Often, the reader receives a finished work, permanently fixed after a long editorial process that thereby presents a work frozen in time and for posterity. Whether literary, technical or scientific, the work is nonetheless the fruit of a trajectory whose existence can be perceived through drafts. It is precisely this “pre‑stage”, somewhat mysterious and usually left unspoken, that the present conference wishes to explore. From the finished work, the light of the world shines; from the initial manuscript, the genesis of thought in motion, of writing in becoming. This genetic perspective on texts applies equally to scientific and literary writings.
But do authors – whatever their discipline – use the same pen strokes, the same erasures, the same writing procedures? How does a scientific discovery arise? Is there a “scientific spirit” that can be identified, guessed, or traced in the drafts of a mathematician, a physicist or a chemist? Do writing practices remain comparable from the Middle Ages to the most contemporary periods? Does a writer such as Ronsard, who revised his texts throughout successive editions, allow us to delimit and understand his masterpiece? Should we excavate his first edition or consider the final, corrected version completed decades later as definitive and unique? Could the genesis of a “J’accuse…!” in the offices of the newspaper L’Aurore help us interpret the printed text of the morning of January 13th, 1898?
These questions also invite consideration of the fate of writers’ archives. Since the second half of the 20th century, many authors have deposited their manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (e.g., Edmond Jabès, Hélène Cixous, Nathalie Sarraute, Pierre Guyotat, Annie Ernaux, Édouard Glissant, whose archives are conserved at the BnF). Whether donated or acquired, these archives (extensive or partial) make a genetic study possible while subjecting pre‑texts to cataloguing, description and sometimes digitization. How do these post‑writing mediations shape our reading of the work? An author’s intentionality may be detectable in the watermarks of his drafts. But what about works published without the author’s own initiative? Think of the fragments of Pascal’s Pensées. Would he recognize the book we read today as a closed volume? The same applies to the history of dictionaries. What additions / deletions / corrections / amendments occur between the very first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in 1698 and the ninth edition presented to the President of the Republic in 2025 at the Institut de France?
Between manuscript and printed text, between private archive and collective heritage, between first formulation and stabilized version, multiple temporalizations of the work emerge. The conference aims to question the acts of writing, rewriting, selection, editing and preservation that contribute to its constitution. It will examine the material, intellectual and institutional conditions by which a text, a body of knowledge or a discovery attains a public form and, sometimes, an apparent fixity.
The conference therefore intends to explore the transversal issue of the genetics of texts across centuries and across all domains of knowledge. We therefore welcome proposals for communications in the following fields:
Presentations (excluding plenary sessions) at this conference will last 30 minutes (20 minutes for the presentation + 10 minutes for questions). The two official languages of the conference are French and English.
Proposals for papers must be submitted to Cécile AUBÉ (cecile.aube@polytechnique.edu) by 1 March 2027 at the latest, in the form of an abstract (one page maximum). The scientific committee will give its decision by 15 April 2027 at the latest.
