Amanda BENMOULOUD (ENS de Lyon)
“Atemwende as a Transitional Space: Learning to Breathe in JJ Bola’s The Selfless Act of Breathing (2021)”
“I quit my job, I am taking my life savings – £9,021 – and when it runs out, I am going to kill myself.” This is how the journey of Michael, a British-Congolese teacher, begins in JJ Bola’s novel The Selfless Act of Breathing. The reader follows his trip from London to the United States where he plans this transition from life to death. His journey is triggered by the murder of one of his students. This trauma accentuates Michael’s existential hopelessness which is epitomised by his inability to breathe properly: his breath resembles “smog” (208) and the city of London refuses to “give back” (181) a clean air to breathe so that Michael experiences “combat breathing” as Fanon, in Sociologie d’une révolution (46), would put it. In the novel, the protagonist becomes aware of the “partitioned” dimension of air: although people share a “common breathing pattern”, breathability differs from one social group to another, as underlined by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2, 14, 2).
Michael not only aims to withdraw from the suffocating atmosphere of London and transition to a different place, but also to redefine what it means to belong in the world. This withdrawal echoes the concept of Atemwende (“breathturn”) coined by Paul Celan – a transitional space defined by Hans-Georg Gadamer as the “calm moment between inhaling and exhaling” (Langage et vérité, 73), which creates a rupture in one’s breathing rhythm. This space is also where a transformation is operated, where one’s breath is redirected and its biological composition changed. Drawing on this concept and on the works of atmosphere theorists (Macé, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Sloterdijk, Mbembe), I will examine to what extent Michael’s journey and sojourn in America mimic an Atemwende which the novel explores as a transitional space that may help Michael get away from a toxic atmosphere and find the freedom to breathe.
Biographical note
Amanda Benmouloud is a PhD student at the ENS de Lyon (IHRIM research laboratory). Her thesis is supervised by Professor Vanessa Guignery and focuses on the politics of breathing in contemporary British literature.
Tim GUPWELL (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
“From the Old World to the New: Transitions in Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (2021)”
In an essay, Rachel Cusk claims that Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow ‘offers an account of how the old world became the new’. The same might be said of her 2021 novel Second Place, whichreworks Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1932), an account of her encounter with Lawrence in New Mexico, with Cusk transposing it instead to a marshy coast land in modern day England, and replacing the famous writer Lawrence with the narcissistic painter L. The many similarities between the older book and the new (the names Brett and Tony, Tony’s seemingly Indian roots, the car journey, the claim that L. wishes to destroy M., the role played by M’s will) all serve to underscore the idea that a transition from an old world to a new, is at play here. But beyond that, it can be argued that Second Place is itself a book playing variations on the theme of transition: the eponymous second place where L will be lodged has itself been buried by nature under brambles and ivy, and before it is uncovered has ‘been allowed literally, to rot back into the earth’. M’s daughter, in the process of discovering herself, has ‘a transitory air…like a person in a busy station looking around’. M’s marriage to Tony, put under strain by the arrival of L. is like the meeting of two land masses being fused, requiring bridges and tunnels to cross the divide. M’s herself is struggling through a transition, not only a physical one as she grows older, but a psychological one, as she evolves throughout the novel, learning to overcome her own concept of reality. Ultimately, the novel suggests that there is in fact, nothing other than transition, that stability is illusory, and that ‘the truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it’.
Biographical note
Tim Gupwell has just completed a PhD on the philosophy of D. H. Lawrence at Paul Valery University, Montpellier, entitled ‘Searching for Clues: the philosophy of D. H. Lawrence in his Non-Fiction’. He is currently teaching at Perpignan University. Focusing above all on Lawrence’s non-fiction, his research interests also include the intellectual background of the twentieth century, Modernism and Modernity, ecological thought, travel fiction and periods of crisis and social unrest.
Xavier LACHAZETTE (Le Mans Université)
“Transience and Transitoriness in Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors (2023)”
Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors revisits the early 1920s through the lens of W. Somerset Maugham’s stay in Penang, Malaysia with his partner Gerald Haxton, at the time of the notorious trial of Ethel Proudlock, the colonial wife who murdered her lover. Both Maugham and Haxton are the guests of one Lesley Hamlyn, whose distant attitude and moral stance gradually evolve over the course of the novel. Beyond Maugham, Tan’s novel also revives other historical figures, such as Sun Yat-sen, just before his return to China to spark the fall of the Qing dynasty, as well as lesser-known individuals from Penang’s past, whose graves are visited in a central scene. Moreover, as the title cryptically hints, the history of Penang’s George Town district is foregrounded through the shophouse doors which one character obsessively preserves.
One of the fundamental aims of literature is thereby unveiled: consciously or not, to fight against death. Indeed, through words, literature grants the dead a form of afterlife, existing in the perpetual now of the text. The written word itself becomes a trace that resists erasure, standing against oblivion. Through intertextuality, famous short stories by Maugham—like “The Letter”, “P. & O.” or “Rain”—are also given a new lease of life. These acts of literary and historical resurrection or preservation thus transform Tan’s novel into a locus in line with Maurice Blanchot’s “neutral spaces” (L’Espace littéraire, 1955), where literature does not overcome death but exists in a continuous dialogue with it, acknowledging its inevitability while resisting its finality. This approach also resonates with the time-honoured French tradition of the tombeau poétique, which pays homage to recently deceased figures of note through artistic tributes.
By inviting readers to embrace existence in all its fleeting richness and its evolving stages, rather than constraining it within rigid moral, sexual and colonial frameworks, The House of Doors celebrates the transience and transitoriness of human life, and gives a complex yet ultimately appeased image of the human condition. Tan not only pays tribute to a city and the figures who fleetingly marked its past, but also honours the fluidity of existence and enshrines the enduring power of literature to defy oblivion.
Biographical note
A member of Le Mans University’s research group (the Labo 3LAM) and an associate member of the University of Angers’ CIRPaLL, Xavier Lachazette teaches British literature at Le Mans University, with a focus on short fiction and Victorian novels. He has published various articles on Daphne du Maurier, W. Somerset Maugham, and 19th -century works by J. Austen, Ch. Brontë, or Ch. Darwin. Following the international Daphne du Maurier conference he convened in Le Mans, he edited two collections of articles, for JSSE and LISA e-journal. He is currently organising an international conference on W. Somerset Maugham, to be held in Le Mans on 13-14 March 2025 with a view to commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Maugham’s demise.
Raphaël LALOUE (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3)
“‘Sneaking into England’’: Social and Cultural Transitions in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Swing Time (2016)”
Zadie Smith’s novels reflect the social and cultural diversity of England as well as its divisions. Her characters are shown undergoing or undertaking transitions in this “nation divided by postcodes and accents, schools and last names.” In the “trans-” prefix, emphasis can be laid either on the process of going from one state to another, or on the new state resulting from that process. In Smith’s novels, discomfort is often the first effect of transitions, and the feeling of in-betweenness is shunned by characters who long for the new, stable state coming after a period of transition. With this presentation, I would like to argue that the inherent instability of transitions is actually what helps characters preserve their sense of self since it is more in accordance with the dynamic nature of identity.
Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, stages immigrant characters who find solace when fitting in with English standards and Swing Time features a narrator who loses touch with her modest background when working for a super-star. They all rejoice in the aftermath of successful transitions, as those appear achieved and unequivocal, but they eventually suffer from this new state. Smith ends up underlining the harm and instability of social and cultural transitions: their finality and success depends either on things that can be lost (wealth, status…) or on the negation of a past culture and identity, sometimes verging on assimilation.
If immigrant characters seem to seek social assimilation, they are often depicted resisting cultural assimilation when going from one culture to another. The limbo of in-betweenness in which they are left offers room for self-creation and is less damaging to their sense of selfhood. In addition, the transformative experience of transition allows them to create their own culture and grants them a set of transcultural skills. Transculturalism as a process of self-creation will be key in analysing how characters perceive their identity, or identities, and how they redefine the very idea of successful transitions.
Biographical note
Raphaël Laloue is a PhD student currently teaching at the Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3. He has just started a thesis entitled “(Af)franchissements: le carnavalesque dans les romans de Zadie Smith” under the supervision of Professor Catherine Delesalle-Nancey. His research focuses on social mobility, performance and self-invention.
Héloïse LECOMTE (ENS de Lyon)
“Pandemic Fiction and the Art of the Interval: Michael Cunningham’s Day (2023)”
The early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and the worldwide lockdown era were experienced as a prolonged pause in fast-paced contemporary societies. In his latest novel Day (2023), Michael Cunningham represents this period of suspended time as a turning point, a moment of gradual transition between pre-pandemic life and the protracted ripple effects of the event.
In this choral, introspective tale of family life, the novel’s three sections record the passage of time and capture the lives and thoughts of a group of relatives on three separate days: April 5, 2019 in the morning, April 5, 2020 in the afternoon and April 5, 2021 in the evening. At the beginning of the story, each of the intertwined plotlines depicts protagonists poised on the threshold of imminent change: while a middle-aged English teacher is contemplating a career change, his sister agonises over breaking up with her husband and the couple’s young son is going through puberty. The characters’ separate meditations on major life changes all take place in liminal spaces that metaphorize their transitional experiences while also turning them into a microcosm of wider societal upheaval.
This paper aims at unpacking Cunningham’s aesthetics of the turning point by analysing the novel’s structure, narratorial choices and handling of temporality in the light of trauma and vulnerability studies. Cunningham’s portrayal of a transformative historical event is eerily reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s elusive representation of World War One in the transitional middle section (“Time Passes”) of To the Lighthouse (1927), forming a corridor between two days, many years apart. As in Woolf’s work, grief imbues the third section of the novel, following the unexpected demise of one protagonist behind the scenes. By foregrounding the irruption of ghosts (figures of in-betweenness) as well as the silences and temporal ellipses between the novel’s three family snapshots, Cunningham creates an art of the interval that documents the shattering impact of the pandemic.
Biographical note
Héloïse Lecomte completed her PhD in 2021 and teaches at the ENS de Lyon. Her research and publications focus on the poetics and politics of mourning in contemporary British and Irish fiction and life-writing and their interactions with the poetic elegy or visual arts. Together with Alice Borrego, Esther Peeren and Gero Guttzeit, she has been spearheading the transdisciplinary seminar “Invisible Lives Silent Voices” since 2021.
Katia MARCELLIN (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
“Prosthetics and Ontological Transitions in Harry Parker’s Hybrid Humans (2022) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021)”
Harry Parker’s book, Hybrid Humans: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Man and Machine (2022), is a non-fiction text in which the author reflects on his own “hybrid” status as an amputee wearing prosthetic legs. This leads him to explore the processes through which medicalised and disabled bodies become privileged interfaces between the human and the non-human, opening the way to the cyborgs of a not-so-distant future. These imperfect bodies are the site where the transition from one ontological state to another takes place, as the difference between healing and enhancing becomes blurry. Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun addresses similar questions, though from a radically different perspective. Presenting itself explicitly as a dystopian science fiction story, the novel also explores the transition from a human to a non-human state of being as a means to overcome the fragility of diseased, ailing bodies. The “Artificial Friend” Klara is indeed a prosthesis for her owner, Josie, a relation defined by Parker as a “coupled system” between a human and an external entity “in which we delegate part of [our physical and cognitive tasks] to the technology” (Parker 150). However, this prosthetic state is only transitory since Klara is later meant to replace Josie, to become her after her anticipated premature death. Using Parker’s text as a framework to read Ishiguro’s novel, I wish to study the ways in which these books present the transition from the human to the “other-than-human” through the ambivalent figure of the prosthesis as both that which heals or supplements the body and the entity that threatens to overcome it. This will lead me to explore processes of hybridization, defined as a transitory state where relationality is literally embedded in one’s body, eventually analysing how the “prosthetic condition” (Boxall 3) reconfigures fictional writing itself.
Biographical note
Katia Marcellin teaches at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and is a member of the research unit EMMA (EA741). In 2022, she completed her PhD entitled “Writing Emptiness: Performative Metalepsis and the Expression of Trauma in Contemporary British Literature”, under the supervision of Pr. Jean-Michel Ganteau (UPVM3). Her work focused on the political and ethical reconfigurations brought about by the stylistic trope of metalepsis in contemporary trauma narratives. She is currently turning her attention towards the field of medical humanities and focusing on the ethical and performative aspects of metonymic representation.
Aida MARRELLA (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3)
“Spaces of Transition: Negotiating Mixed-Race Identities in Diana Evans’ 26a (2005)”
The notion of transition—derived from the Latin transire, to pass—proves to be highly productive when applied to discussions about identities that escape strict normative categorisations and rigid binaries. In 26a (2005), the debut novel by Diana Evans, the author explores the coming-of-age story of two Anglo-Nigerian twins growing up between England and Nigeria in the 1980s. In this novel, the negotiation of biracial/bicultural identity can be understood through certain narrative spaces that reject a stark polarisation of the protagonists’ two cultural heritages. In these in-between spaces, the twins’ cultural and ethnic affiliations do not exist in dichotomous opposition but instead blend and merge in confluence.
Drawing on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (95), Homi Bhabha’s idea of the “third space” (312–313), and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorisation of “borderlands” (1–2), this paper examines the novel’s engagement with in-between spaces as metaphors for mixed-race identities. The bush, the loft, and the airplane are sites of “perpetual transition” (Anzaldúa 78) that resist Manichean dualisms and challenge rigid dichotomies. Through my analysis, I aim to demonstrate how these spaces “resist unitary paradigms and dualistic thinking,” (Carole Boyce Davies, 16) thereby destabilising notions of polarised, fixed identities and revealing the potential for reconciliation between seemingly opposed forms of difference.
Biographical note
Aida Marrella is a Ph.D. candidate at University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, working under the supervision of Professor Alexandra Poulain. Her research focuses on the politics and poetics of space in contemporary British fiction by Black and Asian women writers. Through her thesis, she explores how spatial dynamics intersect with themes of identity, belonging, and cultural negotiation in contemporary literature.
Pauline MONTASSINE (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne)
“‘Silent Words are Said and Heard’: Transitional Echoes in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Wooden Box’ (2023)”
Margaret Atwood’s latest body of work displays an array of heavy and melancholyundertones, mostly influenced by the loss of her partner, Canadian writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019. In Old Babes in the Wood, her latest short story collection published in 2023, the overbearing materiality of absence allows the narrative voice to explore the transitional state of widowhood.
In that collection, “Wooden Box” is a short story that particularly alludes to the various transitions faced by those who must navigate the ambiguous void left by the dead. Atwood’s portrayal of Nell, a fictional character who has only recently lost her husband Tig, offers a deep reflection on the porous boundaries between presence and absence. The reader follows Nell’s recollection of fragmented memories as she reorganizes the second house the couple had bought decades before Tig’s death. Channeling poignant reflections on absence, Atwood metaphorically subverts a sense of ontological and existential instability by shifting spatiotemporal boundaries. Signs of Tig’s absence become new messages to be deciphered, transforming the widow into a detective that becomes able to move through transitional spaces left by the overwhelming absence of her late husband.
This analysis examines how Atwood crafts a delicate yet harrowing narrative centered on intersecting transitions – between life and death, married life and widowhood, presence and absence – where the dead still have messages to share. The story is filled with Tig’s voice and past conversations: its narrative structure embraces the liminal space and time in which the dead can communicate. In that sense, literature emerges as the ultimate liminal medium, reconfiguring the existential materiality of death through an ongoing dialogue between Nell and Tig.
Biographical note
Pauline Montassine is a PhD candidate in Canadian Literature at Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne. Her research explores Margaret Atwood’s use of language as a liminal space in which both the narrator and the reader are invited to negotiate alternative realities. Her main research interests include stylistics, semantics, philosophy of language and interpretation, and reader-response theory. Her article “The Shape of Your Absence: Coming to Terms with Loss and Grief in Margaret Atwood’s Dearly”, published in the peer-reviewed journal Canadian Studies/Études canadiennes, was awarded Best Article-Length Published Text on Atwood by the Margaret Atwood Society in 2023.
Marie-Lise PAOLI (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
“Punchdrunk’s A-Mazing Tale of Transition: Viola’s Room and its Chronotope of Liminoid Dancing”
Borrowing from Victor Turner’s distinction between the liminal and the liminoid (Turner 1974; Bucknall 2016), this paper examines Punchdrunk’s latest immersive production as a rite of passage (Gennep 1960). The audience is both introduced to the threshold experience of the eponymous Viola and made to enact it themselves through a series of instructions. Participants are urged to “follow the light” at all times, guided step by step through a labyrinthine spatiotemporal journey of self-discovery, in which dancing is the prime mover of transition. Drawing on the gothic short story “The Moon Slave” by Barry Pain (1901), Viola’s Room (2024) offers an a-mazing opportunity to revisit the tale of Viola, a teenage girl lured one evening to the heart of a maze. There, she surrenders her free will to the Moon and becomes compelled to dance for hours on end. Adapted by Booker Prize-shortlisted author Daisy Johnson, the recorded narrative invites the audience to enter Viola’s bedroom and lie down in complete darkness as if listening to a bedtime story, until a beacon of light lures them away from the room into a mysterious maze. With words and music still streaming into their ears through headphones, participants undergo a sensory dissociation between the aural space-time of the tale and the haptic exploration of the maze in the here and now. This induced state of in-betweenness will be analyzed through Donald Winnicott’s concept of “transitional phenomena” (Winnicott 2016), focusing on the actantial model of the tale, the thematic process of “becoming a woman,” the intertextual web of the adapted narrative, and the site-specific approach of the theatre company. Probing into the trance-like wandering of the participants will reveal the extent to which it mirrors Viola’s—caught between worlds, yet continuously moving through them—with dance as a powerful tool, forging the conditions of a mutual (sub)liminoid experience.
Biographical note
Marie-Lise Paoli is Associate Professor of English literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, and director of Équipe de Recherche Créativité et Imaginaire des Femmes (ERCIF-UR24142 Plurielles). She is the author of articles and book chapters on musicalized fiction, opera, intermediality and gender, and the editor of Femme et Nature (1999), Écritures de femmes et autobiographie (2001), Marges et territoires chorégraphiques de Pina Bausch (2013), La Cause des femmes dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle (2015), Dire les maux (2015), L’imaginaire au féminin : du liminal à l’animal (2018).
Anne-Elise PINZARU (ENS de Lyon)
“From Multiculturalism to Transculturalism: The Case for a Transition to ‘constructive deconstruction’ in Caribbean Diasporic Novels in Britain”
The 2018 Windrush Scandal allowed the wider British public to become aware of the monocultural limits of a contemporary British society which had advertised its supposed multiculturalism. With this radical shift in national consciousness, the very possibility of still adhering to a shared national narrative in a decolonial context was questioned. However, as members and descendants of the Windrush generation, Sam Selvon, Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy rekindle the English realist novel in order to investigate what brought about the failure of harmonious and egalitarian regimes of cultural coexistence in the UK. Highlighting the way in which monoculturalism has been a defining social factor ever since the arrival of black men and women with WW2 and the Empire Windrush, the novelists envision how transculturalism can positively renew the national narrative. Based on a principle of “constructive deconstruction”, transculturalism according to Mikhail Epstein effectively allows a peaceful coexistence of cultures within a nation state as it is a form of multiculturalism “without determinism and representation”. Zadie Smith has argued for “constructive deconstruction” in her essays on the novel and has implemented it in NW (2012). Nonetheless, this paper argues that the call for a transcultural “constructive deconstruction” has been a constant theme in the novels of other writers of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, notably in the works of Sam Selvon, Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy. Based on an array of cultural and literary criticism from the Caribbean, I will examine the reasons why the repossession of the English realist novel by Black British writers in a constructive light is paradoxical. I will moreover discuss the way in which the novelists deconstruct the underlying monocultural dynamics at work in multiculturalism, as well as the way in which they lay the groundwork for a transition to an ethical and potent British transcultural society.
Biographical note
Anne-Elise Pinzaru is a PhD student in Contemporary British and Postcolonial Literatures at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where she completed her Master’s degree, and a member of the IHRIM research laboratory. She also graduated with an M.Phil. in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies from Trinity College Dublin.
Adrien SPIGA (Université Côte d’Azur)
“Loving the Machine: A Transition to Posthuman Intimacy in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019)”
The growing interdependence between humans and machines has been a focal point in recent posthumanist studies: scholars such as Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman, 2013) have underlined the encroachment of technology on human beings and its subsequent blurring of the boundaries between the two. This is reflected in Machines Like Me, in which Ian McEwan envisions advanced forms of artificial intelligence embodied by gendered, human-looking androids: the Adams and the Eves. Echoing Donna Haraway’s cyborg, the narrator’s Adam can “pass” as a man thanks to its lifelike physique and behaviour—it is thus neither a human nor a machine, but a hybrid creature that can think, love, and even engage in sexual intercourse. This liminal status invites a posthumanist redefinition of intimacy: what does it mean to love, and be loved by, a machine? Drawing on queer and posthumanist studies, this paper will focus on the emotional dynamics between the narrator, his partner, and his android: a close reading of their verbal and non-verbal exchanges will reveal a deconstruction of rigid binaries and the struggle to come to terms with it. Moreover, the underlying homoerotic tension between the narrator and his android has often been overlooked or dismissed as a mere narrative subtext: it will be argued here that such tension is actually the key to fully appreciate the complex, ongoing transition to new conceptions of identity, intimacy and morality.
Biographical note
Adrien Spiga is currently a research and teaching fellow at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay and is pursuing his PhD in English literature under the supervision of Pr. Emmanuelle Peraldo. His doctoral research, conducted within the Transdisciplinary Center of the Epistemology of Literature and the Living Arts (Université Côte d’Azur), focuses on the dynamics between science, technology, and genders in utopian and dystopian novels ranging from the 16th to the 21st century. His wider research interests include narratological, gender and intermedial studies.
Emma ROQUES (Université Paris Nanterre)
“The Emergence of Feminist Collectives in Anglosaxon Art History in the 1970s: Transformations and Revolution within the Discipline”
The 1970s in England is a much-debated decade within the fields of social sciences and history; for a few years now there has been a general movement of rediscovery and rewriting of the history of that decade, especially in gender studies or research that studies gender. The global socio-political turmoil of the period was scarred by political alternation, social revolution and the rise of the students’, queer and feminist movements. In this context of development of feminism and of the Women’s Liberation Movement, many collectives were born, such as the Women’s Art History Collective (WAHC), a group of art history students and artists reflecting on the making of art history and more precisely on the invisibilization of women artists along the centuries. Influenced by the political turmoil, students and feminist demands, along with the emergence of new theories in social sciences and art history, these artists inscribed themselves into the New Art History Movement. This movement – epitomised by John Berger’s answer to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation through his own BBC programme Ways of Seeing – questioned the positivist conception of art history and the patriarchal foundations of art and the discipline of art history. The WAHC challenged the positivist and traditional conceptions of art history in England, within its very institutions such as the Courtauld Institute and London art schools. They faced resistance from these institutions and were victims of machismo by the male (and also occasionally female) defenders of the establishment. The collective was also influenced by American scholars such as Linda Nochlin and her famous article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, though they had a slightly different conception of feminism and art. This paper wants to initiate a reflection upon the feminist collectives within the history of the 1970s and within the history of the discipline of art history.
Biographical note
Emma Roques is a PhD student at Paris Nanterre Université, belonging to the CREA (Centre de Recherche en Etudes Anglophones) and the doctoral school 138 « Langues, Littératures et Spectacles ». Her thesis is supervised by Pr. Charlotte Gould and focuses on the Women’s Art History Collective, a women’s collective composed of art historians, students and artists. She is conducting her thesis along her work at the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Rercherche), in Paris, where she is in charge of studies on gender and professional equality.
Laurent TREVES (ENS de Lyon)
“‘Tangles of what-might-have-been’: Destiny as Shapeshifting Forces in Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under (2018)”
Daisy Johnson’s 2018 novel Everything Under is an eerie reimagining of the Oedipus myth, where a nonlinear structure mirrors the ontological instability of its characters. Mainly set on Oxford’s Isis River, the novel uses the “transitory” nature of water (Bachelard, 14) as a metaphor for the fluidity of identity and destiny. The plot follows Gretel, a lexicographer uncontrollably drawn towards Sarah, the abusive mother who abandoned her sixteen years earlier. Beyond such “emotional fluidity”’ (Clark), the very notion of physical transition is questioned: alongside Gretel’s quest, the chapters narrate the story of Marcus, a transgender character who, as a modern Oedipus, unwittingly fulfills the prophecy delivered by an equally transgender oracle.
This paper will examine the way such geographical, ontological and narrative instability paradoxically dramatises destiny as a shapeshifting yet inevitable force. It will first explore how the metamorphic environment draws the characters towards their immutable fates. The more Gretel resists the limbo-like river and its traumatic pull, the more she is led towards her mother’s secrets and their shared destiny. Meanwhile, identity is in constant flux: transgender characters embody physical and existential transitions, strangers are revealed as biological parents, and a monstrous Bonak exists ambiguously between nightmare and reality. Even family roles are reshaped: Sarah’s “monstrous motherhood” (Creed 35) transforms into dependence as Gretel assumes a caregiver role when her mother succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease. Yet, such metamorphoses inexorably guide the characters towards their fates, in a novel where “everyone feels awfully, mythically doomed”’ (in McReynolds). Ultimately, Everything Under epitomises the inescapable instability of language and fiction. Gretel’s quest to fix meaning as a lexicographer contrasts with a world where words are as liquid as identities and rivers. Likewise, the novel’s hybrid structure, hovering between family drama, myth, horror story and fairy tale, demonstrates how literature embraces fluidity and shapeshifting, crafting a dynamic narrative where “people change gender or shape, language is movable, [and] death is not the end” (in Elkins).
Biographical note
Laurent Trèves is a PhD candidate in contemporary British literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. His thesis, entitled “Loneliness as a world in contemporary British fiction”, focuses on the writing of loneliness, vulnerability and trauma in five British novels. He is also a full-time English literature teacher in Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles and a literary translator.
Héliane VENTURA (Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès)
Transitional Hypotexts: A Source Study of Alice Munro’s ‘Face
Whether in its original version by Charles Perrault (1697) or in the successive one by the Brothers Grimm (1812), “Bluebeard” confronts the reader with the concept of the irrevocable, defined by Vladimir Jankélévitch, as “un passé qui ne peut pas être nihilisé” (260). Bluebeard has committed a series of uxoricides which cannot be undone. “L’avoir eu lieu” (the fact of having taken place) and “l’avoir fait” (the fact of having done) cannot be cancelled but suffer alterations in their subsequent revisitations and repurposing.
I will envisage the transit from Perrault and Grimm to the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries with an analysis of “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1843), “the Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter (1979), “The Museum of Dr. Moses” by Joyce Carol Oates (2007), and “Face” by Alice Munro (2009).
I will try and establish a typology of irrevocability, distinguishing between the one which is death-oriented and the one which is emancipatory, concluding on Jankélévitch’s hopeful claim: “l’irrévocable, c’est notre espérance” (“irrevocability is our hope”) (330) which is grounded on the specific properties of all living organisms, the aptitude of the living to regenerate itself and compensate for the trauma endured in order to find back its original shape.
Biographical note
Héliane Ventura is professor emerita of contemporary literatures in English at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. Her area of specialization is the contemporary short story in the Anglophone world with special emphasis on the rewriting of the canon, intermedial relationships and the emergence of transatlantic literatures. She has contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, written monographs on Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and Sarah Orne Jewett, directed or co-directed numerous volumes of essays and written articles on the contemporary short story published in Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and The United States. Her more recent publication is entitled Alice Munro’s Bestiary A Book of Human and Non-Human Animals, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars publishing, 2024.