and the cultivation of culture », Nations and nationalism 12.4 (2006) : 559-578) and in books like National thought in Europe : A cultural history (2nd ed. ; Amsterdam University Press, 2008) and Commemorating writers in nineteenth-century Europe : Nation-building and centenary fever (edited with Ann Rigney ; Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). »