Album amicorum: Karine Abiven

Karine Abiven is a senior lecturer at Sorbonne University, specialising in Early Modern texts and their links to the present. Her approach, at the crossroads of linguistics, literature and political history, has led her to study a wide range of documents, from private writings to printed pamphlets. She aims to make these texts accessible through digital humanities and is particularly interested in the notion of event. She also works on the circulation of political texts, particularly through song, in a book which is to be published: Sur l’air de Fronde. Chansons d’actualité et guerre civile, 1648-1661, Champ Vallon, tbp 2026.

For starters: what is the place of the notion of the present in your everyday life as a researcher?

My research over the last 15 years has focused on the ways in which the present is told, firstly through the short stories that circulated in the world of Belles-Lettres in 17th-18th century France, and then through more public news texts, with my more recent research on pamphlets from the early modern period. I’m especially interested in the question of ‘who’: who circulated a particular piece of news, who could have received it, and through which medium ? The present is obviously not the same for everyone: this psychological banality has important (and already well-documented) epistemological repercussions. This means that we still need to find out whether this or that utterance was circulated in printed or handwritten form, and in what spheres it was received, and so on. And this despite the many gaps in the documentation. In short, my relationship with the question of the present is marked by a form of hypervigilance, or a critical obsession, towards the sources.

Moreover, the state of the planet also makes me think every day about how anthropocentric the present can be.

What is your expertise and in what way does your research engage with the notions of time, temporality and/or the present?

I work at the intersection of literary studies, linguistics and history.

The history of the forms taken by discourse give insight into the various ways in which the present has been considered. The form of the anecdote, for example – which was the subject of my thesis — made it possible to observe a shift, between the 17th and 18th centuries, from an old regime of rhetorical exemplarity to a more individual approach, marked by contingency, in the way of recounting recent history, literary history, or even the experiences of emerging experimental science. I think it is very useful to combine the history of books and prints and linguistic knowledge for this type of study. It allows us to be aware of the singularity of each utterance, while also considering the recurrences at work in discourse, which bring out sociohistorical trends in these discourses.

What kind of sources do you use in your research on time, temporality and/or the present?

My recent research focuses on political songs and pamphlets, particularly during the Fronde (1648-1653). It is a goldmine for approaching both the written and oral dimensions of current affairs discourse. These songs and pamphlets were printed on broadside, printed as pamphlets, or handwritten on single-sheets. In the semi-literate society of the early modern period, songs were a frequent medium used to inform, entertain, amuse, manipulate, spread rumors, and had a remarkable dynamism and flexibility in circulation. After the Ligue, the Fronde was a time when the printing press largely took over this practical role : they spread texts that are less narrative testimonies of events, than partisan ways of interpreting them. Since these songs were often set to well-known tunes, it is possible to identify enunciative communities, which used which tunes, and thus to better understand who might have been aware of what, and from what point of view.

That is why I have chosen an engraving depicting peddlers of news, sung or spoken. We can see that the street singer (« Le Savoyard, ou l’Orphée du Pont-Neuf ») is blind, as those in this profession often were. These blind street singers have sometimes been considered as ‘mass media’ vectors of their time (see Jean-François Botrel on spanish pliegos de cordel).

Whose ‘present’ or ‘temporality’ are you particularly interested in, in your research?

I dream of knowing how ordinary people relate to the present. I’m well aware that the degree of literacy of the early modern age makes this a complex task. So most of the time I find myself browsing through the literate archive! My hope is to combine the writings of less literate people (the memoirs or household books of craftsmen, for example) with the study of chapbooks that they might have known. It is this public part of private writings that gives me hope of knowing the shared linguistic material of current affairs.

Are there any specific theorists about time that you are particularly drawn to? And/or: Have you recently encountered another project or researcher who is of particular interest regarding this topic?

I have been influenced by the German semantics of historical times since the beginning of my research, in particular Reinhart Koselleck (Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, 1979, translated into French in 1990). His critical vision of regimes of historicity taught me to construct the relationship to time as a datum that is itself historicizable. This school of thought is very attentive to words themselves, and to the history of rhetorical forms, and for this reason their work has been welcomed by French linguists such as Régine Robin, Denise Maldidier and Jacques Guilhaumou, who worked on the words of the event during the French Revolution.

Do you think it is possible to speak of a shared perception of time or of the present at a specific historic moment (one of our research questions)?

I look forward to hearing that from you!

Which three terms come to mind when you think about the ‘present’ of people in Northwestern Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth century?

Famine and War (I am going to look for a third one that is a bit more positive, I promise!)

Finally, what would be your ‘research utopia’ if finances and time were not an issue?

To compile a database of songs and tunes in use from 1500 to 1848 (date not only of a revolution in France, but also of an extraordinary repertoire of melodies by the chansonnier Pierre Capelle). The project has already been started on the 16^th century by Alice Tacaille (musicologist who has worked on the time of François 1er and the Italian Wars) and Tatiana Debbagi Baranova (on the Wars of Religion). It’s a very costly work, because the tunes change names very often, and it is difficult to keep track of them. However, it would be very useful to know how tunes move from one place to another in Europe, whether through the traditional channels of scholarly communication, or through other channels, such as printed communication. In my view, this would be an essential complement to a study of discourses on the present’s forms, complementing what the history of books and prints has been able to do for chapbooks, for example (Chartier, Lüsebrink). Knowing the music that conveys words does not solve all the gaps in our knowledge of the ephemeral utterances of the past, nor does the study of the materiality of texts: but combining the two together would contribute to an oral history of discourses on the present.

But above all, if I really had the financial resources, I would give tenure to non-titular researchers. The sustainability of databases and other research projects is often compromised by funding that is not forthcoming. And above all, knowledge should be able to be produced by individuals who do not sacrifice their professional stability to it.

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