ICLA theory committee member Alexandre Gefen (CNRS and The New Sorbonne) is co-organizing, with Loic Bourdeau (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), an online bilingual series of sessions entitled « Sous contrôle » : Fictions et contre-fictions du contrôle social / “Under Control”: Fictions and Counter-fictions of Social Control. In a time of democratic dictatorships (or démocratures), heightened health measures, artificial intelligence, and the supremacy of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, questions around social control and individual freedom are becoming key to contemporary French and Francophone narrative. In these texts, new forms of surveillance are juxtaposed with new discursive revolutions, new calls for unruliness, chance, and happenstance, new subtle contestations and reminders that desire is radical, and a new return of subversion. The organizers invite proposals for 15-minute presentations in English or French, encouraging contributors to avoid monographic approaches. Abstracts (half a page) and bioblurbs are due by December 5, 2020 at gefen@fabula.org and loic.bourdeau@louisiana.edu. Selected contributors will be informed by December 15, 2020.

The new edition to Brill’s “Chiasma” book series is Territoires de la non-fiction (Territories of Non-Fiction), a collection of essays edited by ICLA theory committee member Alexandre Gefen and featuring a chapter by former member Dominique Vaugeois. If the previous centuries had seen the crowning of the novel, Gefen argues, the twenty-first century begins with the triumph of the document: travel writings, investigative, criminal, or ethnological investigations, autobiographies, “factographies,” factions, literary reports and recordings, and other forms of narrative that refuse to call themselves fictions occupy our bookstores. The volume attempts to inventory these new territories of non-fiction.