To Live in a Library of Five Dimensions
Date: June 11, 2025, 18 h
Location: French Institute in Prague, Štěpánská 35, Praha 1
The event will be held in French with simultaneous translation into Czech.
Where does the hostility towards literature come from, and what are the roots of its growing devaluation? How can we enrich our readings by taking a decentralised look at the texts? To what extent can a perspective from afar shed new light on our understanding of the Greek tragedies? And with what far-reaching arguments has Pope Francis put an end to a long history of scathing indictments of literary texts?
As part of the ‘Grands entretiens avec…’ series, this event is organised by CEFRES and its Platform partners in collaboration with the French Institute in Prague.
This interview with Wiliam Marx, professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France, will focus on the issues addressed by the author in his books, most of which have been published by Éditions de Minuit. It will be chaired by Záviš Šuman, who teaches French literature at the Institute of Roman Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Charles University.
Born in 1966 in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, William Marx studied at the Lycée Thiers in Marseille, then at the École normale supérieure. He passed his agrégation in classics in 1989, and went on to defend his thesis at Paris-Sorbonne in 2000 and his habilitation at Paris 8 in 2005. After teaching in France and abroad, he was elected Professor of Comparative Literature at the Collège de France in 2019.
A member of several prestigious academies and distinguished by numerous institutions, he is a specialist in comparative literature and aesthetic canons, libraries and aesthetic systems. He has published numerous works translated into a dozen languages, including La Haine de la littérature (2015), Un savoir gai (2018), Un été avec don Quichotte (2024) and Libraries of the Mind (2025).
To mark the occasion, the journal Svět literatury / World of literature is publishing an entire Czech translation of William Marx’s Inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, accompanied by an introduction that reviews the key milestones in our guest’s thinking. These texts are now freely available on the journal’s website.