5. La Nouvelle de langue anglaise (SEAC)

5. La Nouvelle de langue anglaise (SEAC)

Responsables : Catherine Bernard (Université Paris
Diderot), Gerald Preher (Université Catholique de Lille)

Ateliers I

Jeudi
6 juin 2019, 13h30-16h30

Présidence : Gerald
Preher

13h30 Tina Terradillos

Université Paul Valéry
Montpellier 3, EMMA (EA 741)

Adam’s Breed de Radclyffe Hall : l’exception éthique

Salué par ses contemporains à sa sortie en 1926 (James
Tait Black Memorial Prize et prix Femina Vie Heureuse), Adam’s Breed a été éclipsé par The
Well of Loneliness (1928), roman de Radclyffe Hall qui lui vaut encore
aujourd’hui une postérité biaisée d’auteure lesbienne : l’exceptionnalité
d’Adam’s Breed s’est vue ignorée par
le statut d’exception donné à The Well
et l’écrivaine par une critique spécialisée qui en a proposé une lecture
essentiellement genrée. Cela pose la question de savoir qui attribue le statut,
s’il en est un, d’exception. Par ailleurs, si l’exception se définit comme ce
qui est hors de la loi commune, pourquoi lui accorde-t-on généralement une valeur
positive alors qu’une telle définition pourrait autant s’appliquer aux
hors-la-loi ? L’exception produit une forme de marginalisation visible
dans la condition d’invertie du personnage principal de The Well et dans la condition d’étranger de celui d’Adam’s Breed. L’exception interroge dès
lors la notion d’espace : où se place l’être désigné comme « exception »
ou « exceptionnel » ? En-dehors, au-dessus, à la marge ?
Toujours ramené à un espace central, comment négocie-t-il cette force
centrifuge ? Cette question renvoie à l’étymologie commune d’exception,
d’incipit, de conception et de réception : dans Adam’s Breed, le statut négatif d’exception stigmatise d’emblée les
personnages mais les oblige ensuite à cheminer pour définir un espace vivable,
d’abord dans l’entre-deux de la norme et de la marge, puis dans un espace
d’accueil où ils tentent de définir un rapport éthique aux autres. Ce trajet
est métaphorisé par la relation du personnage à la nourriture, étonnamment
proche, malgré le décalage temporel, des analyses contemporaines de Corine
Pelluchon : l’acte de se nourrir prend dans Adam’s Breed une dimension éthique qui contribue à un humanisme de
partage qu’on voudrait tout sauf exceptionnel.

14h Stéphane Sitayeb

Sorbonne Université, VALE
(EA 4085)

The fin-de-siècle Short Stories of Arthur
Machen as Poetic Exceptions: from Uncanonical to Unclassifiable Texts

Our current conception of
Welsh prose writer Arthur Machen (1863-1947) as a minor author originates not
only from his Celtic roots but also from his exceptional treatment of
traditional literary genres and his stylistic syncreticism at the turn of the
century, a period during which he produced exceptions in the already
unconventional and transient current called Decadence. Machen’s short stories, hitherto
understudied, consist of exceptions that do not so much subvert or
revolutionize the codesof the genre
as require a divergent critical approach together with different analytical
tools – instruments of study used in poetry and musicology being more adequate
than narratology, for instance. Being minor and undermined not only by his
contemporary critics during the fin-de-siècle
era but also throughout the 20th century, Machen’s short stories have kept an
essence that prevents the specialist of the genre from pinpointing their proper
aesthetic values to the extent that they defy classification. This article
explores the radical differences that bring Machen’s short stories to stand out
among that of his contemporaries. His use of typically poetic topics such as
reverie, night walks, urban festivities or Londonian sketches is accompanied by
unusual motifs and rhetorical tropes: homophonic effects such as alliterative
and assonantal doublets, rhythmical arrangements, syntactic symmetries and the
presence of a vertical dimension contrasting with the usual tabularity or
horizontality of prose works. Underlining a supposed correlation between
canonicality and popularity, or the equation between exception and marginality,
the Machenian exception furthermore confirms the rule, which was applied to his
less uncommon Gothic predecessors (Edgar Poe), fellow-contemporaries and even
rare followers (H. P. Lovecraft and later Stephen King), the exceptionality of
Machen’s texts being manifest even in their barely existent legacy.

14h30 Armelle
Parey

Université
de Caen, ERIBIA (EA 2610)

Kate Atkinson: Exception as a Rule in Case Histories (2004)

Like John Banville, Julian Barnes, and Susan Hill amongst
others, Kate Atkinson went from literary fiction to detective fiction when she
published Case Histories in 2004. While Banville and Barnes have used a
pseudonym for their detective fiction as if to signal a distinction, Hill and
Atkinson have kept the same name for all their production, suggesting a turn or
fluctuation in their writing. Atkinson since seems to have abandoned her
detective character, Jackson Brodie, after four novels published between 2004
and 2010, and developed her interest in historical fiction and the world wars.
I would argue that, more than an exception in Atkinson’s production, these
detective novels are an exception in the genre since they bear Atkinson’s
distinctive mark in terms of plotting, developping her characters and
self-reflexivity. After examining how Atkinson revisits the genre of crime fiction,
notably through the character of its detective and its foray into the
“neo-domestic” (Jacobson), this paper then focuses on the uses Atkinson makes of exception in these
novels, with Case Histories as a case study, taking exception as a
component of narrative, when the irrational, the abnormal, the extra-ordinary
apparently invades and disrupts the lives of characters but also the reader’s
expectations through its reliance on coincidence.

15h PAUSE

15h30 Héloïse Lecomte

ENS Lyon, UMR 5317 IHRIM

“Exceptionality
had become the norm”: Ali Smith’s Aesthetics of Exception in Artful (2012)

Designed as a series of
lectures given at Oxford University, Ali Smith’s Artful, published in 2012, innovatively mingles the genres of essay
and fiction. The lectures are framed by the narrative of a nameless and
genderless narrator’s discovery of his/her dead lover’s conference notes. The
book’s atmosphere is therefore bathed in playful melancholy, and offers a
mischievous metatextual variation on Barthes’s “death of the author”. Smith’s
writing in this book could best be characterized by the conjunction “but”; it
reads like a novel but is not really one; it is a conference, but a highly
unconventional one: it is an exception to both genres. I would argue that the jumbling of narrative genres
potentially mirrors the emotional state of the bereaved protagonist: in the
post-traumatic world shaped by grief, the loss of a loved one creates a kind of
chaos that exceeds the boundaries of normal life. As a disruption of ordinary life,
grief can be considered as a state of exception, and the implosion of narrative
structures and categories aptly portrays this commotion. Furthermore, Ali
Smith’s aesthetics predominantly revolves around the ex-centric and dissensions
from the norm, as she turns outsiders into centres of consciousness and
delights in exploring the lives of the singular, the eccentric, the odd-one-out
in her works. It is my contention that her approach in Artful partakes of postmodernist strategies, in which “difference and ex-centricity replace
homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis”
(Hutcheon). What would usually stand out is then displaced, or rather re-placed
at the centre: the storyline features an elusive, ghostly dead character and offers
the innermost thoughts of a genderless bereaved narrator in an often-comical
way, setting an unusual, exceptional tone for a bereavement story.

16h Catherine Lanone

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3,
PRISMES (EA 4398)

Taking Exception to
Homer’s Epic: Pat Barker’s The Silence of
the Girls

Pat Barker’s 2018 novel, The Silence of the Girls, revisits the Homeric epic from the angle
of the odd one out: Briseis, the woman prisoner caught between Agamemnon and
Achilles, the two men who want her. Silenced in Homer’s tale, she may now
observe the masculine confrontation, and those who decide the fate of her own
world. Rewriting history from the viewpoint of exception, Barker returns to her
signature territory, war, with renewed force, in order to graphically engage
with the plight of women whose bodies are caught and used. The novel addresses
the Iliad‘s ability to speak across
centuries, while reversing the tale and exploring grief, loss, the breaking of
community. In this feminist retelling retrieving the woman from the male
narrative, themes of rape and the pity of war resonate with our world today.

Ateliers II

Vendredi
7 juin 2019, 9h-10h30

Présidence :
Catherine Lanone

9h Georges Letissier

Université de Nantes, CRINI
(EA 1162)

Ronald
Firbank: The Unpindownable “Butterfly”. Taking Exception to the Exception?

By using the butterfly image both Leonard Woolf and
E.M. Forster proved dismissive of Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank (1886-1926).
Woolf, in his essay “Butterflies”, took issue with the effeteness of the
poseur, whose writings betrayed a sore deficiency in substance. Forster, in a
piece which he first thought of calling “Our Butterflies and Beetles”, insisted
that Firbank’s works were not easy to review, let alone criticize.The
difficulty of the task of criticising Firbank was for Forster by no means an
endorsement of a writer, whom he found lacking in many respects. Virginia
Woolf, for her part, found some unstinted pleasures in the experience of
devouring Firbank’s novels. The reference to insectology is interesting to
address the category of the exception. It implies classification and the
identification of ‘taxa’ which are generic groupings. Ronald Firbank would not
fall squarely within any pigeonhole. Seen as a transitory figure between late 19th
century Decadentism and nascent Modernism, he remains unclassifiable: “Firbank
was, in his own aesthetic but involuntary fashion, out from the start, an
exotic, an exception” (Hollinghurst). This paper purports to shun the iconic,
eccentric persona, which has become grist to the mill of some contemporary
fictions where the thin, undulating silhouette of Firbank makes cameo
appearances, to focus on his daunting, exceptional – i.e. beyond the pale –
writings. Following Evelyn Waugh, who claimed, among other things, that
Firbank’s art was “purely selective”, the 1923 novel The Flower Beneath the Foot, with its emphasis on flowering,will be contrasted with the catleya
motif in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. The
stark opposition between narrative expansion, on the one hand, and
narrative-defying contraction, on the other, will be useful to assess the
relevance – and resistance – of the label “exception” to devise a hermeneutic
approach adapted to Firbank’s works.

9h30 Isabelle
Roblin

Université
du Littoral Côte d’Opale, HLLI (EA 4030)

Alison Case’s Nelly
Dean (2016): an Exceptional Neo-Victorian novel?

Nelly Dean by Alison Case (2016) appears to be an exception within the numerous
rewritings of Emily Brontë’s only novel Wuthering Heights. It is, for
the most part, a “coquel”, “evoking events that are simultaneous with the
source text” (Parey, Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary
Anglophone Fiction). Hypotext and hypertext share the same basic narrator,
Nelly Dean who, in the contemporary retelling, writes to Mr Lockwood about “the
story [she] told [him] over those long, dark nights”, but also about “the story

[she]

didn’t tell” (2). This could be a typical neo-Victorian ploy to fill in
the blanks of the original narrative, as in for example Lin Haire-Sargeant’s H:
The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights (1992), Emma
Tennant’s Heathcliff’s Tale (2005) or Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and
the Great Hunger (1995), centring on the main protagonists, Heathcliff and
Cathy. However, it is not so: it is a truly ex-centric stand-alone as Nelly
Dean focuses on … Nelly Dean and the famous romantic lovers remain firmly
in the background. Even if there are indeed some dark secrets revealed, as well
as a pinch of sex and incest (which makes the novel a contemporary one), they
are not the ones the readers of neo-Victorian fiction have come to expect.
After a brief recapitulation of the usual features of neo-Victorian fiction, I
shall dwell on the characteristics that make Nelly Dean a truly
exceptional novel within this sub-genre, for now at least, as it may herald a
new strand of neo-Victorian fiction, just as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in
the 1960s brought about a new way of looking back at the literary canon.

10h Émilie Walezak

Université Lumière Lyon 2,
Passages XX-XXI (EA 4160)

Peacock and Vine (2016) by A.S. Byatt: An Auctorbiography?

A.S. Byatt’s latest text, Peacock and Vine, published in 2016, is
hard to qualify and thus stands as an exception in her work. The illustrated
book dedicated to the lives and works of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny is
not a fiction, but neither is it an essay in literary criticism like the ones
Byatt published previously. It is rather an informal essay on art and life that
has elements of a travelogue, as it was occasioned by a trip to Italy, of a
biography, as Byatt exposes her research on the two artists, of an
autobiography, as she also delivers personal information in print and in
photographs, finally, and maybe most importantly, of an auctorbiography, to use
the term coined by Jean-Louis Chevalier à propos a short story titled
“Arachne”, as her meditation sheds light on her writing life and obsessions.
Through the two figures whom she considers as exceptional in their dedication
to their craft, Byatt draws her own self-portrait in a testamentary way as the
book was published on her 80^th birthday. Her love of descriptions,
of collections, resonates with the repeated mentions of Proust and is echoed in
the illustrations meant to exemplify her visual imagination. The “tangential”
connections between the two artists, as they were qualified in several
unfavourable reviews, provide an insight into the author’s creative process as
the essay reads indeed like “the spark of a novel” (Murray). The exception will
prove to be a testimonial summary of the artist’s own craft.

Ateliers III

Samedi 8 juin 2019, 9h-10h30

Présidence : Catherine
Bernard

9h
Alice Borrego

Université Paul Valéry
Montpellier 3, EMMA (EA 741)

Exceptional Responsibility in Rebecca West’s The
Return of the Soldier (1918)

“[…] in a few moments she was to go out and say the
words that would end all her happiness, that would destroy all the gifts her
generosity had so difficultly amassed. Well, that is the kind of thing one has
to do in this life.” Chris Baldry, the eponymous soldier, returns from WWI to a
house he cannot recognize: suffering from shell-shock, he forgot the past fifteen
years of his life with Kitty, his wife, and Jenny, his cousin, and only
remembers his then lover Margaret, who will be burdened with the difficult task
of bringing his memory back. The peculiarity of this illness, here emblematic
of a suffering nation, forces the women of West’s novel to be confronted with
their responsibility as wives, cousins, but above all social beings. Lévinas defines
responsibility as what makes the self unique, exceptional, insofar as the
individual can only fully exist through his/her responsible relationship to
others: “Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what,
humanly, I cannot refuse. This charge is a supreme dignity of the unique. I am
I in the sole measure that I am responsible, a non-interchangeable I.” In this
regard, this paper will aim at analyzing the different acceptations of
responsibility that overlap in the novel and how the exceptionalism of the
characters is challenged. Not only does the complex return to “normal” suggests
a fracture between soldiers and civilians, it also sheds light on the
reconfiguration of the household roles in exceptional historical times and on
the different shades the notion of responsibility can take according to social
class. The exceptional quality of responsibility is thus challenged by multiple
experiences with others, which either strengthen or weaken the characters’
uniqueness through a redefinition of their status, both in society and in the
household.

9h30 Marie Laniel

Université
de Picardie Jules Verne, CORPUS (EA 4295)

Exceptionality and particularism in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978)

Starting from the specificity
of Iris Murdoch’s ethical stance, her “resistance to the idea that the content
of morality must be statable in the form of universal principles”, her focus
instead on particular cases or “particular perceptual and conceptual schemes”
(Broackes 2012, 9-11), this paper will look at the way Murdoch’s moral
particularism—her vision of morality as a perception of particulars
transcending general rules and classification—shapes her works of fiction, more
specifically her 1978 first-person narrative, The Sea, The Sea. Told from the perspective of Charles Arrowby, an
egotistical theatre director who, Prospero-like, has withdrawn from the world
in the seaside town of Narrowdean, the novel describes the different steps in
Charles’s incomplete spiritual journey, from a self-centred world-view, based
on the intimate conviction of his own singularity as an artist, to a partial
awareness of the plurality of moral experience (“But am I so exceptional?”),
from the limitations of a state of moral exception, based on his psychological
ascendency over others, to a partial acceptance of the contingency of the
world. The liminal coastal scenery and the constantly shifting seascape, which
at once isolate the character and open him up to the vast contingency of the
world, embody this tension between the exceptionality of the egotistical self
and the complexity of a sea of particulars.

10h Silvia
Pireddu

Université
de Turin

Turning the Ordinary into the Exceptional: Digital Storytelling
and the Works of Daniel Meadows.

Creative works are no longer intended
as given products, but as ongoing “emergent”
processes at the intersection between
porous media boundaries. The exceptionality of the work of art is questioned by
highlighting the interstitial, processual and translational dimension of any
cultural production aiming at being recognised as aesthetic. Narratives spread over multiple platforms and media,
calling for a renewed interest in the ancient art of storytelling. In the new
participative transmedia environment, storytelling travels across all sorts of
cultural fields thanks to the re-creative and re-distributive processes allowed
by the Internet and social media. The medium enhances the practice: storytelling combines oral narrative (mode) in the form
of a script (genre) but uses a variety of media (blog, web page, social
networks) to create meaning. Emotive language is also important. These
discursive aspects involved in storytelling will be illustrated by examining
the work of Daniel Meadows (born 1952), an English photographer and
participatory media specialist who pioneered digital storytelling techniques in
Britain. Meadows’ work was influenced by Ivan Illich’s ideas as presented in Tools for Conviviality (1975) and the
activity of the Center for Digital Storytelling at the University of California,
Berkeley. In this perspective, he has produced fictional short video/photo
narratives that focus on the participants’ creativity, dramatising cultures,
traditions and life-stories. Meadows questions the role of the Author and
his/her uniqueness by foregrounding the ordinary as a source of aesthetic
value. The stories claim their exceptionality by embracing a sort of “anarchist”
view of society where individualism is the most vital source of aesthetics.
Digital stories place fragments of life in a broader world context and re-enact
the point of view on History of the subjects involved. The paper suggests that
visual culture, Heritage and narration are an area of mediation that turns the
ordinary into the exceptional.

Ateliers IV

Samedi 8 juin 2019, 11h-12h30

11h Justine Gonneaud

Université d’Avignon et des Pays du
Vaucluse, ICTT (EA 4277)

Exceptionality and Commonality in Jackie
Kay’s Trumpet (2016)

This paper will turn to Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, a novel that may be deemed
‘exceptional’ on more than one count. First, Trumpet remains the only novel to date in the author’s diverse
production of poems, short stories, plays, children’s book and memoir. In Kay’s
own words, “writing a novel is akin to having a long illness”, “physically and
mentally tough”, partly because such a ‘capacious’ art form requires the writer
to think ‘what to keep out’ (Kay 2016). In this respect, exception – i.e the
willing exclusion of information – might be considered as the core of Kay’s
writing process, in a novel that deals with secrecy, loss and the consequences
of a “scandalous revelation”. As the book metaleptically portrays legendary
trumpeter Joss Moody through the various lenses of the media, the general
public’s eye and his mourning relatives’ testimonies, the depiction of an
exceptional posthumously-revealed-to-be-transgender character gradually shifts
its focus to emphasize the shared experiences of grief, vulnerability and
coming-of-age. In her introduction to the book, Ali Smith articulates a similar
movement between exceptionality and universality, observing that this “extraordinary
novel” achieved “classic status” as soon as it was published. With the various
acceptations of the term “exception” in mind, I would like to explore the
tension between exceptionality and ordinariness at the core of the novel.
Focusing first on the motifs of marginality and secrecy, I will argue that such
motifs engage a critical reflection on the making of social norms and their
actual fluidity. Secondly, I propose to analyze exceptionality as “what is set
apart”, “what stands out” and may in turn function as a model to be emulated.
In this respect, my contention is that the novel ultimately pays tribute to the
proverbial rules that exceptions prove, for it celebrates rather than rejects the
notions of ordinariness, tradition, roots, commonality and shared experiences
without which no “exception” could exist.

11h30 Mark
Davies

CPGE,
Marseille

Technological Anxieties and
Formal Innovation in the Contemporary Novel: the Goldsmiths Prize

Current work in UK and Irish “experimental” narrative
fiction has been rewarded through the Goldsmiths Prize, whose remit is
established as “celebrat[ing] the qualities of creative daring [and rewarding]
fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.”
The prize’s existence suggests a resurgence in the interest in questions of
formal novelty, the prestige of which has historically fluctuated. Exhibiting
formally non-traditional styles that each stake a claim to exceptionalism, several
recently shortlisted novels have broached topics that are inherently of our
time, and as such engage the novelist in another attempt to “make it new”.
Contemporary communications technologies, their relationship to narrative and
self-definition, self-destruction or even self-regeneration and the impact
these technologies have on users and readers are aspects of four novels by
authors who have been shortlisted for or judges of the prize. Tom McCarthy’s
2015 novel Satin Island approaches
the concept of a scattered consciousness close to transhumanist questions
concerning the future interaction of humankind and its technologies. Published
in 2017, Joanna Walsh’s Break.up
explores the ways in which unsuccessful romantic relationships are rendered
ambiguous in part due to the technological interface, while Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY, from the same year, examines
the possible persistence of the human in the face of data and a dystopian
undermining of truth. Will Self’s novel Phone,
also from 2017, examines the flux of techno-consciousness and how individuals
might resist the disintegration of the ego, be it due to age, drugs or
technology itself. Thus, in a societal context in which human individuality is
seemingly undermined by technology, it seems pertinent to investigate the role
that the “experimental” novel could play in reinforcing, allaying or
sublimating these fears, and how far these approaches might constitute a
contemporary avant-garde.