François Gallix, Armelle Parey et Isabelle Roblin (dir.), L’Inachevé ou l’ère des possibles dans la littérature anglophone. Récits ouverts et incomplets

Depuis la publication de Fins de romans. Aspects de la conclusion dans la littérature anglaise en 1993, suivie de deux numéros de la revue Lisa e-journal, le premier en 2006 intitulé Re-Writing Jane Eyre et le second en 2009, Jane Eyre: Text, Context, Ur-Text, les anglicistes caennais ont affirmé un intérêt pour les marges, confins ou pourtours du texte. C’est donc forts de cette expertise développée au fil des ans qu’ils proposent dans ce dernier opus une réflexion sur l’inachevé, à la fois ..

Pruning London down to her marrow: Michael Morcock’s attempt at a strategy of the implicit in London bone

Plus connu en tant qu’auteur de science fiction, Michael Moorcock appartient pourtant bien à cette génération des « écrivains de Londres », dont parle abondamment Ackroyd dans sa récente biographie : London the Biography (2000). Parce que Londres est tout à la fois un palimpseste quasi infini et un organisme vivant, le récit court ne peut recréer cette densité et ce vitalisme qu’en empruntant les voies de l’implicite et en recomposant les sinuosités multiples des actes de parole. Précisément London Bone n’atteint cette moelle essentielle, tapie au cœur de l’os, qu’en définissant des modus operandi de l’implicite : l’indirection, l’interaction dialogique et le minimalisme. Entre le texte en filigrane, la force connotative des toponymes et la faconde hyperbolique des excentriques, Moorcock dessine une cartographie londonienne que le lecteur retrace pour son propre compte, en négociant des passages entre hyper-assertions et allusions discrètes. L’identité du lecteur que construit une telle stratégie de l’implicite, mobilisant différents subterfuges, est fluctuante. Il faut en effet que celui-ci puisse être ou bien le Londonien à qui ces courts récits s’adressent sur le mode de la connivence, ou alors l’étranger qui assiste fasciné à la construction de ce qui n’est rien moins qu’une mythologie de Londres 

La hantise du rien comme envers de l’H/histoire chez Graham Swift : Waterland et Ever After

In Swift’s fictions, History is invested with a calling. It conceals the emptiness, the nothingness of reality. Through its dramatic function, history, understood both as story-telling and historiography, hides the annihilating real.Waterland and Ever After, probably the most historical of Swift’s fictions to date, both testify to a similar obsession with nothingness to the same degree. This is an aspect which has hardly been addressed so far. In both novels, Swift’s writing draws its creative energy from the dynamic of the lack. It is indeed prompted from an impulse to fill up the void, which constantly returns through the author’s prose. The need to tell stories, or to be told stories to, stems from irrepressible drives. Lacanian theory shows that the object of the pulsion cannot be assimilated with any concrete object, but instead, conceived of as a gaping hole, a void and thus as eluding representation. Nothingness is indeed one of the objects a, alongside with gaze and voice

Le texte victorien à l’âge postmoderne : jouvence ou sénescence ? Fingersmith de Sarah Waters et le mélodrame victorien

An impressive number of novels, recreating the Victorian era, have been published over the past three decades. And the trend shows no signs of becoming extinct ! But what do these updated versions of 19th century fictions tell us about the legacy of Victorian literature in the 21st century ? Do they bear witness to its obsolescence ? Or do they, on the opposite, underscore its unimpaired vitality ? After a brief survey of the reception of Victorian fiction in the first half of the 20th century, this article suggests that never before have the novels by Dickens, Braddon or Collins contributed so vividly to rejuvenate literary creativity. The argument is illustrated by taking the example of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, published in 2002. Through a contrastive, dialogic method of reading, it can be shown that Waters felicitously weaves together masterly-contrived plots from her Victorian predecessors, in order to sustain suspense, while setting the lesbian issue high on her narrative agenda. Yet, far from tiring today’s readers of Victorian fiction, Waters arouses a genuine interest for its intricacies and obliquity. As a result, the « old » versus « new » opposition is partly neutralised, to give way to a cross-fertilisation between past and present

: Psychogéographie de la ville chez Ford Madox Ford - Paris

International audienceThough he was born in London, Ford reported that he would never regard that city as his own and dismissed the idea of having come 'back to London' when he did return, as if the English metropolis knew not him. Paris was linked to the ebb and flow of Ford's affects and emotions and to his artistic ventures. The ups and downs of the writer's mindscape inscribe the persistence of the Parisian urbanscape in the essays. Working from the premises of psychogeography, from Guy Debord to Will Self, this chapter investigates Ford's Paris as an impressionist cityscape. Indeed, if the geography of Paris remains the same, the mental images change and Ford shows how impressions from childhood are superimposed on the adult's, with the Left Bank consistently standing for a whole continent. Invariants do persist across the years, such as the subjective image of the impassable cleft separating the Left Bank from the Quartier de l'Etoile, like two brain hemispheres. In the last resort, Paris is lived as a text, or palimpsest, affording a thorough artistic experience. Therefore this chapter attempts to read Ford's Paris through a kaleidoscope of his writings

From Dickens’s Theatrical Performance to Contemporary post Dickensian Narrative and Artistic Performance (Acker, Ackroyd, Waters and Rushdie)

Recent studies have underlined the relevance of the Victorian Age (whose temporal boundaries have been stretched to include the “long nineteenth century”) to the postmodern era. This essay narrows the topic to Dickens’s own relevance to postmodern aesthetics, through the question of theatricality. Dickens’s invention of public readings may be seen as an innovative method to advertise literary production, but it is also a tangible illustration of the type of boundary crossing valued by postmodern writers. With Dickens, who in this respect is very much in the Sternean-Shandian vein, theatrical performance is both inside the text (e.g. the parodic staging of Hamlet in Great Expectations) and outside the text, when dramatized versions of his novels are specially written to be acted out. It is the author’s versatility (implied as he was in a whole range of activities: fiction-writing, editing, journalism, publishing initiatives, amateur theatricals, speeches, public readings, business undertakings and so forth), together with the plurality within his works (the neo-baroque effect, perceptible among other things through the so-called “streaky bacon” or the “wonderful gargoyles”), which have served as a springboard for contemporary fiction-writers. Sarah Waters’s fictions, notably Fingersmith, have been almost unanimously praised for their plots, described as sheer “tour de force”. It can be claimed that Waters’s narrative ploys are borrowed from the theatrical world which held a real fascination for Dickens. With English Music, Ackroyd, for his part, illustrates what Clayton in his study: Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (2003) calls “undisciplined” creativity, by revisiting Great Expectations trans-artistically, through an odd combination of the pictorial, the musical, the cinematographic and the theatrical. This curious mixture of genres turns narration into fictionalized artistic performance, devised as a paean to the English tradition. At the other end of the spectrum, more iconoclastic literary experiments may be seen as bearing witness to Dickens’s off-the-beaten-track approach to novel-writing. Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, by juxtaposing disjointed jump-cut sequences incorporating fantasy, personal statements and plagiarism transforms Dickensian theatrical performance into “narrative happenings”. As for Rushdie, the few pages he dedicates to Our Mutual Friend in his Satanic Verses capitalize on Dickens’s histrionic exuberance to stun the reader through verbal fireworks

: Psychogéographie de la ville chez Ford Madox Ford - Paris

International audienceThough he was born in London, Ford reported that he would never regard that city as his own and dismissed the idea of having come 'back to London' when he did return, as if the English metropolis knew not him. Paris was linked to the ebb and flow of Ford's affects and emotions and to his artistic ventures. The ups and downs of the writer's mindscape inscribe the persistence of the Parisian urbanscape in the essays. Working from the premises of psychogeography, from Guy Debord to Will Self, this chapter investigates Ford's Paris as an impressionist cityscape. Indeed, if the geography of Paris remains the same, the mental images change and Ford shows how impressions from childhood are superimposed on the adult's, with the Left Bank consistently standing for a whole continent. Invariants do persist across the years, such as the subjective image of the impassable cleft separating the Left Bank from the Quartier de l'Etoile, like two brain hemispheres. In the last resort, Paris is lived as a text, or palimpsest, affording a thorough artistic experience. Therefore this chapter attempts to read Ford's Paris through a kaleidoscope of his writings