Entering literature 2: Self-made Books
This symposium is organised within the framework of the TANDEM Program AV ČR-CNRS and led by Hélène Martinelli (ENS Lyon) & Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė (Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague).
Date: November 14, 2025
Location: ENS Lyon – Buisson (D8 003), 19 allée de Fontenay
Language: French, English
Full program can be downloaded here
Program
10:00 Welcoming coffee
10:30-11:00
Hélène Martinelli (ENS Lyon) & Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė (Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
Presentation of the Tandem project, Cefres, 2026-2028: “Paper Bonds. Bookmaking for Kin, Friends and Self in Contemporary Europe and the Middle East”
11:00-13:00
Marie Rivière (Universitat de Barcelona & DILTEC– Paris 3)
Between monolingual industrial textbooks and multilingual handmade artbooks
Lucie Ryzová (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
(Re-)Materialising words: Scrapbooking in Egypt, then and now
13:00 Lunch break
14:30-17:00
Miloš Hroch (Charles University, Prague)
Selfing & Shelving of Zines: An (incomplete) overview of current threads in zine studies
Anna Malinowska (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Cutting Up Books. A Method in Visibility and Self-navigation
19:00 Dinner
ABSTRACTS
Marie Rivière (Universitat de Barcelona & DILTEC laboratory (Paris 3)
Between monolingual industrial textbooks and multilingual handmade artbooks
This talk aims to compare two ways of making books. On the one hand, the industrial production of French language textbooks intended for a huge, international, anonymous public. On the other hand, the slow handmaking of multilingual art and literature books for a very limited and mainly close audience. I will draw on my dual experience as a professional editor and voluntary bookmaker, blended with my research in sociolinguistics and cultural sociology, to present how these two ways of publishing may match. However, I will mostly outline how they differ from their conception to their circulation (organisation, stakeholders, schedule, editing, graphic design and layout, printing, digital options, marketing, distribution, potential price, sale or gift, users/readers feedback), and how this may impact the outside (material, format, colours, binding), as well as the inside (text, image, blank) of the books. In doing so, I will highlight five sensitive issues: language, politics, copyright, pace, and value.
Lucie Ryzová (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
(Re-)Materialising words: Scrapbooking in Egypt, then and now
My current research focuses on the centrality of novel writing practices to the emergence of modern forms of selfhood, and more broadly, the transformation of textual cultures in colonial Egypt. I have worked extensively on personal photographic practices and the parallels between self-writing and picture-taking in this historical context. My work is based on a considerable body of paper-based artefacts that include diaries, letters, photographs and photographic albums, and scrapbooks and paper-based ephemera of diverse kinds, all of which middling and mostly urban Egyptians considered important enough to keep for decades. This material comes from two main directions: from private collections of descendants (family archives), and as alienated objects turned into commodities and sold in various flea markets across contemporary Cairo. Inscribing, “doing things with paper” (Latour, Gitelman), and mediation (acts of extending one’s reach in time and space through forms of social exchange) are central to this work; such practices were gendered, and they were class-making and subject-forming.
For this workshop, I will share aspects of my research (both past and current) that intersect with, or speak to, the themes addressed by the “Material Bonds” project. I will present the considerable body of scrapbooks produced by mostly young, educated Egyptians in the first half of the 20th century. They typically include various combinations of texts and images, both written or hand-drawn as well as cut off from newspapers and magazines. Some of them are entirely hand-made. Secondly, I will share the many instances of material engagement with words (and images) that are visible only through this “archive”: scribbling, doodling and drawing over print artefacts (books, newspapers and magazines). All these practices can be understood as forms of personalising or appropriating mass-produced print artefacts; they speak of historically specific ways of engaging with the (then new) medium of print; and they offer critical insights into new forms of self-making, intimacy, and imagination enabled and encouraged by the new medium of print.
Finally, I will share instances of contemporary material engagement with such family archives in Egypt, which often take the form of creative destruction through various art-making projects (including book-making), in ways that intersects with the contemporary focus of this workshop. I understand this workshop to be exploratory; my aim is thus to historicize some of the questions and themes that are central to this project, and to explore further crossings between our respective research interests and directions.
Anna Malinowska (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Cutting up Books: A Method in Visibility and Self-navigation
This talk draws from my forthcoming monograph/art book Cutting Up Books: A Method in Visibility and Self-Navigation(Intellect, 2026), which investigates how the physical and conceptual dismantling of books can generate new affective and epistemic relations with texts. Rooted in practices of material and textual fragmentation (cutting, folding, reassembling), this project reimagines the book not only as an object of reading, but as a critical medium in its own right.
Rather than treating fragmentation as a loss, the book proposes it as a generative act: a mode of thinking that resists closure and linearity, and instead embraces the tactile, the contingent, and the personal. As a female academic from Eastern Europe navigating the Anglo-American corpus and English as both a pan-language and pan-method of contemporary academia, I use this process as a means of visibility and self-navigation, revisiting, unsettling, and reinhabiting academic writing while challenging dominant forms of authority, coherence, and legibility.
Through experimental writing methods and handcrafted bookworks, Cutting Up Books explores how affect, intimacy, and embodied labor are entangled in acts of self-made publishing. In conversation with the Paper Bonds project, I will reflect on how these methods engage with kinship, memory, and the private-public dynamics of authorship, and how they open space for collective reflection on the material infrastructures of knowledge. The talk will also present examples of physical book-objects produced in the process, foregrounding the affective dimensions of their making.
Ania Malinowska is a cultural theorist, writer, and Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She is also a former Fulbright Research Fellow at the New School in New York. Her work explores the intersections of technoculture, affect (Love in Contemporary Technoculture, Cambridge University Press 2022) and experimentation-as-method (Cutting Up Books. A Method, Intellect 2026). She is a proponent of textrapolation, an automated cut-up technique for theory-making.
Miloš Hroch (Charles University, Prague)
Selfing & Shelving of Zines: An (incomplete) overview of current threads in zine studies
Selfing hints at how the individual or collective self is constructed or “manufactured” via material and discursive practices of writing, making and publishing zines, while shelving refers to the current expansion of zine archives within and outside institutions. These two concepts will serve as starting points for an (incomplete) overview of current threads in zine studies, including liminality of zines and material histories of zines, which Miloš Hroch (from the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at Charles University in Prague) will present on based on the upcoming special issue “Selfing and Shelving: Zines between Institutions and Alternative Media Identites” for DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, he co-edits (with Sabina Fazli and Matthew Worley). In the second part, he will zoom in on the materiality of zines and his earlier research on the Prague zine scene, contextualised by the post-digital era.