Deadly Girls\u27 Voices, Suspense, and the Aesthetics of Fear in Joyce Carol Oates\u27s The Banshee and Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi

Abstract: this article focuses on deadly girls’ voices in The Banshee and Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi, two short stories taken from Joyce Carol Oates’s collection The Female of the Species, subtitled Tales of Mystery and Suspense. It shows that children are used as leading and focal characters not only to increase suspense but also to manipulate the readers’ traditional sets of ethical, semantic and literary references. Oates resorts to her favourite “aesthetics of fear” for it is a powerful means of putting horror and abjection at a distance, and it is associated with the question of meaning— meaning is what we fear most of losing, she says. Thus she involves her readers in complex interpretations of her hybrid tales—one drawing from the Gothic, the other from the grotesque—and thereby leads them to a better understanding of themselves and their humanity

An Interview with Hollis Seamon

Hollis Seamon was invited to Bordeaux Montaigne University in April 2016 to give a lecture entitled “Mask, Cape and Crown: Disguise and Dis-ease in Somebody Up There Hates You” (2013), her latest novel. A remarkable success on both sides of the Atlantic, this novel associates illness with youth and laughter

Hybridism and Self-Reconstruction in Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story

This article analyzes Joyce Carol Oates’s hybridism in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, as a powerful means of self-assertion and self-reconstruction. It suggests that to write about her painful experience of bereavement Oates resorts to hybridism—generic, narrative and typographic in particular—as it is both a characteristic of her fiction and a means of dramatizing her experience. This hybridism helps her not only express her emotional “derangement” but also recover her identity as a writer. Thus her narrative manifests confusion and continuity, chaos and control, inconsolability and consolation at one and the same time

“Cancer was an alchemist”: Eve Ensler’s Experiences of Vulnerability in In the Body of the World

This article analyzes Eve Ensler’s experiences of vulnerability as they are related in her 2013 memoir, In the Body of the World. While the book illustrates “traditional” or etymological vulnerability, resulting from trauma and cancer, it also exemplifies what American philosopher Erinn Gilson calls “epistemic vulnerability,” i.e. vulnerability not as weakness but as potential. As both illness and trauma narrative, Ensler’s memoir also offers an opportunity to question the dichotomy between disability and trauma studies

“I am a freak of nature”: Tourette’s and the Grotesque in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn

Cet article propose une lecture de Motherless Brooklyn, publié par Jonathan Lethem en 1999, à la lumière de la théorie bakhtinienne du grotesque et du rire. L’originalité du roman tient à sa mise en fiction du syndrome de Gilles de la Tourette dont souffre le personnage principal, également narrateur à la première personne, qui s’approprie délibérément le surnom « phénomène de cirque » dont il a été affublé dans son enfance. Ainsi ce héros-narrateur joue un double rôle tout le long du récit : il est à la fois le phénomène grotesque qu’on exhibe sur le stand de foire, et celui qui exhibe et construit le phénomène en baratinant le public / lecteur. Lethem, de cette façon, remet en cause tant la représentation traditionnelle du handicap (et le stéréotype du handicapé) que les principaux genres dont s’inspire le roman : fiction policière et récit de formation. Le texte se fait parodie, au sens bakhtinien du terme, à la fois hommage à ces genres traditionnels et réécriture de ceux-ci. Lethem, enfin, utilise à la fois les tics et autres vocalisations symptomatiques du héros et son penchant pour les images grotesques et le rire, afin d’opérer un changement paradigmatique et transformer le stigmate en atout. Le romancier contribue ainsi à renouveler significativement la fiction consacrée à la maladie.This article analyzes Jonathan Lethem’s neuronovel, Motherless Brooklyn (1999) in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque and laughter. The specificity of the novel lies the first-person narrator and leading character suffering from Tourette’s syndrome and appropriating the nickname “freak of nature” he was given as a child. Thereby, he plays a double role: he is both “the grotesque freak” exhibited on the platform / page, and the freakshow talker constructing the freak from his condition. The novel turns into a freakshow, not in the sense of the sordid spectacle of the past, but as a construction questioning both the social and the literary order. Through the grotesque and laughter, Lethem challenges the traditional representation of disability—and the stereotype of the disabled person—and also the major genres his novel borrows from: detective fiction and the coming-of-age narrative. The book turns into parody, in the Bakhtinian sense, i.e., both a homage to and a rewriting of traditional genres. Lethem also takes advantage of his narrator’s symptomatic verbal outbursts and penchant for grotesque images and word play to shift disability paradigm—turning stigma into asset—and revitalize illness literature

Introduction to issue 3

This issue of Angles investigates new practices, in-between spaces, and research questions which do not immediately fall into clear-cut slots.Ce numéro de Angles se penche sur les nouvelles pratiques, les espace entre-deux, et les domaines de recherche qui ne rentrent dans aucune case pré-établie

An Interview with Hollis Seamon

Hollis Seamon was invited to Bordeaux Montaigne University in April 2016 to give a lecture entitled “Mask, Cape and Crown: Disguise and Dis-ease in Somebody Up There Hates You” (2013), her latest novel. A remarkable success on both sides of the Atlantic, this novel associates illness with youth and laughter

Elisabeth Bouzonviller. F. S. Fitzgerald. Ecrivain du déséquilibre.

La collection « Voix américaines » vient de s’attaquer à l’un des piliers de la littérature américaine : Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Cerner le géant fitzgeraldien en 128 pages n’est certes pas chose facile mais Elisabeth Bouzonviller relève le défi avec finesse et conviction. Pour ce faire, elle s’appuie sur les œuvres (les cinq romans et une quinzaine de nouvelles parmi les plus célèbres) mais aussi sur les textes personnels de l’écrivain (lettres, essais, carnets) qu’elle cite abondamment, si..

Tammy Berberi on Disability studies

This interview of Tammy Berberi, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, discusses the advent and challenges of disability studies in the United States and in Europe.Cet entretien avec Tammy Berberi, Associate Professor à l’Université du Minnesota, aborde l’apparition et les défis posés par les études sur le handicap aux États-Unis et en Europe

Surface composition and structure of Co\u3csub\u3e3\u3c/sub\u3eO\u3csub\u3e4\u3c/sub\u3e(110) and the effect of impurity segregation

The Co3O4 (110) single crystal surface has been characterized by low energy electron diffraction (LEED), Auger electron spectroscopy, and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). LEED analysis of the clean Co3O4 (110) spinel surface shows a well-ordered pattern with sharp diffraction features. The XPS spectra are consistent with stoichiometric Co3O4 as determined by the concentration ratio of oxygen to cobalt (CO /CCo) and spectral peak shape. In particular, the cobalt 2p XPS spectra are characteristic of the spinel structure with Co3+ occupying octahedral sites and Co2+ in tetrahedral sites within the lattice. During prolonged heating at 630 K, bulk impurities of K, Ca, Na, and Cu segregated to the surface. Sodium desorbed from the surface as NaOH at 825 K, potassium and calcium were only removed by sputtering since no desorption from the surface was detected for temperatures up to 1000 K. Copper also disappeared upon heating above 700 K, most likely by desorbing although the possibility of diffusion back into the bulk could not be eliminated. The appearance of copper impurities correlated with Co3O4 (110) surface reduction to CoO, and the surface could not be fully reoxidized even upon extended oxygen annealing as long as the copper impurity remained on the surface. Upon removal of the Cu from the near-surface region, the surface was easily reoxidized to Co3O4 by O2