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International audience ; Through its take on 'the humble', this volume attempts to reveal the depth and philosophical relevance of literature, its ethical and political dimension as well as its connection to life. Because it can be associated with social class, religion, psychology or ethics, the notion of 'the humble' lends itself to diverse types of studies. The papers collected in this volume argue that in the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, artists and writers have revisited the term 'humble' and, far from treating it as a simple motif, have raised it to the status of an aesthetic category. This category can first foster a better understanding of fiction, poetry, painting, and their representation of precarious lives through various genres and modes. It may also draw attention to neglected or depreciated humble novels or art forms that developed from the Victorian to the contemporary period, through the Edwardian and the modernist eras. Finally, it helps revise assumptions about the literature and art of the period and signals to a poetics of the humble. The works of art examined here explore the humble as a possible capacity and ethical force, a way of being and acting.

International audience ; Through its take on 'the humble', this volume attempts to reveal the depth and philosophical relevance of literature, its ethical and political dimension as well as its connection to life. Because it can be associated with social class, religion, psychology or ethics, the notion of 'the humble' lends itself to diverse types of studies. The papers collected in this volume argue that in the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, artists and writers have revisited the term 'humble' and, far from treating it as a simple motif, have raised it to the status of an aesthetic category. This category can first foster a better understanding of fiction, poetry, painting, and their representation of precarious lives through various genres and modes. It may also draw attention to neglected or depreciated humble novels or art forms that developed from the Victorian to the contemporary period, through the Edwardian and the modernist eras. Finally, it helps revise assumptions about the literature and art of the period and signals to a poetics of the humble. The works of art examined here explore the humble as a possible capacity and ethical force, a way of being and acting.

Abstract
The paper deals with the state of the social sciences after the boom of internet services in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. The results of our survey, based on 512 responses from the economics and history departments of major Czech public universities, show that internet services are considered a quality factor for academic output; however, the issues of plagiarism, a lack of resource criticism, inadequacy of impact factor-based evaluations, poor academic training for the new generation of social scientists, the failure of state academic policy, and the generation gap make further development in the Czech social sciences rather problematic. As a result we recommend creating a better communication link between policy makers and scholars, reforming the current state policy which encourages lower quality academic output, and improving academic training, which requires a more individual approach, and also placing higher demands on social scientists.

International audience ; In this article, I reflect on what a democratic literature could look like, within the field of novelistic fiction. A first approach consists of defining democracy as a method and a form of government. The fictions that work within this definition are relatively rare, on the one hand because democracy is already a privileged theme within public conversation and the social sciences, and on the other hand because the contemporary writers who are the most professionalized are rarely those who have intimate knowledge of the political world's inner workings. These literary texts that represent democracy are nevertheless devoted, above all, to indicating the gap between what democracy is and what it should be. A second approach consists, for novelists, of transforming their novels into a democratic space: they can transform fiction into an emotional and theoretical experience that proves that equality is an unalienable right (as Rancière shows), and can redistribute speech and attention by putting foregrounding otherwise marginalized subjects. Finally, a third approach consists of investigating how literature circulates in public. Le Clézio, reading Dagerman, insists that even the literature that hopes to support society's weakest is, nonetheless, a cultural pastime of the cultivated elite classes. To open to the largest number of people possible is, for literature, an impossible demand: after a certain point, the desire to appeal to a larger readership works against singularity and aesthetic precision. But the democratic spirit implies that we must get rid of everything that comes from a position of preciousness, or from "strategies of distinction" (Bourdieu). As long as it negotiates, in each moment, a balance between aesthetic precision and readability, literature can accelerate the process of individual emancipation, and can communicate to every subject, in the words of Kafka: "You also have weapons." ; Dans cet article, je m'interroge pour savoir ce que veut dire écrire une littérature ...

International audience ; In this article, I reflect on what a democratic literature could look like, within the field of novelistic fiction. A first approach consists of defining democracy as a method and a form of government. The fictions that work within this definition are relatively rare, on the one hand because democracy is already a privileged theme within public conversation and the social sciences, and on the other hand because the contemporary writers who are the most professionalized are rarely those who have intimate knowledge of the political world's inner workings. These literary texts that represent democracy are nevertheless devoted, above all, to indicating the gap between what democracy is and what it should be. A second approach consists, for novelists, of transforming their novels into a democratic space: they can transform fiction into an emotional and theoretical experience that proves that equality is an unalienable right (as Rancière shows), and can redistribute speech and attention by putting foregrounding otherwise marginalized subjects. Finally, a third approach consists of investigating how literature circulates in public. Le Clézio, reading Dagerman, insists that even the literature that hopes to support society's weakest is, nonetheless, a cultural pastime of the cultivated elite classes. To open to the largest number of people possible is, for literature, an impossible demand: after a certain point, the desire to appeal to a larger readership works against singularity and aesthetic precision. But the democratic spirit implies that we must get rid of everything that comes from a position of preciousness, or from "strategies of distinction" (Bourdieu). As long as it negotiates, in each moment, a balance between aesthetic precision and readability, literature can accelerate the process of individual emancipation, and can communicate to every subject, in the words of Kafka: "You also have weapons." ; Dans cet article, je m'interroge pour savoir ce que veut dire écrire une littérature ...

International audience ; By the end of the 20th century, literary theory had acquired the mythified value of a universal explanatory framework, placing theories of the text in original ways at the roots of the tree of knowledges, and turning their academic analysts into the masters of such knowledge. With French Theory, textual and narrative theories, as well as rhetoric and semiology, were used to decoding the most disparate social facts, be it to understand a lover's discourse for Barthes, to deconstruct philosophy through literature for Jacques Derrida, to rethink historical narrative in Hayden White, or to analyze the poetics of science for Fernand Hallyn. Pursuing the linguistic turn that had affected philosophy, literary theory had led textual categories and logics to a universal and hegemonic ambition: everything was language, everything constituted discourse, everything represented a sign. In that respect, literary theory was more than a theory of literature, more than an epistemology or a « critique of critique ». It was, indeed, a « critique of ideology" inseparable from an explicitly Foucauldian and secretly Marxist critical social thought, be it in its American culturalist version or in its more directly political French formulation. The critiques erected against this kind of literary theory have been clearly identified, and the cultural war against the cultural studies and their social constructivism centered around sexual and racial issues have resulted in a stagnation of theory, at least in the most prominent U.S. universities. The alliance of formalism and of left-wing ideologies in the service of an identitarian discourse, or the adoption of Derridian deconstruction as an anticapitalist weapon have been the object of fierce criticism, since the debate initiated the 1980s by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels' ruthless article « Against theory » which triggered Richard Rorty's and Stanley Fish's counterattack , down to Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral's Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (2005).