It is with great pleasure that we inviteyou
to the 5th Franco-Irish Literary Festival on the theme “Memory now” |
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The Festival, organised by the Alliance
Française Dublin and the Cultural
Service of the French Embassy in Ireland, in partnership with
the Arts Council, the Ireland Fund of France, Ireland
Literature Exchange, the Irish Writers Centre and Poetry
Ireland, takes place, for the first time, in the award-winning Chester
Beatty library. We would like to acknowledge the warm welcome
which the library has generously extended to us. This year our festival is suggesting that our Irish
and French authors and their Francophone and European guests explore the
topic of memory. Childhood memory,
adult memory, conscious and unconscious memory, individual memory of a
life or collective memory of a nation, faithful or trumped up memory,
memory passed on through literature or by other artistic forms. In a
world being globalised, where breaks and recompositions are
proliferating, the duty of memory, more than ever asserts itself to
retrace or to reinvent paths travelled, in order to conjure up and forge
the pathways of the future. Artists, and especially writers, are both the
guardians and the explorers of a past that can be as much a burden as a
privilege, which they have inherited and which they will have to build
on. All writing is a trace, a furrow that defines a
space, builds a place, that is to be travelled again and always, in an
Odyssey always being renewed. Odyssey... The fifth edition of our
festival, in this year of 2004, has the privilege of coinciding with the
centenary of Bloomsday, and it will
make its contribution to the commemoration of a precise time-space: the
Dublin of 16 June 1904, bearing witness precisely to the capacity of
memory to recreate the universal, as far as it is transfigured by
language. The afternoon of Saturday 3 April will be devoted to Joyce,
from the birth of Ulysses to its first publication in Paris, and to the
relations that contemporary writers maintain with his work. To delve into Memory, its forms and its functions
today, apart from the Irish and French authors who form the crux of this
festival, in the past, we invited authors from the Francophone world. On
the eve of the biggest enlargement that the European Union has ever
experienced, we have invited European writers from the accession
countries. Twenty two authors from Ireland, France,
Haiti, Québec, Togo, Germany, the Czech
Republic, Poland, and Latvia will give us a taste of
their novels or poetic words. All this over two and a half busy days! We are hoping for a significant participation from
our English -speaking audience. For that reason, simultaneous
interpretation will be provided. Finally, we would like to express our warmest
thanks to our sponsors and patrons without whom a festival of this size
would never have been possible. We look forward to seeing you from 2nd to 4th of April, 2004! Enjoy the festival !
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Patrick Thomas |
François Chambraud |