Université Paris 13 99 avenue Jean-Baptiste Clément F 93430 VILLETANEUSE		Département d'études des cultures et pays anglophones
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Le symposium a réuni quelques-uns des meilleurs spécialistes de l'œuvre de William Morris et de l'histoire sociale et culturelle de l'ère victorienne.
Les enregistrements VHS et les textes seront bientôt disponibles (lien à partir du nom de chacun des intervenants)
 

• 09h-10h: Susan Trouvé-Finding (Université de Poitiers): Imaginary topography
• 10h15-11h15: Elizabeth Gaudin (Université Paris 7): Art & work & industry
• 11h30-12h30: Jacques Carré (Université Paris 4): Architecture, utopia and history in Morris’s thought

• 13h30-14h30: Logie Barrow (Universität Bremen): William Morris, the Socialist League and Democracy
• 14h45-15h45: François Poirier (Université Paris 13): The historical reconstructions at work in "how the change came"
• 16h-17h: Jean-Paul Révauger (Université Bordeaux 3): Guild Socialism
• 17h15-17h45: Catherine Durieux (Université Paris 1 et 3): : News From Nowhere dans la " chaîne des utopies "

Résumés - Abstracts: cliquer ici
Comment se rendre à l'Université Paris 13? cliquer ici.

Dans la littérature utopique, le voyage imaginaire dans un monde inconnu tient une place de choix. Morris choisit d'exposer sa vision de la société en le déplaçant vers un monde bien connu de ses lecteurs, celui de Londres et des environs de la Tamise. La place occupée par ces deux 'lieux' est telle que l'on pourrait presque parler de 'personnages' du roman au même titre que William Guest, Ellen et Clara, Dick et son grand-père. Les paysages imaginaires où  ceux-ci évoluent sont mais un véritable mise en scène de la société nouvelle, un 'blueprint' à travers duquel Morris nous laisse apercevoir en filigrane les symboles de l'ère victorienne déchue. Le lecteur effectue un constant va-et-vient entre le monde irréel, imaginaire de l'avenir et le monde réel, contemporain de Morris où la toponymie, l'histoire, la situation géographique de chaque lieu donne lieu à une interprétation multiple, concernant à la fois le portrait que Morris dresse du de la société nouvelle, la signification réelle de son choix (lieu symbolique, lieu affectif, lieu politique, lieu social...) et ses intentions quant au contraste que le lecteur est amené à faire.

Along with the commercialism of his time, William Morris utterly rejected the contemporary conception of art, as an elitist occupation which ordinary working men were totally excluded from, and he questioned from the start the distinction between Fine Arts and crafts. His deeply held belief was that  a  complete social revolution was needed, if  art were not to perish altogether.
Morris’s own definition of art was intimately linked to his conception of work as the mainspring of human happiness. In his eyes, what was to be recovered was the worker’s control over his work, his tools, and his production, necessary prerequisites for his freedom to create beauty. In this respect, as in others, his preferred historical reference was the Middle Ages. News from Nowhere provides an attractive illustration of this merging of work and art.
At a time when industrial design was beginning to take off (as exemplified in the work of Christopher Dresser), Morris deliberately chose to concentrate on reviving traditional handicrafts. This has meant that in spite of his considerable influence on taste, as well as in the social and political fields, and in spite also of his -rather paradoxical- commercial success, his impact on the aesthetic choices of our mass-producing societies has remained limited.
 
 

Throughout his life Morris had a keen interest in architecture. His youthful passion for Gothic was heightened by reading Ruskin’s famous chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic’. The building of his ‘Red House’ illustrated Morris’s definition of architecture as a comprehensive art of the environment and as a collective creation. Morris’s foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was no mere antiquarian hobby but the occasion of developing his views on the meaning of work and art in history. Architecture was increasingly seen not in terms of style but in terms of mode of production. Morris’s dislike of Renaissance architecture reflected his hatred of the division of labour — in this case a division between theory and practice. His even greater dislike for Victorian architecture reflected his perception of the city as the ultimate form of capitalist alienation. The utopian world of Nowhere at last restored architecture to its inhabitants. The art of building was now part of the art of living. Still historical architecture had something to teach the moderns, its triumphs (Kelmscott) and failures (Cockney villas) testifying to the ups and downs of civilization and pointing to Morris’s cyclical view of history.

As a socialist during his final one-and-a-half decades, Morris did much to spread ideas about radical democracy. These remained very much alive within the doctrinal ferment of Britain's second labour movement which he helped to found. They had been bequeathed from the first, after the circum-1850 collapse of Chartism as a national movement. Doctrinally, this tradition was almost buried by world events from 1914. In practice, though, it interacted with 'rank-and-file' emphases which have often characterised British industrial relations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
We will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of both traditions, the doctrinal and the practical. Centrally, we will examine what Morris stood for as a democratic revolutionary socialist and what he did not, at least in relation to anarchists and to the question of leadership in general.

Morris envisages a process of change from capitalism to socialism and eventually communism which is largely inspired by his interpretation of a number of events in English or European history. In particular, the peasants' revolt of 1381, the events of the Cromwellian period, the French Revolution, Chartism, and closer to him in time, the Paris Commune are clearly a source of his reflexion. This paper will be based on a study of the state of the historiography and literature on these subjects in the late 19th century.

On sait que William Morris a écrit News from Nowhere en 1890 pour proposer une alternative à la vision socialiste de Bellamy, telle qu’elle s’exprime dans Looking Backward en 1887. Sa critique de Looking Backwards de Bellamy, parue dans son journal le Commonweal, est généralement connue des lecteurs attentifs de News from Nowhere. Ce que l’on sait moins, c’est que Bellamy a écrit en retour une critique de News from Nowhere dans The New Nation, un journal de son propre mouvement " nationaliste " . Le dialogue ne s’arrête pas là puisque William Dean Howells, le " doyen des lettres américaines " et un membre très éminent du mouvement " nationaliste " de Bellamy, publie, à son tour, A Traveler from Altruria (1894). Cette utopie éminemment intertextuelle cite nommément Bellamy et Morris et propose une vision qui constitue une véritable synthèse des deux. L’examen de ces quelques chaînons de ce qu’Orwell a appelé la " chaîne des utopies " doit me permettre d’illustrer l’importance du dialogue et des allers et retours transatlantiques dans le domaine des idées et de démontrer l’unicité de la tradition utopique anglo-saxonne par delà les frontières nationales.

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