Henry Carmines, Université Paris Nanterre
Lambert Strether’s “acclimatization”: Henry James’s The Ambassadors as environmental novel
In 1918, Joseph Warren Beach wrote that in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, “we are invited to behold the entire process of acclimatization of Lambert Strether” (Beach 268). A character’s “acclimatization” differs from the character “development” which we see in traditional Bildungsroman plot structures. Rather than navigating the twists and turns of oncoming events, Lambert Strether slowly adjusts to an environment. What we traditionally think of as “event” is better thought of in The Ambassadors as the slow unfolding of “environment”. This shift from “event literature” to “environmental literature” is one of the formal characteristics of the “atmospheric modernism” which Anna Abramson identifies in an attempt to reframe our reading of modernist literature (Abramson 8). When we place focus on “environment” as logically prior to “event,” this creates an interesting consequence for the way we experience the passage of time. Strether’s awareness of time throughout the novel is shot through with a sense of being “too late,” or out of sync with his environment. This, Timothy Morton argues is an unavoidable feature of the experience of self in a biosphere: “the sense of self at bottom is […] a ghost of a ghost that always arrives later than the actual biosphere that triggered it. […] The feel of delay, of ‘out of jointness,’ of separation, is a symptom of our immersion!” (Morton 78). My reading of The Ambassadors will try to think through Strether’s “acclimatization” as an alternative way of experiencing the self and time which results when we place priority on “environment” rather than “event.” The moment of ecological transition in which we live requires massive shifts in our modes of experiencing even such basic vital conditions as the sense of self and of time. Reading Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors may allow us to participate in this moment of “transition.”
Henry Carmines is a doctoral student at the Université Paris Nanterre, affiliated with the Centre de Recherches Anglophones (CREA). His current research focuses on the ecological and aesthetic implications of the figure of atmosphere in the work of Henry James. He has received a B.A. in Philosophy from the College of William & Mary, a Master’s Degree in French literature from the Université Grenoble Alpes, and a Master’s Degree in English studies from the Université Paris Nanterre. His article “Reading Henry James Atmospherically: The case of The American Scene” was published in Leaves(2023). He co-organized this year’s international conference on “The Atmospheres and Ambiances of Modernist Literature” (Nanterre, April 2025).
Rose DuCharme, Université Paris Nanterre
Towards a Trans-Modernism and Creole Representations in Alice-Dunbar Nelson’s Writing
The figure of the Creole serves a transitional role in modernist writing. The Creole evokes the history of transatlantic exchange (through slavery and colonization) that led to the formation of Creole identities. As a literary representation, the Creole is both a pre-modernist regionalist figure anchored in Louisiana or the Caribbean while also signaling modernist preoccupations with hybridity, indeterminacy, fluidity, and newness. As Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s definition of creole from her essay “People of Color in Louisiana” (1917) convincingly demonstrates, “creole” is an overdetermined classificatory label with contested racial and ethnic meanings that are continuously in flux. I contend that Creole representations also destabilize constructions of gender in that they signify racialized femininity and are rendered categorically queer through projections of deviant sexuality and feminized excess (for example through the stereotype of the indolent Creole woman). I will explore this through a reading of Dunbar-Nelson’s short story, “A Carnival Jangle,” first published in Violets and Other Tales (1895). “A Carnival Jangle” is a transitional proto-modernist narrative that bridges nineteenth century regionalism and a modernist aesthetics of ambiguity. The narrative also stages a gender transition: Flo (whose racial identity remains uncertain) cross-dresses to attend a New Orleans Carnival ball, resulting in her mistaken identity and murder. “A Carnival Jangle” situates the violent ramifications of gender fluidity as a particular effect of creolization that occurs through the merging and hybridization of identities amidst the spectacle of Carnival. Dunbar-Nelson thus implies that the creole is a queered figure that unsettles gendered categories while also generating a sense of racial and ethnic fluidity.
Rose DuCharme is a recent PhD graduate in Comparative Literature from University of California, Irvine and an enseignante contractuelle in English at Université Paris Nanterre. Her doctoral thesis Creole Modernism: Gender, Race, and Intimacy in the Transatlantic examines the representation of Creole figures in Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean, United States, and European contexts to argue that the Creole is used to generate modernist stylistics of ambiguity while also being racialized, feminized, and queer.
Nina Eldridge, Université Bordeaux Montaigne
From Windows to Walking: James Joyce’s Transition from Fixed Descriptive Gaze to Mobile Interconnected Perspective
Though James Joyce only published four narrative works, his writing underwent significant evolutions in form. Among these formal innovations is the transition between different techniques in description. The short stories of Dubliners (1914) employ descriptive techniques closer to those of realism and characters’ static poses are often used to reflect the sense of paralysis Joyce identified within Dublin. Conversely, the kaleidoscopic and fragmented style of Ulysses (1922) owes much to the adoption of what Philippe Hamon terms “ambulatory description.” The focal character in motion becomes the site of simultaneous perception and experience, the resulting descriptions shaping narrative composition accordingly.
Drawing on theories of description, this paper proposes a study of James Joyce’s narrative transition from a fixed descriptive gaze (notably that framed by a window) to the ambulatory descriptive gaze of a walking focal character. It ultimately argues that this transition creates an embodied narrative space in Ulysses. The paper first considers the importance of the window motif in literary tradition, exploring its role as a framing device and Joyce’s engagement with it. It then explores how Joyce chooses to “step outside” of this framing and explores his embrace of the mobile focal gaze (with the inclusion of the sensory information and interruptions that this situation implies). Finally, the paper emphasises that Joyce integrates the mobile descriptive gaze into the narrative setting in ways that surpass the issue of sensory influences and in fact portray an environmental interconnectedness of the subject. Studying these changes in descriptive positioning shows that Joyce’s narrative innovations reveal a deeper transition in the very conception of space in the early 20th century.
Nina Eldridge is a PhD student in English Literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, working under the supervision of Pr. Pascale Sardin. Her dissertation is entitled “Modernist Metaphysical Anxiety: Description and Narrative Space in the Experimental Novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (1916-1931).” Her recent and upcoming publications include “Matter in Motion: Ontology in Fixity and Flux in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves” (PULM, 2024) and “Jacob’s Body: the Travelling Young Englishman in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room” (PUPPA, 2025). She has recently edited an issue of Leaves on the theme “Abundance and Scarcity” (2024).
Soraya Hachet, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
The Darling Buds of May Sinclair: Blooming in Midlife at the Dawn of a New Era
May Sinclair, commonly known as the first to have used the notion of “stream of consciousness” in literature(see “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson”, 1918), is not included in the modernist canon today. By the time the Great War began, she was fifty years old and had already devoted years of her life to a declining era. Despite this, she engaged in contemporary causes: she assisted the wounded of Belgium in Hector Munro’s Ambulance Corps in 1914, protested alongside the suffragettes, and, for a time, embraced her friend Ezra Pound’s Imagist aesthetics. She was, in Suzanne Raitt’s words, a Modern Victorian; both on the verge of anachronism and a pioneer. In addition to being a novelist, Sinclair was a philosopher who defended a New Idealism, aiming to reconcile body and mind. These innovative spiritual theories, pervaded with 19th century tendencies, are illustrated in her fiction, notably in Mary Olivier: A Life. While incorporating elements of the traditional Bildungsroman, this novel also foreshadows those of the 1920s which are well known today as modernist classics. Mary’s––and May’s––blossoming is perceptible stylistically as well: Sinclair goes from a second-person narrative to the assertive “I”. The protagonist’s growth is intertwined with a broader historical transition. What remains of this crossing? Which fin-de-siècle intuitions find their fruition in Modernism?
Soraya Hachet is a second-year PhD student at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is writing her thesis on ecstasy and crossed perspectives of a mystical aesthetic in British modernist literature, focusing on authors such as Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and May Sinclair.
Leila Haghshenas, Université Catholique de l’Ouest
Leonard Woolf’s autobiography: the art of modernist transition
Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) was an eminent British political theorist and commentator on international events. Woolf’s humanist efforts to establish peace and cooperation around the globe contributed to the creation of the League of Nations. Despite an early and precarious literary career, Woolf chose to give up his literary ambitions in order to focus on his political and journalistic career while taking part in the publication of modernist works by founding the Hogarth Press in 1917. In the last years of his life, Woolf undertook the writing of his autobiography, which when it came out in the 1960s, proved to be a masterpiece of its type.
In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf plays with the blurred boundaries of fiction and autobiography. It could be said that Leonard Woolf’s autobiography departs from the traditional framework of self-narrative and embraces other literary genres such as fiction and journalistic account. This paper aims at exploring Woolf’s transition from autobiographic narrative to fictional narrative in the light of his innovative approach to autobiography. Furthermore, Woolf’s approach to identity marks the transition to a new perception of the autobiographical self as a plural and impersonal one.
Leila Haghshenas is a lecturer at UCO (Université catholique de l’Ouest). She defended her doctoral thesis, “Ipseity and alterity in the literary work of Leonard Woolf” at Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 University in 2019. Her research interests include (but are not limited to) modernist literature, postcolonial theory, ethics of alterity and oriental philosophy.
César Jumpa Sánchez, Université Paris Nanterre
Eliot’s Spiritual Transition: From The Hollow Men’s void to the light of the Ariel Poems
This paper will cover the oft-discussed shift in T. S. Eliot’s poetic attitude once his spiritual stance had hit rock bottom after the publication of The Hollow Men (1925) through his gradual inclination toward the Anglo-Catholic faith that culminated in his religious conversion in 1927. By also keeping in mind his simultaneous nationality switch from that of a U. S. citizen to a British subject, the issue we will focus on points to the process in which the author traversed a “dark night of the soul”. This is envisioned to the extent Eliot had glimpsed a light at the end of the tunnel in the image of the Anglican Church, as he strived for salvation from deep personal crisis. Such religious leap is reflected in the sharp modulations of his poetic output starting that same year with the Ariel Poems, which included “Journey of the Magi”, “A Song for Simeon”, “Animula” and “Marina” poems leading up to the publication of Ash-Wednesday (1930), his first full-fledged liturgical composition. We will ponder on how these touchstones were to trigger an amplification of his lyrical drive toward redemption, as he had intuitively embraced the Dantean allegory of descending to Inferno’s depths, then upward to the Purgatorial echelons as a tiered progression. Furthermore, our analysis will counterbalance the idea that Eliot’s “sudden” change of perspective was carried out with a reactionary or purely classicist motivation, and instead we will posit how this shift was an essential hinge that was to boost the remainder of his creative endeavor in the Modernist literary landscape.
César Jumpa Sanchez is currently a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Université Paris Nanterre, with a thesis on the literary crossroads between the works of T. S. Eliot and César Vallejo. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in New York City and later a Master’s degree in Hispanic American Literature from the University of Barcelona. Currently an ATER at Nanterre’s English department, he is a member of CREA and its “Modernismes” research group. His most recent literary and translation work, in Spanish and English, has appeared in different international journals and magazines. His latest collection of poems, entitled Tremor en el liceo, appeared in May 2024, published by Buenos Aires Poetry.
Marie Laniel, Université de Picardie Jules Verne
“Smoke words languishing and melting in the sky”: Atmospheric Transitions in Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Fiction
In Chapter V of Orlando, the transition from the 18th to the 19th century is marked by the sudden appearance of a “turbulent welter of cloud”, which generates a whole new moral climate, affecting cultural practices and literary production. Here, as in the rest of the chapter, Virginia Woolf humorously conjures up and subverts the notion of Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age”, a notion which, according to Maike Oergel (in Zeitgeist: How Ideas Travel, 2019), became ubiquitous in Britain in the 1820s-1830s. William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age (1825), and Thomas Carlyle, in “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831), attempted to identify the mysterious process shaping the modes of thinking and feeling specific to their times, usually in order to reform them, but also the dynamics of change or transition from one era to the next. In their essays, Thomas Carlyle and his disciple, John Ruskin, often resorted to metaphors (popularis aura, the “storm-cloud” or “plague-wind”) to represent Zeitgeist as an ambient medium, conducive to the production of specific artworks. This paper aims to suggest that Woolf revived and subverted these metaphors to represent the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, in some of her essays, such as a draft version of “Character in Fiction” (1924), where she reflects on “a force at work—a force which is sometimes called the Spirit of the Age or the Tendency of the age”, a “mysterious power […] taking us by the hand”, or “The Patron and the Crocus” (1925), where she discusses the “atmosphere” of literary production; but also in her novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and Between the Acts, where she uses the metamorphic power of the air to question the clear-cut periodisation of History, to represent what Anna Abramson calls “gradual climatic fluctuations”, “troubl[ing] barriers without completely abolishing them” (The Age of Atmosphere: Air, Affect, and Technology in Modernist Literature, 2016), and to body forth the tensive dynamics of latency and untimely return that complicates and distorts the seemingly linear course of literary History.
Marie Laniel is a senior lecturer at the University of Picardie Jules Verne and a member of CORPUS UR-UPJV 4295. Her research focuses on Victorian subtexts in the works of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and on ecopoetic readings of Woolf’s works by contemporary female writers (Jeanette Winterson, Olivia Laing, Cécile Wajsbrot, Ali Smith). She is the vice-president of the Société d’Études Woolfiennes and the co-editor of two online journals, L’Atelier and Polysèmes.
Jean-Rémi LAPAIRE, Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Orlando transitions from page to stage (on a French campus and an Italian stage)
In 2022, I chose Orlando (1928) as “core artistic material” for the seminar on gesture, intersemiotic translation and performative reading that I used to teach at UBM. 34 graduate students from the English Studies and General Linguistics programs attended the formal sessions and creative workshops that I organized on campus. A graphic arts student was invited to sketch them as they engaged in the workshop activities. In early May, six of them volunteered to design a special production for an international student festival hosted by Università del Piemonte Orientale (Vercelli): Teatro in Lingua, Lingua in Teatro. They worked under the supervision of graduate students from the master’s program in performance studies. The short but intense stage adaptation that they co-designed was performed and recorded at Teatro Civico in early June: S/he: Orlando in Performance.
“Adapting” Orlando for the stage requires an ability to “interpret” the written narrative in all three senses of the term: cognitive (‘to provide an understanding of the text’), performative (‘to offer one’s own artistic rendition of the work’), and translational (‘to express the original meaning in a different language or semiotic system’). In practical terms, the adaptation process requires a structured script that both abridges and essentialises Woolf’s 78800-word ‘biography’. I propose to explain and illustrate the method we used, which involved dramatic selection, syntactic compression, poetic reduction and the creation of a chorus to further the narrative and comment on the action. The 8000-word script was then used to initiate a process of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson 1959, O’Halloran et al. 2016). The two guest artists whom I invited to facilitate the workshops at my home university, and the four drama students who volunteered to design the public performances all used simple but powerful techniques: recitation, dialogue, tableau vivant, choreographic interludes, and vocal-kinetic displays. Visuals from the Maison des Arts workshops in Pessac, and the TILLIT performances in Vercelli will be shown, and insights from the students’ learning diaries shared.
Jean-Rémi Lapaire is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Linguistics, Pragmatics and Gesture Studies at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne (UBM), France. He has explored the inbuilt physicality and dramaturgy of language, while designing and testing new embodied approaches to language teaching that engage and empower the ‘learning body’. He has been a regular guest at Trinity College, Dublin, giving formal lectures and facilitating workshops on arts-based language learning. He has produced numerous stage adaptations of works by Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Oscar Wilde for the TILLIT Festival in Italy.
Maud de Luget, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
In Transit: Journeys in the In-Between in Ford Madox Ford’s, E. M. Forster’s and Virginia Woolf’s works
If some modernists claimed they were performing a complete aesthetic, political and cultural break from their Victorian or even Edwardian predecessors (one can think of Pound’s call to “make it new”), paying attention to the modernists’ representation of public transport and to the role these transitional spaces play in their work reveals many ambiguous continuities between their own artistic practices and that of their elders. Contrary to the tight critical partitions which prevailed in the readings of modernism until not so long ago, approaching the movement through the prism of its representation of public transport enables one to perceive the “background noise of History” (to paraphrase Foucault’s saying) in one of its most mundane, everyday, but also common expressions; namely, in the sound made by the wheels, cogs and mechanisms of its public transport, as it took one generation from one age of British literature, to the next.
I would like to show that such a trans-disciplinary approach of modernism (crossing technological, historical and literary readings) opens fruitful critical perspectives by revealing an arguably under-exploited political aspect of the movement. I indeed propose that scenes set in public transport reveal a strong meta-literary and political dimension. In such scenes, the fundamentally liminal and transitional spaces of public transport enable writers to reflect a British nation in the throes of change, as in a revealing mirror; but also to reflect on alternative communal models, in which instability, liminality and “transitions” paradoxically allow for new forms of political self-assertion.
Maud de Luget is professeur agrégée d’anglais and a recent PhD graduate of the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her work focuses on modernist aesthetics, the community and public transport. Her thesis explored how scenes set in public transport in modernist writings reflect a mutating British society and offer a reflection on the community that allows for a reassessment of the political, aesthetic and ethical engagement of three authors (Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf) with their time. Her recent and upcoming publications include “Interrupted Trains of Thoughts: Modernism and Urban Transport—An Aesthetics of Disruption” (EBC, 2022), “Public Transport as Moving Borders in the Works of Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell” (Cycnos, 2023), and “L’hospitalité entre éthique et esthétique : repenser la communauté depuis l’espace du train dans la littérature moderniste britannique (1890-1930)” (Miranda, ongoing).
Florence Marie, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour
Transition(s) in Olive Moore’s Celestial Seraglio (1929): Forks in the Road or the Limbo of In-Betweenness
Olive Moore is an obscure modernist writer, whose works were retrieved from oblivion some twenty years ago. So far only Spleen and Fugue have received specific attention. I intend to delve into Celestial Seraglio (a Tale of Convent Life), a partly autobiographical novel published in 1929. As far as I know it has only been commented on once, in the unpublished dissertation of Sophie Cavey (2018).
The narrative focuses on the final year at the convent of the main protagonist, Mavis, who is barely 14 when she crosses the doors of the institution for the last time on the last page of the novel. Celestial Seraglio can be viewed as a Bildunsgroman, and in that sense the idea of transition is paramount, but it is a Bildungsroman with a twist. Mavis’s transitional period is spent mainly in liminal spaces and in places that are “heterotopias of crisis” or even, at times, “heterotopias of deviation”–a telling comment on the space allotted to women in pre-war society. Now these heterotopias can be analysed as transitional spaces, which is fitting for characters who seem to be “trapped in the limbo of in-betweenness” and attempting to figure out who they are as they try on different identities. Whether the transitional process is a success or a failure or whether the main character remains in an unresolved tension between two poles is a question I will be exploring in detail. The answer, which is bound to remain tentative, depends on how one understands the notion of “transition” and whether or not one maintains a linear vision of identity. An analysis of the composition of the “tale” may help us shed a new light on the question. I will examine “the art of transition” in Celestial Seraglio focusing in particular on the four epigraphs in French at the beginning of each chapter but also on the absence of such an “art of transition” in a text that values abrupt ruptures between the different sections of each chapter, juxtaposition in a haphazard way, disjointed multiple perspectives, fragmentation, etc…
Florence Marie is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (E2S UPPA). She is a member of ALTER. She defended her thesis on J.C. Powys in 2003 and since then she has published articles on his first eight novels and on other modernist writers (with special interest in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage). She is one of the contributors to Féminisme et prostitution dans l’Angleterre du XIXe siècle: la croisade de Josephine Butler (ed. Frédéric Regard, ENS Éditions, 2014) and the co-editor of Le genre, effet de mode ou concept pertinent? (Peter Lang, 2016), L’incarnation artistique : mises en scènes littéraires (L’Harmattan, 2021) and May Sinclair in Her Time – Reappraising May Sinclair’s Role in Early-Twentieth-Century Literature and Philosophy (PULM, 2024).
Mantra Mukim, Cergy Paris Université
Infra Poem: Arun Kolatkar in the Transit
Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1974) is a long poem obsessed with the rift between his lyric speaker and the infrastructure of the pilgrim town of Jejuri that the speaker is visiting. Among the built environments included in the poem are: railway station, train, roads, buses, doors, goods, waste, statues of deities, temple architecture, and animal shelters. Set entirely in a pilgrim town in Western India with several mentions of the local deity, Khandoba, the poem is interested as much in the sacred as in the material infrastructure that both produces and fails it. This presentation rethinks the modernist periphery in view of these infrastructural glitches that Kolatkar ascribes to it, where the glitch, “at the end of bumpy ride” or when “the roof came down”, reveals the peripheral subject’s imbrication in the global circuits of modernity and its infrastructures. The presentation points to Kolatkar’s use of the long poem form that sustains the geographical largesse of the area he is describing but also maintains a certain internal inconsistency and gaps that is analogous to the infrastructure of Jejuri the town. Kolatkar’s infrastructure poem, the paper argues, is a long poem without resolution, breathless advancing, full of glitches, and, yet, allowing exchange and mobilisation.
Mantra Mukim is Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (Eutopia-SIF) based in CYU Paris. His research interests include global modernism, critical theory, and twentieth century poetry. With Derek Attridge, he edited the book Literature and Event: 21st Century Reformulations (NY: Routledge, 2021), and his research articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, Textual Practice, Interventions, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and Irish Studies Review. His first monograph, Samuel Beckett’s Lyric Failure, will be published with Bloomsbury in 2024.
Berengere Riou, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord
“Different yet the same as before”: A Modernism of Imperceptible Transitions
For a long time, modernism was understood, based on modernist writers’ own assertions, as promoting a radically new aesthetics breaking with previous literary movements, particularly those of the Victorian era. However, studies in the past few decades—starting with Mary Ellis Gibson’s Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (1995), and Cassandra Laity’s H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle (1996)—have nuanced the extent of that rupture from tradition. Those works, together with more recent publications—Hélène Aji’s observation of a “Romantic remanence” in Pound and Williams (2005), and Peter Nicholls’ analysis of Pound’s lingering reliance on Swinburnian rhythms (2010)—have brought to light a discrepancy between the rhetoric of differentiation at work in mainstream modernist theory, and the reality of modernist poetics. As shown by Clément Oudart (2010), even before that scholarly turn, one of the most vocal heirs and promoters of modernism, Robert Duncan already declared himself a “Romantic” (The H.D. Book, 1959-64), deliberately blurring the border between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century poetics—a perspective then embraced by other key figures in the (post)modernist tradition, such as Susan Howe and Devin Johnston. My presentation further highlights the continuity from Romanticism to postmodernism, by focusing on a specific paradox of modernist poetry, which is its ambivalent relationship to “in-betweenness” or “middleness”—whether temporal (modernist poets’ own turn-of-the-century situation), spatial (standing at the junction between two continents), or textual (producing a text where meanings constantly flicker). I contrast the modernists’ (especially the male modernists’) anxiety about the absence of clear delimitations (“an endless series of infinite middles,” as Pound puts it in “Cavalcanti”) with their fetishization of the mediumistic properties of a literary text, best exemplified in their translation practice, and rooted in occult beliefs about the power of a text to smuggle hidden meanings. In doing so, I suggest a modernism not of rupture, but of imperceptible transitions, or to paraphrase H.D.’s Trilogy, one that is “different, yet the same as before.”
I am a teaching and research associate (ATER) at the Institute of Technology of Saint-Denis, and a member of the Pléiade Research Center (Université Paris 13). I obtained my Ph.D. in English at New York University in 2023. My dissertation, “Unspeakable Things: The Poetics of Secrecy in Ezra Pound and H.D.” articulates the emergence and development of a modernist poetics of secrecy shaped in interaction with fin-de-siècle secret societies and ancient models of collective mystery. My research currently explores the connection between poetic and official secret during and after World War Two, in the context of the ties between modernist writers and OSS (later CIA) agents.