Caledonia Dreaming : commitment, literature and independence

International audienceThis paper examines the notion of commitment in literature in the contemporary context, and the connection between literature and nationalism in Scotland. It starts with the philosophical reflection on the goal of all art that Alan Riach and Alexander Moffat based their argument on in their book The Arts of Independence (2014), in order to underline the ways commitment is related to the history of cultural nationalism and to the representation of Scottish identity in contemporary literature, in places where this representation does appear. In order to do so, the paper tackles the necessity for artists to eschew what Eleanor Bell calls the postmodern predicament, in particular the dangers of an essentialist approach to Scottishness. It also examines the wider implications of the concept of cultural nationalism, in a context where inferiorism as well as banal nationalism are surfacing again. These recent developments have led artists and critics alike to try to devise new configurations for cultural nationalism, with the return of the idea of an " archipelagic " identity, or with a distinction being drawn between independence and interdependence for example. The part played by the artists in the independence debate, their commitment, has been precisely to promote a literature that looks at what, according to Riach and Moffat, is the essential goal and virtue of all art, to speak to and of our humanity

"Regaining Control: Jenni Fagan, The Panopticon (2012)"

International audienceDiscusses Fagan's groundbreaking novel about an Edinburgh teenager as "an important landmark of contemporary literature," "a performative act of resistance ... over the forces of oppression," and "an invitation to reconsider the ethics of our contemporary world.

“Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mother Superior”: la transgression chez Iain Banks et Irvine Welsh

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“Signing off on the right side of History?” Relating in Louise Welsh’s apocalyptic trilogy"

International audienceThis article examines the way the Scottish writer Louise Welsh contributes to the trend of postapocalyptic fiction in the 21st century, with her plague times trilogy. Relying on the critical and theoretical writing of Michael Foessel, Jean-Paul Engélibert, Bertrand Gervais, Denis Mellier, Hélène Machinal and François Hartog, it shows that Welsh’s trilogy, which spans the whole catastrophe, from the outbreak of the virus to the aftermath of the apocalypse, borrows from the essential tropes of the genre (the crumbling of order, the incapacity to “faire monde”, the contemporary, presentism, the actualisation of the future, the neo-Antiquarian concern with fragments, the cyclical nature of the narrative) to reflect upon the necessity for humans to relate to their past and their future, but also to relate to themselves and to each other. Welsh depicts a presentist world, where the chaos of the pandemic has severed all connection to people’s past, which precludes any meaningful projection into the future. The temporal closure is given spatial treatment, and the characters in the last volume are turned into collectors of fragments from the material past (sim cards, books) and from the political past (political regimes). Welsh also uses the generic codes of crime to recapture the severed link, or create a new one, and to question the new world order that her novels depict

Reconstructing the Future: Contemporary Scottish Literature and the Nation

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Une personne, deux noms : la notion de confluence dans les écrits de Jackie Kay

International audienceThis article examines the many ways in which Jackie Kay’s writing is about confluence: as a Scottish writer with a Nigerian father, as a lesbian poet, as an adopted child, she is situated at the crossroads of our cultural, societal, racial landmarks. Looking more precisely at her latest collection of short stories Reality, Reality, as well as to her memoir Red Dust Road and some of her poetry, this article looks at the way Kay, by starting from duality, delineates a territory for the definition of the self which she calls the “middle ground” and which, as she explains in her memoir, has to be constructed with a voice that knows no precedent; it is also a voice that fuses together reality and fiction. Kay’s fiction and her poetry probe the depth of our notion of reality, and of “the windy place” our identity sometimes stems from. Finally, the space of confluence for Kay is also a space of writing, which helps her explore what she calls “the road not taken”.Cet article examine les différentes formes de confluence qui constituent l’écriture de Jackie Kay. Auteur écossais dont le père est nigérian, poète lesbienne, enfant adoptée, Kay se situe aux confins de nos repères culturels, sociétaux et raciaux. En partant de son dernier recueil de nouvelles Reality, Reality, de ses mémoires Red Dust Road et de certains poèmes, cet article se penche sur la façon dont Kay, en partant de la notion de dualité, trace un territoire identitaire qu’elle nomme « the middle ground ». Ce territoire, ainsi qu’elle le déclare dans ses mémoires, postule une voix qui ne connaît aucun précédent ; c’est également une voix qui mêle réel et fiction. Les œuvres de Kay sondent les profondeurs de la notion identitaire, de ce qu’elle nomme « the windy place » dont elle procède. L’espace d’écriture qu’elle bâtit l’aide ultimement à explorer ce qu’elle décrit comme « the road not taken »

“ ‘They peer at my dark land’: The Ethics of Storytelling in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Women’s Writing”

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Generic Instability and Identity in the Contemporary Novel

International audienceContemporary aesthetics is characterized by generic mixing on the level of both form and content. The barriers between different media and different genres have been broken down in all literary art forms, whether it be theatre, poetry, or the novel. While the publishing industry is increasingly keen to label novels according to genre or sub-genre, the novel itself (and novelists) persist in resisting generic categorizations as well as inviting them. Is this a move towards a new aesthetic liberty or does it simply testify to a confusion of identity? Thanks to theoretical approaches as well as analyses of specific works, this collection of essays aims to examine the concepts fo generic instability and cross-fertilization, of narrative postures and impostures, and their constant redefinition of identity, which contaminates the very concept of genre. It demonstrates the diversity of generic practices in the novel today and furnishes is with undeniable evidence of how generic instability is fundamentally constitutive of the contemporary novel's identity

"Ghosts from the future: post-apocalyptic narratives in Scotland and the displacement of memory"

International audienceThis chapter examines six apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novels by Scottish authors, John Burnside’s Glister (2008) and Havergey (2017), The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) by Jenni Fagan, and Louise Welsh’s trilogy A Lovely Way to Burn (2014), Death is a Welcome Guest (2015) and No Dominion (2017), and the way they use the futuristic postulate they are based on to set the present as an object of historical scrutiny. The novels all conjure up ghosts from the future, which enable them to reflect on the historical, environmental and political “juncture” we are at, and raise the issue of the displacement of memory. The chapter draws on theories of the apocalypse, in particular Michael Foessel’s (faire monde), Jean-Paul Engélibert’s (the crumbling of order) and Georgio Agamben’s (messianic time), to show how the novels’ indictment of the present takes on an ecopolitical dimension. All attempt to restore history within presentism, by exploiting the contraction of time between the (ecological, political) crisis and the end. They also eschew the biblical notion of the New Jerusalem, instead foregrounding nomadism, both spatial and temporal, for its capacity to end presentism by asserting humans’ connection to the world. In so doing, they provide an ecopolitics and an ecopoetics of wandering which places the land at the heart of their renegotiation of historiography, by emphasising historical continuity between the human and the non-human, redefining the notion of community in the process. This continuity is best expressed with Jean Luc Nancy’s concept of the inoperative community, i.e. a community with a “spontaneous inclination to come together”

Reconstructing the Future: Contemporary Scottish Literature and the Nation

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