Editorial

List of contents Welcome to the thirteenth issue of the EPOP Project

Newsletter. In this number you will find information
1) EPOP NEWS: THE LPCM WEBSITE about a new web site created by the Limoges team to
p.2 connect researchers working on European popular culture;
a report of the Leeds conference by Diana Holmes and
2) CONFERENCE REPORT: FINDING
Rebecca Ferreboeuf; and a list of recent publications on
THE PLOT
p.3 popular culture.
If you have any suggestions regarding the newsletter or
2) RECENT PUBLICATIONS
p.5 anything else relating to the project, please contact
federico.pagello@unibo.it.
The EPOP Project Publication Committee

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1) EPOP News: the LPCM portal
While the EPOP Project has officially come to its end on 24 May 2010, EPOP activities
have certainly not stopped. In fact, the EPOP network was born to be the starting point for
future initiatives, involving a larger number of researchers and institutions. With the same
goal, the Limoges team has recently inaugurated a new collaborative online portal, containing
news, information, and essays related to current research on European popular culture. The
LPCM website is run by the Coordination Internationale des Chercheurs en Littératures Populaires et
Cultures Médiatiques, founded by the University of Limoges in 1995, and it aims to reinforce
collaboration among researchers by allowing members to post contributions in all sections.

Please visit the LPCM website at the following address:

http://www.flsh.unilim.fr/lpcm/.

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2) Conference Report: Finding the Plot
(Leeds, 14-16 April)
The conference Finding the Plot: On the
Importance of Storytelling in Popular Fictions
was held from 14 to 16 April at the University of
Leeds (Devonshire Hall). It represented an important
development in the research collaboration between
the literary arm (or ‘cluster’) of the University of
Leeds-based Popular Cultures Research Network
(PCRN), and the University of Limoges-based Centre
de Recherches sur les Littératures Populaires et les Cultures
Médiatiques (CRLPCM), forming part of a broader
project of research that aims to complement and
interrogate the history of ‘high’ French literature
with a critical history of majority reading practices.
The conference was tightly focused on
questions of plot and storytelling, with 3 plenaries
and 27 papers organised in themed parallel sessions
leading into a closing round table discussion that
traced the threads of discussion and drew
conclusions from the whole event. Forty scholars
took part in the conference, representing a
productive diversity of career stages, institutions,
nations and research specialisms. Eleven colleagues
attended from the University of Leeds, eleven from
other universities in the UK, one from Ireland,
eleven from France, two from Belgium, one from
Switzerland, one from Sweden, one from Canada,
and one from UK secondary education. Seven
postgraduates attended, of whom two also provided
conference support (both practical and academic). A
book based on selected conference proceedings is to
be produced jointly by editors from the PCRN and
the CRLPCM. The Annual General Meeting of the
international network for the study of popular
culture, currently based at the CRLPCM, was held in
the course of the conference.
The Icelandic volcano suddenly erupted on
the final day, complicating return journeys. With
some useful support from the University, and much
initiative on the part of delegates, most were able to
travel home (albeit not in the way intended and at
considerable cost) with only a day or two’s delay –
only the Québécois colleague saw the plot digress to
an unexpected extra week in Leeds.
Finding the Plot was advertised to a wider
public through Education Leeds, who included a
poster in their weekly pack sent out to schools, and
through the Leeds Library and Information service
who are currently engaged on a project around the
spoken and written word involving a number of
storytellers working with librarians and teachers.
Although this did not have the effect of bringing in
colleagues from secondary/tertiary education (we
had only one delegate from this sector), we felt that
publicity for the conference performed a useful
function in opening lines of communication on this
theme and thus for potential impact. We also
contacted publishers: Berghahn and Manchester UP
advertised at the conference and made a small
contribution to funding; HarperCollins responded
with a declaration of interest in being kept informed
of events and developments in our work on popular
fiction and reading pleasure.
The conference theme of plot and
storytelling was topical in the context of much
recent scholarship and public debates. On the one
hand, storytelling has been characterised by some
theorists (notably Christian Salmon) as a strategy of
seduction widely used in politics, advertising, military
and business training, to sell products or ideas – thus
as sinister and manipulative. On the other hand,
interesting contemporary work (Nancy Huston,
Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer as well as
several of those present at the conference) pursues
the path traced by (for example) Frank Kermode,
Peter Brooks, Paul Ricoeur, Janice Radway in
exploring the vital role of story in the way that
human beings relate to the world and each other, and
in seeing the pleasure of even the simplest reading
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of a story not as passive escapism, but as a complex
and enriching negotiation between reader and text.
Debates and conclusions
It would be impossible to reduce two days of papers
and discussion to a simple set of conclusions. These
were some of the major threads drawn together in
the closing round table.
• The pertinence of the concept of plot
extends well beyond literature and other forms of
fiction, for example to history and the way it is
recounted, to the telling of celebrity lives
(including those of politicians), but there is danger
in assuming that all narratives are necessarily
fictional. The distinction between reality and
fiction, narrativised fact and invented story, is a
crucial one.
• A historicised perspective, not just on texts but on
critical theory, is also important: conditions of
production, historical events, filtres génériques and
multimedia influence plot and the way plot is
theorized. Barthes, Eco etc. are constant points of
reference, but their work also needs to be
historically contextualised.
• ‘Academic recuperation’, or how to think through
popular culture and literature without forcing it
into the framework of ‘élite’ critical categories,
remains an important issue.
• The conference exemplified three main approaches
to plot: literary (textual analysis), studies of
reception, a hybrid approach connecting these.
Reception studies raised the question of the
(singular) reader, i.e. the danger of assuming that
the critic’s own reading equals that of the generic
reader, and the possible need (exemplified in some
papers) for a more sociological/ethnographic
methodology.
• Suspicion of plot – a sense that to become
immersed in a fictional world is always to ‘lose
oneself ’ and be manipulated – is tenacious, and re-
emerges to some extent in Salmon’s arguments.
• From the reader’s point of view, the pleasures of
story include: anticipation and its fulfilment; the
transformation of time as mere succession of events
into meaningful sequence (la temporalité maîtrisée); the
enrichment of reality; consolation (which is not
necessarily an infantile or self-deluding process); a
paradoxical combination of transgression and
confirmation of dominant moral codes; interactivity
and dialogue between one’s own story and those of
others; liberation from the concealed fictions that
shape identity through self-declared and chosen
fictions; extension of the space of possibility,
imaginary mobility and movement; the dynamism of
creative variation on plot; catharsis, the therapeutic
function of imaginary journeys, both affective and
cognitive.
• Some distinctions that matter are those between style
(‘écriture’) as the sole criterion of true literary value
(which tends to exclude most ‘popular’ texts), and
other elements including inventiveness, plot,
characterisation; between a series and a cycle (the
latter connected by an ongoing plot structure);
between fiction and narrative; between ‘bad’ political
uses of plotting and ‘good’ ones.
• French and Anglo-Saxon approaches to the study of
(popular) literature remain distinctly different, and
include some difference in the approaches attributed
to ‘Cultural Studies’. The confrontation of the two
proved illuminating and can certainly be exploited
further.
The conference was supported by the following
bodies: The British Academy; the French Embassy;
Association for the Study of Moder n and
Contemporary France (ASMCF), Society for French
Studies, University of Leeds School of Modern
Languages and Cultures, and we thank them all.
To be continued.
Diana Holmes
Rebecca Ferreboeuf
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 3) Recent publications
Marginalia: Bulletin bibliographique des études sur les
littératures et les films populaires, Hors-Série 10-12,
Bram Stoker and Dracula Studies: Special issues:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/26043304/
Dracula-1.
Luciano Curreri, Fabrizio Foni (eds.), Un po’
prima della fine? Ultimi romanzi di Salgari tra novità e
ripetizione, Roma, Sossella, 2009.
Fabrizio Foni, Piccoli mostri crescono: Nero, fantastico e
bizzarrie varie nella prima annata de La Domenica
del Corriere (1899), Bologna, Perdisa Pop, 2010.
Richard Fantina, Victorian Sensational
Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles
Reade, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Alberto Gabriele, Reading Popular Culture
in Victorian Print: Belgravia and
S e n s a t i o n a l i s m , New York, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Sabrina Kempf, Intermediale Weltreise:
Jules Vernes Le Tour du monde en 80 jours
in Roman, Theater und Film, Saarbrücken,
VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008.
Carolin Miriam Küllmer, Der weibliche
Vampir in der Literatur des 19.
Jahrhunderts, München, Grin Verlag, 2009.
Matthieu Letourneux, Le roman d’aventures
1870-1930, Limoges, PULIM - coll.
"Médiatextes", 2010.
Anthony Uhlmann (ed.), Literature and
Sensation, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2009.

About this Newsletter

EPOP Project Newsletter provides news about the development of the project activities and circulates
information on research, initiatives and events concerning the history of European popular culture. The
newsletter will normally be published monthly.
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