Creation and Disputation: Cases, Quarrels, and Controversies in Early Modern France and England – AGÔN

This project aims to study the concept of “création”, especially the phenomenon of literary “création”. Its approach is both rhetorical and historical, aiming to understand literary “création” in context and situate the notion within the processes that define, defend and challenge it. The project will not presuppose a definition of “création”; instead we intend to analyze the practices, issues and discourses that surround it. Our claim is that for the period, on which we intend to focus, namely the early modern period, the concept can best be understood in terms of a set of conflictual relationships, consisting of debates, stances, arguments and responses, examples and refutations. Looking at it in this way will enable us to explore the extent to which thinking about “création” developed in relation to thinking about other forms of knowledge, and thus to examine the historical processes by which the concept was defined and refined in epistemological terms, and to shed new light on phenomena such as the emergence of new literary genres, such as the novel, the essay, etc. If “création” was often thought of in the period as an instance of the classical notion of inventio, our claim is that it must also be understood in relation to the dispute, a concept which is also to be found in classical rhetoric (disputatio) and therefore in literary history, but which also involves an exploration of the categories of knowledge and the specific conditions in which disputes occur. Our project is comparative in approach, exploring the different cultural practices and spaces, which first emerged in France and England and gradually spread to the rest of Europe, as well as the different disciplines.

Our aim is to understand how creative disputes work by looking at their rhetorical principles, the ways in which their arguments are disseminated, and their theoretical, philosophical, scientific and even economic implications. The project’s sub-title gives an indication of the range of types of enquiry we intend to carry out. The phenomenon of the dispute can be approached through a single and singular object of study, a case, understood here as a legal category. A particular dispute can also take in several related cases, as well as questions of practices, genres and definitions, and here it takes the form of a quarrel, a phenomenon that was a structuring principle of cultural life in France in the period, and perhaps in England too. The rise of quarrels in the period reveals issues and tensions that go far beyond the polemics surrounding a particular practice or theoretical object. These are best described as controversies, and although this term refers most frequently to religious questions, scientific controversies are very much part of the debating arena also. And it is rhetoric that provides us with the link between case, quarrel and controversy. Disputatio is a rhetorical practice, occupying a central role in medieval scholastic philosophy, but controversia belongs to rhetoric too; it is an elaborate form of declamatio and is governed by strict rules. Akin to suasoria, it can be defined as an imaginary legal debate, in which, on the basis of a particular law and a particular situation in which that law is infringed, a pupil must argue either in line with the law or against it. Controversia thus makes use of a case. It is at the intersections of these different domains that early modern “création”is situated.