« In the End of Commentary » -300,000,000 de Blake Butler, ou la fiction absolue

International audienceThis essay questions the narrative regime developed by Blake Butler’s 300,000,000 and aims to show that the reflexivity that the text builds upon downplays rather than enhances the hermeneutic approach. If the text constantly feeds back upon itself in order to reflect (upon) its own gestures and moves as well as its very inscription on the page, its aim is to undo any sort of relation to reading conceived of as a grasping mode and to underlie instead some form of absolute (or “severance” in its etymological sense recalled by Quentin Meillassoux) perceptible in the diverse ways the text eludes any readerly grasp. As it obfuscates its many leads, as it warps the syntax to opacify its own discourse, as it also renders problematic any analytical understanding of the text, 300,000,000 rather consists in some sort of speculative fiction understood philosophically, whose main characteristic would be to interrogate the very status of the text-as-object.Cet article s’interroge sur le régime narratif que développe 300,000,000 de Blake Butler pour démontrer que la réflexivité sur laquelle se construit ce roman vise à déjouer toute approche herméneutique plutôt qu’à la renforcer. Si le texte fait constamment retour sur soi pour questionner et réfléchir son propre geste et son inscription à même la page, il tend davantage à défaire tout rapport à la lecture pensée comme saisie au profit d’une forme de déliaison ou d’absolu (au sens étymologique que donne Quentin Meillassoux à ce terme), perceptible dans les diverses modalités de retrait avec lesquelles il joue. En brouillant les pistes, en opacifiant le propos dans le cours d’une syntaxe retorse, en rendant en outre problématique tout déchiffrage analytique, 300,000,000 relèverait davantage d’une forme de fiction spéculative, au sens philosophique du terme, dont le propre serait d’interroger l’identité du texte en tant qu’objet

How to Unread Shelley Jackson ?

This article aims at examining the activity of reading as it is precisely questioned by Shelley Jackson’s novel, Half Life. Playing on binary oppositions and twinning, the text undoes itself as it displays its attraction to blankness and erasure.<br>Cet article s’intéresse à la lecture comme activité telle que la remet en question le roman de Shelley Jackson, Half Life. Par un jeu sur les oppositions binaires et la gémellité, le texte se défait en tendant vers le blanc et l’effacement

Willie & Babs, Phil & Bob: “et moi, et moi, et moi…" (On Reading Pornography)

Taking its cue from a broad definition of pornography in literature and building up on the ambiguous relationship uniting William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife to its parodic response in Robert Coover’s “On Mrs. Willie Masters,” this article aims at interrogating the ways in which these texts, whose aesthetics verges on the pornographic, short-circuit the usual paths to meaning. If in both cases emphasis is put on the textual performance, the reader/critic sees herself beaten on her own turf and can only remark performatively, and give in to the evidence, that what these texts perform, overexposing them in the light of a writing given to simulation, are none other than her own critical obsessions

« What’s Black and White and Read All Over? » Esquisse d’un je(u) étrange : Half Life (2006) de Shelley Jackson

Shelley Jackson’s first novel, Half Life, leaves Nora in command of the text, making her tell her story and conquer a self she was deprived of at her birth. But how to do so when “her” story is always-already “theirs,” split in half, and when saying I is therefore impossible? For Nora is not alone, Nora is inseparable—and literally so—from Blanche, her “twofer” sister. Through an interplay of binary oppositions, Jackson fashions the (twin) metaphor of writing and reading, inciting her reader to intervene in the text and dig deeper into it to (un)cover meaning under the successive layers of whiteness that reveal the blankness of a page that is slowly being erased as one reads / runs over it

Robert Coover & the Generosity of the Page

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Tentative d'approche d'une fiction spéculative

International audienceTaking “speculative” in a philosophical sense, this paper endeavors to define what “speculative fiction” could be while investigating the contradictions it gives rise to. For by positing that speculative fiction aims to destabilize the referentiality at the heart of language and fiction, the critical discourse is bound to create links and try to relate where the speculative text concomitantly strives to sever all such hermeneutic connections. Thus challenging reading habits, the speculative text will not be read in any conventional sense and might have instead to be speculated

The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson : Anatomy of Melancholy/Criticism

Somewhere between a short story collection and a novel, a book and a hypertext, a text and its intertext, The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson playfully displaces its boundaries and, so doing, questions the organicism of the diverse reading paths it makes (im-)possible. What is taking shape, from page to page and text to text, or what is being “embodied” in this writing that progressively claims its femininity back, is somehow akin to a little epistemological drama or crisis, which renders all source of possible knowledge problematic by patiently deconstructing any critical and hermeneutic attempt, while stressing the parasitic and artificial dimension of its commentary.Quelque part entre le recueil de nouvelles et le roman, entre le livre et l’hypertexte, le texte et son intertexte, The Melancholy of Anatomy de Shelley Jackson joue à déplacer ses propres frontières et à inter¬ roger, ce faisant, l’organicité des parcours de lectures qu’elle rend (im-)possibles. Ce qui s’y trame ainsi, de page en page, de texte en texte, ou ce qui «prend corps » dans cette écriture qui progressivement se féminise, est de l’ordre d’un petit drame et d’une crise épistémolo¬ gique, visant à rendre problématique la source de toute connaissance possible, en déconstruisant patiemment toute tentative critique et herméneutique, tout en soulignant la dimension parasitaire et artificielle du commentaire.Vanderhaeghe Stéphane. The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson : Anatomy of Melancholy/Criticism. In: Cahiers Charles V, n°47,2010. How to Read Contemporary American Literature. pp. 121-143

Reading Under Observation: délire Lolita

This article aims at, if not answering, at least raising the question: What is it exactly that we read when we read Lolita? If Vladimir Nabokov’s narrator overtly plays with his readers, he too, whether he knows it or not, is being toyed with. Through a series of manipulations and “camouflages” the text turns the reading experience into a “camouflet,” questioning its very foundations, be they narrative, textual, temporal or structural

The Infernal (2015) de Mark Doten -- Mondes, machine, interface

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