République des Savoirs

Laboratoire transdisciplinaire du CNRS, ENS et du Collège de France

Pierre-Yves Anglès

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Biography: Pierre-Yves Anglès (he/him) is a French PhD candidate in English and Anglophone literature. He studied both modern and comparative literature in Paris (B.A. Sorbonne Université – M.A. Ecole normale supérieure, ENS-PSL) and in the United-States (visiting undergraduate program at Northeastern University – graduate research grant at Columbia University).

His doctoral work, situated within literature and cultural studies, is supervised by professors Hélène Aji (ENS-PSL) and Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge). It mostly looks into non-fiction and spatial studies to evaluate the transnational history of the 1960s and its broad range of countercultures as well as revolt and youth movements. His project draws on direct interviews with writers and activists as well as archival work, including at the Yale Beinecke Library thanks to a grant from the Association Française d’Etudes Américaines (AFEA, 2024).

Pierre-Yves Anglès is especially committed to transatlantic studies through conferences, research mobilities (Maison française d’Oxford, 2023), and teaching (Sciences Po Paris, ENS-PSL). He has also published in popular media, including The Washington Post, Le Monde and Revue Esprit. A specialist in academic administration, he currently serves as Director of Studies of Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL).

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Title of the PhD project: “Going Places: Self-narrative, space and revolt of the 1960s in the United-States and in France” (EN) / “Going Places: Ecriture de soi, spatialité et révoltes des années 1960 aux États-Unis et en France” (FR)

Thesis director: Hélène AJI (ENS)

Co-director: Emma WILSON (University of Cambridge)

Academic year of registration: 2022-2023

Summary of the PhD project: Set at the intersection of comparative literature, history and political science, this doctoral project intends to analyze the French and American 1960s’ revolts through the genre of memoirs. Historical testimonies as much as literary productions that helped mythologize the 1960s, the corpus’s memoirs display multiple types of revolt: political, to transform the world, existential, to change life, or countercultural, which has more to do with lifestyle and value systems. Manifesting in France and the US, these revolts sometimes nourished one another, which makes this project inherently transnational.

Space is the framework chosen for the study of revolt, and a very underrepresented analytical tool in non-fiction studies. Such approach to the 1960s allows combining individual experiences (literary geography) with critical theory that exposes power structures or the critical function of marginality as a space of stigmatization and emancipation (geocriticism). Space also holds an aesthetical and affective dimension as many sites of the 1960s turned into “sites of memory” (geopoetics). Ultimately, this project will excavate the roots of various contemporary social movements, including “identity politics” and environmentalism, all tied to the emergence of “the generation” as a dissenting political category.

N.B. Writers central to this project include Maya Angelou, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Joan Baez, Angela Davis, Joan Didion, Abbie Hoffman, Cleve Jones, Susan Sontag, Patti Smith and Gloria Steinem.

 

Research interests and interdisciplinarity

  • Literature: French-American comparative modern literature, non-fiction genres and writing (autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, speeches, biopics, New Journalism), Beat Generation, Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Smith
  • Political and social sciences: political and cultural history of the “long Sixties” (1958-1974), philosophies of revolt (existentialism, New Left, Albert Camus), youth and citizen mobilizations (New Social Movements, intersectionality)
  • Theory: transnational and spatial studies (literary geography, cultural studies, French theory), ecological turn (Anthropocene, ecopoetics, zoopoetics)