Seminar “With the Muses. A counter-history of the author, from Calliope to AI”

As part of the H-AI TEAM project (WP4, creative collaboration), Alexandre Gefen (CNRS / Sorbonne Nouvelle) convenes a hybrid seminar at the Sorbonne, on Thursdays from 6:00 to 7:30 pm (room F007, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, staircase C, 2nd floor), with a parallel online stream: visio.numerique.gouv.fr/udt-tvmz-hzg. Free entry; sessions are held in French.

Argument

The act of writing is spontaneously pictured as a solitary face-to-face: a subject, a desk, a blank page. This image — the “room of one’s own” turned into the genius’s cell — is not an anthropological given but a historical construction, largely forged by Romanticism, legally stabilised by copyright, sustained by the economy of the book and by a certain idea of literature. The single, all-powerful author corresponds to a situated ideology of literature, of which this seminar intends to write the counter-history.

From Antiquity to artificial intelligence, the seminar looks at practices that contradict creative solitude. There are at least two families under the word “collective”. On the one hand, agency shared among peers — duos, salons, workshops, contemporary collectives: a co-present, negotiated writing, now well studied. On the other, and this is the second heart of the inquiry, agency delegated to an other who is not a peer: the muse first of all, but also the god, the dead, the unconscious, language, chance, the machine. Here the writer does not share the work with a fellow; they become channel, medium, secretary, editor of a speech that comes from elsewhere. Muse, spiritualism, automatism, structure, statistical model are so many avatars of one series. Artificial intelligence is not its rupture but its contemporary state: the most recent of the muses.

The guiding thread is therefore a concept — agency, and more precisely hetero-agency, the delegation of creative action to an other that the seminar names, by metonymy, the muse. Each session asks where, in a given writing arrangement, the capacity to act resides, and to which muse it is lent; it treats literature as a thousand-year-old laboratory of distributed agency, including non-human actants long before AI, which helps us think what becomes of the “author” when the creative act ceases to be attributable to a single subject and is redefined as a gesture of reception, curation and responsibility.

Programme 2026–2027

• 24 September 2026 — Introduction: the individual author, genealogy of a myth (Alexandre Gefen)
• 5 November 2026 — Writing with the Muses (Florence Dupont)
• 3 December 2026 — Writing from orality (Tristan Mauffrey)
• 21 January 2027 — The anonymous author (Marc Escola)
• 4 February 2027 — Theatre before the author (Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès)
• 25 February 2027 — Writing as a parlour game (Karin Kukkonen)
• 25 March 2027 — Writing on stage (Cristina de Simone)
• 22 April 2027 — Writing as a ghostwriter (Marie-Ève Thérenty)
• 29 April 2027 — Writing with two voices (Benoît Peeters)
• 13 May 2027 — Writing with the copyist (Nathalie Koble)
• 27 May 2027 — Writing on the assembly line (Matthieu Letourneux)
• 10 June 2027 — Writing under several names (Lionel Ruffel)

Each session is listed in the events calendar. A second year (2027–2028) will turn to the unconscious, the editor, the translator, the reader, the archive and the text generator.