“Introduction”

Résumé 0

“Introduction”, Régine Battiston, Nikol Dziub and Augustin Voegele (Eds.), “Amitiés vives”: littérature et amitié dans les correspondances d’écrivains [Living Friendships: Literature and Friendship in the Correspondence of Writers], Reims, Éditions et Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2022, p. 9-22. (Symposium. University of Haute-Alsace, 19-20/11/2020.) Friendship is obviously situated in an “interspace”, between alter and ego, between same and self, between idem and ipse. To what extent does the epistolary act – especially when it includes a literary dimension due to the identity of at least one of its actors – contribute to the creation, discovery or invention of oneself as another? We tried to answer this question by breaking it down into several sub-questions: is correspondence, and in particular literary correspondence (the epistolary posture and the literary posture being both favourable to opening up to the unknown or the unfamiliar), a terrain conducive to the development of friendships linking two beings of different sexes/genders? Is the letter conducive to interdisciplinary and interartistic friendships? And what about intercultural friendships?