The Black Sea, and its six littoral states (Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia), its important port cities, its littoral settlements, its multicultural richness and its history going back to Antiquity, offer in an exemplary way the possibility to be studied in this perspective.

The Black Sea as literary and cultural space supposes an inductive-deductive research: an object is set within a frame(work) in order to be observed during a process which comes to modify the frame(work). The object ‘Black Sea’ is constructed as a literary and cultural space, and in turn helps to define the concept. This concept, actually, can be approached from three perspectives. The first one considers the concept as a milieu hosting in coexistence different literatures as well as different cultures; the second treats the concept as an interactive space entangling literatures in a way similar to the approaches of Pascale Casanova or Emily Apter; the last accepts the concept as matrix of the imaginary, relying on the géocritique of Bertrand Westphal and the literary geography of Sheila Hones. Combining the perspectives could support the hypothesis of Black Sea as civilisation, not in the classical sense of collective system of values interrelated hierarchically but in the sense of world-system (Wallerstein) held within the frame of the global world-system; and could offer the possibility of tracing manifestations of such civilisation in literary works. A literary and cultural space implies fluctuation between materiality and ideality, history and myth, – which is sustained by the adopted interdisciplinary methodological prism.

This conference presents itself a second stage of a collective research aimed at studying the Black Sea as literary and cultural space. It is a continuation of the first conference “Black Sea as Literary and Cultural Space” (see the call), held in Tbilisi on 25-27 October 2018, organised by Ilia State University upon the initiative of Mr. Alexis Nuselovici, Professor at Aix-Marseille University.

Organising institutions:

• Institute for Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia);
• Chair of Romance Studies of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (Sofia);
• Ilia State University (Tbilisi);
• Aix-Marseille University (Aix-en-Provence, Marseille) ; INaLCO (Paris).

For more information, see the website.