The Art of Friendship in France, 1789-1914

友谊无处不在。几乎不可能想象一个没有它的社会或文化。然而，对于一个对几乎所有人都如此直接、直观地具有意义的概念来说，友谊一直是一个出了名的棘手的学术问题。非官方的、不成文的、不受管制的(更不用说往往是不说的)友谊本身并不适合给自己下明确的理论定义；过去的友谊也不一定会留下痕迹，让我们能够从证据中阐述历史友谊的模式。毫无疑问，正是友谊的这些有问题的方面所带来的挑战和可能性，使友谊在过去20年里成为一个跨越多个学科的富有成效的研究领域。历史学家和文学评论家出于不同的原因被吸引到这个主题上，并以不同的方式解决这个问题--但他们很少有机会比较他们对友谊的基本假设，从而找出他们谈论的是不是同一件事。我们的跨学科网络鼓励一个研究法国大革命和拿破仑时代、19世纪以及一战前的美丽时代的国际学者小组，考虑在他们自己的领域内(也许是他们自己的国家学术背景)对友谊的预设是什么，以及他们可以从其他学科的学者使用这个概念中学到什么--特别是，他们可以通过跨学科对话获得什么新形式的证据，以及这些证据如何丰富他们自己对这个核心文化问题的描述。我们的网络将把来自法国、加拿大、英国和美国的历史学家和文学学者聚集在一起。世卫组织将合作将友谊作为公共和私人问题、作为文化现象和生活事实、作为代表性和现实进行调查。对我们来说，特别重要的是友谊与性和欲望的关系：因为当包括约翰·博斯韦尔和艾伦·布雷在内的历史学家们在争论如何让过去的时代有一种语言来谈论同性的欲望和关系时，19世纪文学的批评者可能同样渴望一种语言来谈论文本，这种语言以某种方式摆脱了20世纪阅读和解读理论中似乎被欲望所垄断的文本。十九世纪(异性恋)的男人和女人会不会“只是朋友”？无论现实生活中是否可能，19世纪的文学文本能代表这样一种友谊吗？一部小说中的人物完全被友谊捆绑在一起，性欲被排除在外，这部小说甚至可以阅读吗？所有这些问题都将进入我们的合作探索中：友谊对19世纪法国不同的人意味着什么，对友谊的分析可以告诉我们关于这个所谓熟悉的背景的新事物，此外，19世纪关于友谊的思想的特殊性可以教会我们关于这个日常主题的假设和盲点。

Friendship is everywhere. It is almost impossible to imagine a society or culture without it. Yet for a concept that is so immediately, intuitively meaningful to virtually all human beings, friendship has been a famously intractable scholarly problem. Unofficial, uncodified and unregulated (not to mention, very often, unspoken), friendship does not lend itself to clear theoretical definition; nor do the friendships of the past necessarily leave traces that might allow us to elaborate a model of historical friendship from evidence. It is doubtless both the challenge and the possibilities promised by these problematic aspects of friendship that have made it such a productive field of research, across a number of disciplines, in the last twenty years. Historians and literary critics have been drawn to the theme for different reasons, and have addressed it in different ways - but they have rarely had the opportunity to compare their basic assumptions about friendship, and thus to work out if they are even talking about the same thing. Our interdisciplinary network encourages an international panel of scholars working on France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, the nineteenth century, and the Belle Epoque up to the Great War, to consider what presuppositions about friendship operate within their own field (and, perhaps, their own national academic context), and what they might learn from the use made of the concept by scholars in other disciplines - in particular, what new forms of evidence they might acquire through an interdisciplinary conversation, and how that evidence might enrich their own account of this central cultural question.Our network will bring together historians and literary scholars from France, Canada, the UK and the USA, who will collaboratively investigate friendship as a public and private issue, as a cultural phenomenon and a fact of life, as representation and reality. Of particular importance to us will be the relationship of friendship to sex and desire: for while historians including John Boswell and Alan Bray have debated how 'friendship' might have provided past ages with a language in which to talk about same-sex desire and relationships, critics of nineteenth-century literature might equally hanker after a language in which to talk about texts that somehow escapes the seeming monopoly of 'desire' on twentieth-century theories of reading and interpretation. Could nineteenth-century (heterosexual) men and women be 'just friends'? Could nineteenth-century literary texts represent such a friendship, whether possible or not in real life? Would a novel in which the characters were bound exclusively by friendship, and from which sexual desire was excluded, even be readable? All of these questions will flow into our collaborative exploration of what friendship meant to different people in nineteenth-century France, what new things an analysis of 'friendship' can tell us about this supposedly familiar context, and, in addition, what the peculiarities of nineteenth-century ideas on friendship can teach us of our own assumptions and blind spots about this everyday theme.