Agenda

Far from being a marginal or derivative phenomenon, appropriation emerges as a structuring principle of literary modernity and contemporaneity, calling into question notions of originality, authorship, textual ownership, and creative authority. From early reflections on quotation and imitation to modern theories of intertextuality and rewriting, literary criticism has progressively displaced the figure of the autonomous author in favour of a relational, palimpsestic conception of the text. Seminal interventions such as Roland Barthes’s critique of authorial sovereignty, Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, and Antoine Compagnon’s work on citation and repetition have provided a foundational framework for understanding literature as a practice of reuse and transformation.
Anglophone criticism has further refined and expanded these perspectives. Harold Bloom’s theory of influence conceptualizes literary creation as agonistic misreading; Linda Hutcheon has theorized adaptation and parody as creative, critically reflexive modes; Julie Sanders has mapped rewriting and appropriation as historically situated literary practices. More recently, Kenneth Goldsmith’s work on uncreative writing has foregrounded appropriation as an explicit aesthetic and conceptual strategy in contemporary literature.
Within this theoretical constellation, appropriation is here approached not primarily as an ethical or legal problem — though such questions remain relevant — but as a poetics: a set of formal, stylistic, and discursive operations (quotation, allusion, ekphrasis, montage, collage, pastiche, rewriting, sampling, archival reuse) through which texts negotiate their relation to prior texts, genres, and cultural materials. Appropriation thus becomes a site where literature reflects on its own conditions of possibility, its memory, and its modes of transmission.
The conference seeks to explore how these poetics of appropriation operate across genres and periods, from rewritings of myth, the sacred texts, and the canon, to modernist and postmodern experiments with fragmentation and citation, and contemporary practices shaped by translation, remediation, and digital textuality.