"Compensations of poverty" : la féerie urbaine ou la modernité en question dans "On Third Avenue" et "Ephemerid" de Mina Loy

This paper explores the poetics of metamorphosis in "On Third Avenue" and "Ephemerid" by Mina Loy. Her ambivalent response to modernity comes to the fore in the representation of an urban fairyland influenced by the works of Baudelaire, surrealist writers as well as the box constructions of Joseph Cornell. Modernity’s indebtedness to an unacknowledged past is at the heart of the aesthetic experience staged in these two poems

Photography and memory work: Rethinking autobiography in Family Secrets by Annette Kuhn

Préparation d'un article en coursInternational audienceIn her hybrid work Family Secrets, Annette Kuhn radically reworks the conventions of life writing. Merging autobiography with cultural criticism, her collection of essays does not set out to trace the making of a unique self, the way most autobiographies would, but explores instead the complex workings of memory and the deep connections between the individual self and society. To do so, Kuhn revisits her past through a personal archive of family pictures and public documents, submitting them to what she calls “memory work”, “an active practice of remembering which takes an enquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re) construction through memory.” (Kuhn 157)This paper will focus on the role played by family photographs in this exploration. These are not used for referential purposes, as a way to recover the past, but as an interpretative device, a way to unsettle it and show it as subject to a multiplicity of interpretations. Rereading family pictures through a method based on free association, Kuhn unleashes their subversive potential, bringing out family secrets and forgotten traumas. Trimmed and covered with inscriptions, these banal, apparently harmless testimonies of family life turn out to be at the heart of intense power plays. Pictures also allow Kuhn to explore the inscription of the self in social structures. Located at the intersection of private and public worlds, formal and ceremonial pictures are part of what Kuhn calls “popular memory”. They become invested with a memorial function, pointing to larger cultural evolutions in post-war Britain but also capturing more marginal trajectories; the undocumented plight of the “scholarship girl” torn between two worlds is thus given particular attention. Caught in a web of conflicting discourses, family photographs emerge in Kuhn’s essay as constantly open to reinterpretation, showing memory and the past as perpetually in the making. Kuhn’s goal is not merely deconstructive however: Primarily concerned with the significance of the past in the present (“the struggle is now, the past is made in the present”, 19), she turns life writing into an empowering, deeply relational enterprise that can delineate another future for the writing subject and her readers

Conclusion (avec Sylvie Le Moël)

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"Compensations of poverty" : la féerie urbaine ou la modernité en question dans "On Third Avenue" et "Ephemerid" de Mina Loy

This paper explores the poetics of metamorphosis in "On Third Avenue" and "Ephemerid" by Mina Loy. Her ambivalent response to modernity comes to the fore in the representation of an urban fairyland influenced by the works of Baudelaire, surrealist writers as well as the box constructions of Joseph Cornell. Modernity’s indebtedness to an unacknowledged past is at the heart of the aesthetic experience staged in these two poems

“My Own Face as Personal Vanishing Point”: Writing the Body in Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face

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In Search of a Lost Past: Michael Ignatieff’s Photo Albums in The Russian Album

Article en préparationInternational audienceThe Revolution of 1917 caused the departure of a great many Russian families from their home country. This experience of exile is at the heart of a number of works of life-writing, some of them written by the descendants of Russian migrants. Such is the case of The Russian Album, published by Michael Ignatieff in 1987. His narrative is a minute reconstruction of the lives of his grand-parents, Paul and Natacha Ignatieff, based on their memoirs and family photo albums. Ignatieff’s Russian Album is striking for the central role it gives to the family pictures, a selection of which can be found in the middle of the book. Their significance, which goes beyond the decorative or merely illustrative function they are usually limited to, illustrates Marianne Hirsch’s claim that following the democratization of photography with the invention of the kodak at the end of the XIXth, “in the ensuing century, the camera has become the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge and self-representation – the primary means by which family memory is perpetuated, by which the family’s story is told.” (Family Frames, xvi)Ignatieff’s work raises questions about the meaning of memory and identity for younger generations dealing with the traumas experienced by their parents and grandparents. The Russian Album is in fact characterized by the ambivalent attitude of the narrator to his roots: his deep desire to know his past is matched by his conjoined fear of being claimed by it. This ambivalence underlies the relationship between text and images. Pictures are presented as the matrix of the book; what is more, the narrator exhibits a deep trust in them as an archival material that will help him reach some kind of truth about the past. However, his use of family photographs reflects a fear of their latent power, a fear that ultimately leads him to try to contain them and to reassert the primacy of words

" 'La Douleur – comporte un Élément de Vide – '. L’expérience de la souffrance chez Emily Dickinson"

International audienceQue nous apprend la poésie sur la souffrance ? On dit souvent d’une douleur extrême qu’elle est indicible. La poésie d’Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) nous invite à repenser la relation entre la langue et le vécu en donnant à lire la douleur comme ce dont on ne peut faire l’expérience. Ses poèmes mettent en scène, non pas un sujet souffrant, comme le fait communément la poésie lyrique, mais une voix qui, de poème en poème, tente de définir ce qu’est la douleur. Cette dernière y est présentée à l’état pur, isolée de tout contexte. Abstraits en ce qu’ils présentent une douleur réduite à son essence, dont on ne sait si elle est physique ou psychique, ces textes ont cependant recours à des images très concrètes, souvent spatiales, pour dire une expérience paradoxale. La douleur n’est en effet pas décrite comme une positivité, mais comme un vide ou un « abîme ». Elle n’est pas une épreuve qui advient et dont le sujet pourrait se détacher, se distancer pour la décrire et l’analyser, lui conférant ainsi le statut d’expérience. Mettant en échec la mémoire et bouleversant la perception du temps, la douleur transforme l’existence en un présent perpétuel auquel le sujet ne peut s’arracher. S’il n’y a pas d’au-delà de la douleur et si elle échappe à la conscience claire, comment, dès lors, en parler dans un poème ? Le recours aux registres gothique et sublime, les fins suspensives, la ponctuation très particulière de l’auteur et l’effacement du je lyrique – qui laisse la place à la douleur personnifiée – constituent autant de procédés qui donnent à lire, non la douleur elle-même, mais le mouvement de la pensée dans sa confrontation avec ce qui se dérobe

Exposition, surexposition et décomposition prismatique : l’art de la mémoire dans Speak Memory de Vladimir Nabokov

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Le monument funéraire chez Sylvia Plath

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