Édouard Glissant argues that no contemporary writer can truly write monolingually, since the presence of the world's other languages inevitably inhabits and shapes the literary imagination : « Je parle et surtout j’écris en présence de toutes les langues du monde. » (Glissant 1996, 39). Even when a text appears to be written in a single language, it remains haunted by other linguistic worlds, cultures, and imaginaries.

Building on Glissant's poetics of Relation, this seminar asks how multilingual literary practices challenge monolingual paradigms of literary criticism and comparative literature. It invites participants to reflect on multilingual writing as a relational practice. How does writing across or within multiple languages transform literary imaginary and reshape our understanding of relationality? What linguistic traces—whether visible or latent—inhabit texts written in such dominant languages as French, English, and Spanish? How do suppressed, inherited, or untranslated languages participate in the construction of literary meaning?

We are particularly interested in how multilingualism unsettles the notion of discrete, bounded languages and instead foregrounds literature as a site of relation. 

The seminar also seeks to address methodological questions. How might we develop comparative approaches capable of reading multilingual texts without reproducing linguistic hierarchies? What critical tools enable us to attend to unequal power relations between languages—particularly between colonial and minoritized languages, such as French and Creole, English and Indigenous languages, or other asymmetrical linguistic formations? How can comparative literature account for multilingualism without reducing less dominant languages to mere traces of hegemonic ones?

Possible topics include:

• Relationality and multilingual literary imagination
• Visible and invisible multilingualism
• Translation, opacity, and untranslatability
• Creolization and linguistic relation
• Colonial and postcolonial language hierarchies
• Comparative methodologies for multilingual texts
• Linguistic justice and world literature
• Minoritized languages and literary criticism
• Archives of multilingualism and multilingual reading practices

By bringing together scholars working across literary traditions, languages, and historical periods, this seminar aims to explore multilingualism not simply as a feature of texts but as a relational mode of thinking, writing, and reading—one that invites comparative literature to rethink its own methods and assumptions.