Anne-Frédérique Mochel-Caballero (CORPUS, Université de Picardie Jules Verne)
“Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls into the Earth…”: Death and Rebirth in The Chronicles of Narnia
As a writer of fantasy and science fiction deeply influenced by the Bible, C. S. Lewis considers the notion of transition essential, particularly the transition between life and death. He draws inspiration from the Biblical metaphor of the dying seed, referencing it in nearly all his works, including The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis sees an ethical dimension in this idea, emphasizing the necessity of losing before gaining. He also links it to the Christian concept of felix culpa, which suggests that good can emerge from evil. Furthermore, he regards this metaphor as a universal principle—a pattern of descent and ascent found in nature, human systems of thought, and the Biblical narrative.
Anne-Frédérique Mochel-Caballero est maîtresse de conférences à l’université de Picardie Jules Verne à Amiens, où elle enseigne la littérature anglophone, et membre du groupe de recherche CORPUS. Elle est l’auteure de L’Évangile selon C. S. Lewis, Le dépassement du masculin / féminin dans la quête de Dieu (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011). Elle s’intéresse particulièrement à la fantasy et à l’intertextualité biblique. Elle a publié des articles sur les œuvres, entre autres, de C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Madeleine L’Engle, J.K. Rowling et Margaret Atwood.
Jeremy Elprin (ERIBIA, Université de Caen Normandie)
“‘Ready or not, here I come’: Panic and Play in Richard Powers’ Playground (2024)” (“a transition toward a new hybrid form of storytelling”)
In his most recent work of speculative fiction, Playground (2024), the American novelist Richard Powers invites us to imagine a world suffering from overlapping climate-change catastrophes, and on the cusp of an AI revolution – one which is very similar to ours, but set in 2027. If Powers’ fiction has always been characterized by a probing, formally experimental interrogation of the effects of modern science and technology, his latest work would seem, at least on the surface, to herald a transition toward a new hybrid form of storytelling. The novel is split between two alternating narrative frames: the first, told from the perspective of Todd Keane, a billionaire tech CEO suffering from dementia with Lewy bodies, and the second, told from the perspective of an ostensibly omniscient third-person narrator who, as the novel’s final pages suggest, may be the very AI (“Profunda”) to whom Todd has been relating his story. Narrative play, in other words, thus dovetails into a profound disquiet about the consequences of human ingenuity: as Todd tells his artificial interlocutor, “The rest of human history, however long or short, will be spent hopelessly trying to contain you” (p. 372). The present paper sets out to examine the (hopelessly?) fine line between panic and play, which hinges on a subtle choreography of concealment and disclosure in the novel. As one voice usurps, metamorphoses into, or becomes recombined with, another, distilling and disrupting its authority, the reader is forced to recalibrate his or her understanding of the unfolding narrative, as well as the stakes of “play” in the novel. While other contemporary works of dystopian science fiction have employed AI narrators in provocative ways (a prominent example being Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 Klara and the Sun), Playground would seem bent on further unsettling our basic assumptions about storytelling, creativity, and the manifold non-human forms of “branching and unfolding life” (p. 2).
Jeremy Elprin is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Caen Normandie. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Oxford and Paris Cité University, where he completed his PhD on the letters of John Keats. His research focuses primarily on 18th– and 19th-century British literature, with particular interest in Romantic-period poetry, epistolary poetics and culture, and manuscript studies, but his broader interests include the modern and postmodern novel and short story forms in English. His recent publications include articles on Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Charlotte Lennox. He is currently co-editing a collection of essays on representations of the commons in early modern England, as well as a separate volume on 20th– and 21st-century offshoots of British Romanticism.
Marine Galiné (CIRLEP, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne)
“Genre and Gender Mutations in Sue Rainford’s Follow Me to Ground (2019) and Redder Days (2021)”
Irish writer Sue Rainsford offers in her two novels an embodied experience of femininity that transcends the traditional analogy which ecofeminism rests upon, namely that between patriarchal violence inflicted upon women and capitalistic violence against Nature, a space too long considered as mankind’s property. By investing her novels with the familiar tropes of the gothic and magical realism, Rainsford shifts the focus away from the Anthropocene in order to reassess the female experience through a dialectical interplay between subjectivity and incarnation.
This paper will tap into Barbara Creed’s studies on the monstruous feminine (1993) and the ecoGothic (Dawn Keetley ; Matthew Wynn Sivils, 2018) to analyse how the female body is celebrated in its physicality, ambiguity and connection to the e/Earth. Both narratives celebrate two female protagonists, Ada and Anna, who interact in a peculiar way with the natural space they grew up in – a chthonian and unstable heterotopia (Foucault, 1994). What’s more, the generic hybridity of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days, which can be read as both dystopian fables and tales of horror, allows for the subversion of gender power dynamics through liminal and powerful female characters. Finally, we’ll investigate the plasticity of language itself as a vehicle for semiotic emancipation as defined by Kristeva in her theory of “écriture féminine” (1974).
Marine Galiné est titulaire d’un doctorat en études irlandaises sur l’étude des femmes et du féminin dans la fiction gothique irlandaise du XIXe siècle, sous la direction de la professeure Sylvie Mikowski. Ses recherches s’intéressent également à la circulation des motifs gothiques dans la culture populaire et aux interactions entre le corps et l’espace dans ces productions. Elle a publié sur des auteurs irlandais, de William Carleton à Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, mais aussi sur Guillermo Del Toro (Crimson Peak, 2016), Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, 2018) et Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground, 2019). Elle est actuellement chargée d’enseignement en anglais au Campus des Comtes de Champagne (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne) et chercheuse associée au CIRLEP (Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Langues et la Pensée).
Maïwenn-Iman Le Garf (CREA, Université de Paris Nanterre)
“From Starjumping to Churten: Towards an Abolition of Transition in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle”
If Le Guin’s Hainish cycle constitutes a diffuse ensemble of stories that only fit loosely together, it still possesses distinctive features: the narratives that form it retrace the stories of explorers—most often ethnographers—discovering foreign worlds and new civilisations across the galaxies. It is a literary universe in which transition plays a crucial role: worlds are always in some process of restructuration, genres merge into one another, and their quest for a home that always seems to lie right beyond the horizon leads the protagonists in their journeys between worlds and across time.
However, the implications of this last element—the transition between worlds—gradually evolves throughout Le Guin’s oeuvre, in a process thatgestures towards an abolition of transition. I will thus begin by discussing the storylines of exile and return in Le Guin’s fiction, to understand the tension between lost homes and new worlds in relation to the ethnographer’s role. I will then examine the motif of the journey between worlds as sacrifice, which Le Guin develops at the junction of SF and fantasy in the first Hainish novel, Rocannon’s World. Finally, I will retrace the way in which this initial conception of the sacrificial journey is challenged in later Hainish stories, starting from the invention of the ansible (The Dispossessed) to the development of churten (A Fisherman of the Inland Sea), which respectively allow for instantaneous communication and instantaneous travel between worlds.
My aim will be to show that the evolving representation of the ethnographic journey is tied to the notion of inherited guilt, which the narrative tries to appease through sacrifice. This permeating sense of guilt seems to have been finally exorcised in Le Guin’s last SF collection, Changing Planes—in which travelling has become mere entertainment and the ethnographer has seemingly turned into a tourist.
Maïwenn-Iman Le Garf est agrégée d’anglais et rédige actuellement une thèse à l’université Paris Nanterre sous la direction de Benoît Tadié, intitulée : « How shall a human being live well, then?” Perspectives anthropologiques du faire-monde dans l’oeuvre d’Ursula K. Le Guin ».
Laura Martin-Gomez (LAIRDIL, Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier)
“Lost in transition? Middle-earth, from Tolkien to transmedia universe”
Known among fantasy fans as the epitome of successful world building, Middle-earth is the fictional universe in which the popular novel The Lord of the Rings takes place (1954-55). This fictional universal was carefully crafted by J.R.R. Tolkien throughout his life, as the English author and academic wrote countless stories unfolding in Middle-earth from World War I to the end of the 1960s. After the author’s death, many posthumous publications have come to challenge readers’ perception of a set universe, as Tolkien had written multiple versions of the same stories and did not settle all issues arising from his fictional concepts – like the origin of Orcs or the life span of Elves. Despite all this uncertainty, Middle-earth remained at its core the creation of a single man. The author himself was adamant on his exclusive role, as he repeated in interviews and letters that he “h[e]ld the key”. Yet, he also sold the adaptation rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings during his lifetime and thus opened the door to other writers who would become storytellers in Middle-earth. A lot of different radio shows, theatre plays, video games and movies have since been produced, the most famous being Peter Jackson’s trilogy of The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003). This talk will explore how Middle-earth, the literary universe of a single author, evolved from its original state to become a popular transmedia object. We will especially focus on the meaning and role of the latest adaptation, The Rings of Power (2022-), as both first Middle-earth TV series and first adaptation not based on a single Tolkien narrative.
Laura Martin-Gomez is Associate Professor at the University Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature on the reception of Tolkien’s works by his fans in the USA, the UK and France (2020). Her research now mostly focuses on the link between fan practices, especially related to the literatures of the imagination, and the learning of English.
Clara-Louise Mourier (CECILLE, Université de Lille)
“Domestic Spaces as Sites of Transition in Feminist Postmodern SF: Carol Emshwiller’s ‘Sex and/or Mr. Morrison’ and Josephine Saxton’s ‘The Triumphant Head.’”
Darko Suvin defines science fiction as a genre of « cognitive estrangement, » a mirror that unsettles and problematizes the reader’s familiar sociopolitical reality. But what space could be more familiar than the domestic sphere? Postmodern feminist authors Carol Emshwiller and Josephine Saxton challenge this notion, revealing the alien not in distant galaxies but within the home—and within the self. In their texts, speculative fiction transforms the domestic realm into a transitional space, endlessly open to processes of defamiliarization and reinterpretation.
This paper examines two feminist short stories from the 1960s and 1970s New Wave of science fiction, where the domestic sphere becomes a liminal space teeming with radical otherness. Emshwiller’s Sex and/or Mr. Morrison explores voyeurism and corporeal transformation through the eyes of an aging concierge obsessed with her possibly alien neighbor. Saxton’s The Triumphant Head portrays a fragmented housewife reflecting on her disjointed identity in the context of a marital routine. Both stories use domestic settings to interrogate gender, the body, and notions of life itself, offering multilayered and non-static « gestures of pointing » (Suvin) toward the un/familiar.
Bibliography
- Emshwiller, Carol. “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison,” Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent, 1974 [1967].
- Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
- Saxton, Josephine. “The Triumphant Head,” The New Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent, 1977 [1970].
- Suvin, Darko. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. Macmillan Press, 1988.
Après des études menées à l’ENS Paris-Saclay, Clara-Louise Mourier a obtenu l’agrégation d’anglais. Elle est aujourd’hui doctorante en deuxième année sous la direction du Professeur Thomas Dutoit (Université de Lille, laboratoire CECILLE) et sous la co-direction de la Professeure Cécile Roudeau (Université de Paris, laboratoire LARCA). Ses sujets de spécialité sont la littérature spéculative américaine, les études féministes et les humanités environnementales.
Georges Pillegand-Le Rider (Prismes, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
“Extraterrestrials Meet Environmental Collapse: Hyperobjects and Ecological Panic in the Videogame Outer Wilds”
In Outer Wilds players can explore a fictitious solar system composed of six planets and try to understand the fate of the civilization that settled there thousands of years ago. Why did the “Nomai” come to this solar system? Why did they all end up dying? How is the time loop experienced by the protagonist connected to the mysterious projects the Nomai had undertook?
The game indeed stages over and over again the same twenty-two minutes before the explosion of the sun. Although the protagonist is trapped to witness the cyclical, never-ending collapse of these planets and environments, the loop nonetheless enables them to acquire sufficient knowledge to explore the farthest reaches of the solar system and understand the true reason why the extinct Nomai first came to the solar system: an unfathomable instance they named the Eye of the Universe. The outcome of the game enables the protagonist to access the Eye and merge with it to create a new universe.
Outer Wilds is full of transitional movements: dying planets, decaying environments and the whole universe shifting towards a rebirth. In this paper, I will argue that the true alien, extraterrestrial presence in the game is, in fact, the Eye of the Universe, and that its connection to the end of the world and the environmental collapse has profound implications for current issues in environmental studies and flat ontology. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, I will focus on the particular impact that linking extraterrestriality with hyperobjects can have for ecological thinking.
Georges Pillegand-Le Rider is a PhD student under the supervision of Alexandra Poulain (Prismes, Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle). He works on extraterrestrial presences in the American imaginary, linking these representations to environmental studies. His master’s thesis, L’Extraterrestre face au féminin/masculin, was published by L’Harmattan in 2021.
Raphaëlle Raynaud, (Textes et Cultures, Université d’Artois)
« Des quêtes en héritage : instabilités et ruptures dans la transmission de l’héroïsme en littérature fantasy »
Souvent définie par la capacité d’expansion de ses longs cycles romanesques[1], la fantasy établit ses intrigues sur le temps long. Au fil des tomes, les héros grandissent et laissent parfois place à leurs descendants, ce qui permet de prolonger les épopées et d’étirer indéfiniment l’exploration de l’univers romanesque. Or cette transition vers de nouveaux héros déstabilise souvent les structures du récit. Adoptant les caractéristiques des opposants ou se rebellant contre l’ordre instauré par les aventures de ses ancêtres, l’enfant peut amorcer une rupture narrative brutale avec les schémas romanesques précédents.
Il s’agira ici de confronter deux cycles romanesques de fantasy états-uniens autour de ces questions : la trilogie The Fitz and The Fool de Robin Hobb, et la trilogie The Broken Earth de N. K. Jemisin. Chez les deux autrices, la vie des héros est bouleversée par la naissance puis l’enlèvement de leur fille. D’abord simples objets de la quête de leurs parents, les enfants s’autonomisent au fil des tomes et s’approprient la focalisation. Parcourant des mondes profondément modifiés par les aventures passées de leurs géniteurs et génitrices, elles développent de nouvelles caractéristiques pour survivre, proposant des évolutions anti-héroïques alternatives : détournant les pouvoirs magiques qui leur sont légués, cherchant vengeance ou destruction, elles proposent une vision radicale des quêtes fantasy. J’interrogerai la tension entre continuité et éclatement dans ces œuvres, en observant comment la transmission de la narration à d’autres personnages est aussi une rupture sur les plans narratologiques, ontologiques et pragmatiques.
Raphaëlle Raynaud est agrégée de lettres modernes et doctorante en littérature comparée sous la direction d’Anne Besson (laboratoire « Textes et Cultures » – ED SHS 586). Sa thèse analyse des œuvres de fantasy dans une perspective écocritique et transmédiale, s’intéressant notamment aux aires française, états-unienne et argentine. Son étude des productions romanesques et dessinées se prolonge par ses séjours d’étude en Argentine et en Espagne et sa participation à des séminaires et des revues (intervention « Natures extraordinaires, héros et héroïnes de fantasy » à la BNF en mai 2024, intervention « Métamorphoses réalistes et monstres vraisemblables : l’adaptabilité des créatures de fantasy dans un milieu en crise » à l’Université de Lausanne, 2024…).
Vanille Reintjes (SEARCH, University of Strasbourg)
“‘Now turned into figures hideous,/According to their mindes like monstruous’ (Book II, canto xii): The Human, the Nonhuman and the Inhumane in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene”
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) is a six-book epic poem that weaves moral and political allegories within a richly imaginative poetic landscape. While predating the formalization of modern fantasy, the poem exhibits characteristics often associated with the genre, including supernatural phenomena and vivid encounters with a diverse cast of noble knights, mystical figures, and grotesque monsters. These features are subsumed within Spenser’s « dark conceit », a complex and continued allegorical structure designed to convey moral instruction and articulate a political critique of the Tudor dynasty. This paper examines the Bower of Bliss episode in Book II, focusing on Acrasia’s portrayal as the seductive witch who ensnares men and transforms her entrapped victims into beasts.
Central to this analysis is the exploration of transitions — and the ways that Spenser interrogates the porous boundaries between the human, the nonhuman, and the inhumane. These grotesque metamorphoses are not merely static depictions of moral corruption but dynamic processes that reflect ideological tensions within the religious and political fabric of Elizabethan England.
This paper situates Acrasia’s enchantments within Spenser’s broader critique of Catholicism, specifically targeting Queen Elizabeth I’s rival and cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Acrasia’s nonhuman beauty, crafted through Spenser’s use of the descriptio puellae and the Petrarchan canon, conceals her inherent cruelty and inhumanity, aligning her with Protestant representations of the Catholic queen and, more broadly, of Catholic vice—particularly the association of lust with spiritual and political hideousness. This dissonance reveals a profound humanity in the fear of succumbing to sin, as Acrasia’s allure embodies the perilous temptation that threatens both moral integrity and spiritual salvation. Her victims’ transformations, portrayed as both physical and moral devolution, symbolize the loss of agency and virtue under the sway of human desires. This paper demonstrates how Spenser employs depictions of the nonhuman and the inhumane to reflect on humanity’s frailties.
Vanille Reintjes, agrégée d’anglais et doctorante contractuelle à l’Université de Strasbourg, se spécialise en poésie élisabéthaine sous la direction de Rémi Vuillemin (PR, Université de Strasbourg) et Ladan Niayesh (PR, Université Paris Cité). Diplômée d’un master de recherche, elle s’intéresse depuis lors à l’art du portrait poétique et aux rapports entre esthétique et éthique – des thématiques qui ont orienté ses deux mémoires, portant respectivement sur le blason poétique et les figures de l’inhumain dans la littérature de la Renaissance anglaise. Actuellement en première année de doctorat, elle consacre désormais ses recherches à l’étude des représentations de la hideur dans le poème épique du poète élisabéthain Edmund Spenser. Sa thèse s’intitule « La Laideur dans poétique de The Faerie Queene d’Edmund Spenser ».
Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans (CORPUS, Université de Picardie Jules Verne)
« Rompre avec l’égoïsme des adultes : The Irregulars, Victoriana du care comme révolte générationnelle »
Tom Bidwell’s The Irregulars (Netflix, 2021) stages an improbable gang of teenagers (a mostly disenfranchised lot, with also an heir to the throne) righting supernatural wrongs in the streets of Victorian London, under the shady threats/blackmail/promises of Dr. Watson.
The TV series has been copiously mocked for its so-called anachronisms (dialogues, diverse ethnicity, gender roles), yet what such criticisms have failed to see is that these are no overlooks, but the very point, the “message” of the show: the Z generation knows better. Better than whom? Better than their parents and, more generally, all who belong to the generation immediately above. All grown-ups in the show prove either monstrously manipulative or pathologically immature, and particularly Arthur Conan’s hero, Sherlock Holmes himself, portrayed as a self-centered, substance-using derelict.
A case in point is the series’ grown-ups’ impossibility to deal with loss and grief: adults will go to impossible lengths not to lose the ones they love, including risking the end of the world, when youngsters know better. They accept what cannot be changed, and try to survive by taking care of their own chosen community, and advocating inclusiveness and resilience.
Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans est maîtresse de conférences en littérature anglophone à l’université de Picardie Jules Verne. Après avoir travaillé sur la poésie romantique anglaise (notamment Wordsworth et ses miroirs, PUL/Ellug, 2014), elle s’intéresse à présent à la poésie d’Ursula K. Le Guin dont elle a traduit les deux derniers recueils (Derniers Poèmes, Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2023). Du fait de cette migration vers les écrivains de littératures dites de l’imaginaire, elle a lancé le tout premier atelier qui leur sera dédié au congrès de la SAES en 2025 à Toulouse. Elle coorganise également un séminaire doctoral sur Littératures de l’imaginaire et Théories de la fiction avec Charlotte Arnautou de l’Université d’Artois, et elle dirige la toute nouvelle collection Territoires de l’imaginaire aux Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
[1] A. Besson, D’Asimov à Tolkien. Cycles et séries dans la littérature de genre, CNRS, Paris, 2004