Wintertime Saharan dust transport towards the Caribbean: an airborne lidar case study during EUREC4A

Wintertime Saharan dust plumes in the vicinity of Barbados are investigated by means of airborne lidar measurements. The measurements were conducted in the framework of the EUREC4A (Elucidating the Role of Cloud-Circulation Coupling in Climate) field experiment upstream the Caribbean island in January-February 2020. The combination of the water vapor differential absorption and high spectral resolution lidar techniques together with dropsonde measurements aboard the German HALO (High Altitude and Long-Range) research aircraft enable a detailed vertical and horizontal characterization of the measured dust plumes. In contrast to summertime dust transport, mineral dust aerosols were transported at lower altitudes and were always located below 3.5 km. Calculated backward trajectories affirm that the dust-laden layers have been transported in nearly constant low-level altitude over the North Atlantic Ocean. Only mixtures of dust particles with other aerosol species, i.e., biomass-burning aerosol from fires in West Africa and marine aerosol, were detected by the lidar. No pure mineral dust regimes were observed. Additionally, all the dust-laden air masses that were observed during EUREC4A came along with enhanced water vapor concentrations compared with the free atmosphere above. Such enhancements have already been observed during summertime and were found to have a great impact on radiative transfer and atmospheric stability

Serious Play: The Representation of the Thatcher Years in Malcolm Bradbury’s Cuts, David Lodge’s Nice Work and Alan Hollinghusrt’s The Line of Beauty

Margaret Thatcher appears as a central character in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), she is also explicitly discussed in Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) and her policy of cutting public expenditure constitutes the main backdrop of Bradbury’s Cuts (1987); it is hardly surprising then that the state of Britain in the 1980s should be a major concern in the three novels under consideration. What interests me in these contemporary versions of the condition of England novel is the simultaneous and slightly paradoxical cohabitation of a social and a metatextual emphasis, of political analysis and literary playfulness, of a transitive and a self-reflexive scope. It is this tension between the referential and the poetic functions of literature which will mainly be examined in this study of postmodernist social fiction considered as yet another form of generic recycling and interbreeding. Beyond these texts’ ostentatious ludism, what might be at stake in the combination of politics and poetics is the alethic function of this type of fiction which constantly seeks to shed light on both society and textuality, on both the condition of England and the condition of the novel

Entre métonymie, métaphore et métatextualité : le trope surdéterminé de la route dans The Famished Road de Ben Okri

The road is metonymic is two ways, first because it represents the people who walk on it and second because this unique path, this scrap of a thoroughfare is only a fragment of the plural and global roads. The road is also metaphoric insofar as it stands for an escape, a destiny or a journey—be it an aimless journey or a pilgrimage, an adventurous or an educational quest. Finally, the road which meanders through the diegesis is metatextual since it embodies the thread of the text, the guiding line of the narrative. And if the text of the road and the road of the text are intertwined it is the very structure of the novel which is determined by the eponymous road. The main question is then: is The Famished Road an open novel, an endless novel or rather a novel with a progression and a revelation? Is it a clueless maze or a signposted itinerary? Critics have often underlined the novel’s absence of teleology but this paper intends to challenge this conception of a novel of wandering in order to reveal the plurality of the reading pacts and routes similar to the hermeneutic plurality of the trope of the road

The Counter-Order of Simulacra: Alan Duff’s gut novel, Once Were Warriors

Publié en 1990, Once Were Warriors, le roman néo-zélandais d’Alan Duff, partage avec la fiction britannique de la même époque (celle de Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Kazuo Ishiguro ou Jeanette Winterson) le souci de renouveler la présentation romanesque de l’histoire, de retérritorialiser le passé en donnant la parole aux oubliés de l’histoire, aux marginalisés et aux maltraités. Le principe de la rétroaction qui utilise des textes ou des genres du passé pour les réactiver, les relocaliser, les investir de nouvelles significations (Bhaba 1996) conduit inévitablement à ce que Saïd a appelé une "hybridation pluraliste" et qui constitue, selon Linda Hutcheon, une des caractéristiques principales du postmodernisme. Ce qui paraît fascinant pourtant, ce n’est pas tant ce recoupement, aussi fondamental fût-il, entre le roman postcolonial de Duff et la fiction postmoderne que les divergences frappantes: les célèbres attaques contre la nostalgie stérile du postmodernisme, contre son emprisonnement dans le passé, sa logique du simulacre et de la simulation, perdent tout fondement dans le cas de Duff dans la mesure où son roman, loin d’être hypertextuel ou métatextuel, se veut empirique. Il s’avère ainsi plus proche ontologiquement d’une autobiographie fictionnelle ou d’une parabole politique que d’un recyclage palimpsestueux de textes antérieurs. Par sa "violence épistémique" (Spivak, 1988) et par la création d’un nouveau code linguistique, Duff réhabilite la fonction éthique de l’art et se coupe radicalement de l’esthétique ludique et autoréflexive du postmodernism

Entre vanité et art poétique : l’esthétique du rien chez Graham Swift

As a metaphor of the disintegration into nothingness, the ashes in Last Orders bespeak the mere nothing of life (« it aint nothing at all ») and appear in numerous descriptions which can then be read as revisited vanitas paintings. Swift’s challenge is to transform the mere nothing of life into a poetic totality and thus establish a bridge between life and literature, despair and art : « To build a bridge ! To span a void ! » Linking the entropic nothingness of the human condition and the literary sublimation of nothingness as an antidote to the void, Swift combines postmodernist nihilism and a romantic conception of demiurgic art. At the intersection of the two poles we find the concept of the sublime defined as the unrepresentable par excellence, the sublime of the void and the abyss

Laurent Mellet, Jonathan Coe : Les politiques de l’intime

Parce que Laurent Mellet, le premier, a eu le courage et la perspicacité de tenter une étude globale de l’œuvre de l’un des acteurs majeurs de la scène culturelle britannique d’aujourd’hui, il mérite d’emblée remerciements et louanges. L’œuvre de Jonathan Coe est aussi prolifique que protéiforme puisqu’elle est composée de dix romans, d’un recueil de nouvelles, de deux ouvrages pour la jeunesse, de trois biographies (de B.S. Johnson, Humphrey Bogart et James Stewart), de nombreux articles et ..

The Counter-Order of Simulacra: Alan Duff’s gut novel, Once Were Warriors

Publié en 1990, Once Were Warriors, le roman néo-zélandais d’Alan Duff, partage avec la fiction britannique de la même époque (celle de Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Charles Palliser, Kazuo Ishiguro ou Jeanette Winterson) le souci de renouveler la présentation romanesque de l’histoire, de retérritorialiser le passé en donnant la parole aux oubliés de l’histoire, aux marginalisés et aux maltraités. Le principe de la rétroaction qui utilise des textes ou des genres du passé pour les réactiver, les relocaliser, les investir de nouvelles significations (Bhaba 1996) conduit inévitablement à ce que Saïd a appelé une "hybridation pluraliste" et qui constitue, selon Linda Hutcheon, une des caractéristiques principales du postmodernisme. Ce qui paraît fascinant pourtant, ce n’est pas tant ce recoupement, aussi fondamental fût-il, entre le roman postcolonial de Duff et la fiction postmoderne que les divergences frappantes: les célèbres attaques contre la nostalgie stérile du postmodernisme, contre son emprisonnement dans le passé, sa logique du simulacre et de la simulation, perdent tout fondement dans le cas de Duff dans la mesure où son roman, loin d’être hypertextuel ou métatextuel, se veut empirique. Il s’avère ainsi plus proche ontologiquement d’une autobiographie fictionnelle ou d’une parabole politique que d’un recyclage palimpsestueux de textes antérieurs. Par sa "violence épistémique" (Spivak, 1988) et par la création d’un nouveau code linguistique, Duff réhabilite la fonction éthique de l’art et se coupe radicalement de l’esthétique ludique et autoréflexive du postmodernism

A Cracked Construction: Postmodernist Fragmentation and Fusion in McEwan’s Atonement

Just as the ground beneath Briony’s feet is distinguished by ‘floorboard cracks’ (11), just as the Tallis’s Meissen porcelain vase displays ‘three fine meandering lines in the glaze’ (43), just as the historical context of the fatal day of Briony’s crime is marked by ‘earthquakes’ (59), that is, geological rifts, and just as the memory of Briony the adult writer is breaking up, the structure of McEwan’s Atonement reveals multiple rifts and splits, a main fracture between Briony’s main narrative and her 1999 coda and many secondary chinks between and within the various parts and subparts. This paper will examine this novelistic principle of fragmentation as a structural device meant to highlight the gaps between the characters’ irreconcilable points of view, the chasm between fiction and reality, and possibly the discontinuity between unlike aesthetic or generic movements. However, in the same way as the vase is glued together again, the novel fuses together contrastive fictional conventions, intertextual influences and novelistic genres. Striving to convey separation and union, fragmentation and fusion, Atonement ultimately illustrates the paradoxical nature of postmodernism’s patchworking both as a metaphor of a traumatic type of bearing after-witness characterised by a series of fractures (in the narrative, temporal and symbolical orders) and as a sign of the syncretic dream of combining Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, humour and tragedy, realism and metatextuality, romance and historical fiction