European and global responses to the concept of “literary engagement” between 1945 and 1968

The question of “engagement” (or commitment) became one of the defining elements of post-WWII literature and was, for a long period, at the center of the discussions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics in several European countries. Commonly associated with the name of Jean-Paul Sartre, the success of the notion of “committed literature,” however, went well beyond the French national space. This panel focuses on the transnational circulation of the concept of “committed literature” and, more broadly, on the circulation of related notions, such as writers’ “responsibility,” as well as on any type of counter-discourse or counter-theory targeting “committed literature.” We would like to explore the different degrees of transnational propagation and dissemination of these debates both in regions that absorbed the intellectual debates taking place in France and in the case of countries which remained more impermeable to them.