Peter Ackroyd, Kitsch and the Logic of Impersonal Imitation
p. 239-249
Résumé
This paper purports to analyse the ways in which Peter Ackroyd uses (in his own terms) the specifically Catholic modalities of kitsch, in accordance with the prescriptions of impersonality dear to modernist aesthetics, as an adjunct to the traditional powers of intertextuality and hypertextuality (such as plagiarism, parody and above all pastiche). In fact, what lies at the heart of Ackroydian kitsch is the imitation of pre-existing literary and aesthetic models as reproduced on a different, cheaper material privileging the ways of congruence over the higher demands of sublimity. Through kitsch, what Ackroyd favours is the impersonal execution of English music in a highly emotional tone whose symptom is the apparent prevalence of the what over the how. This should allow us to assess Ackroyd’s contribution to the field of contemporary English letters as favouring continuity over rupture, and more specifically as a continuous emotional execution of the secular impersonal tradition of English letters and culture.
Texte intégral
1When considering the meaning and values of impersonality in the early twenty-first century, i.e. more than a hundred years after the notion started being defined and stabilised by modernist practitioners and their precursors, one has to confront the arduous task of assessing the conditions in which it migrated into the new millennium and whether it allows itself to be applied to new corpora. In the following lines, I shall then strive to use this category by respecting the original definitions honed out by modernist masters: impersonality as surrender of the self, as rejection of the first person, and above all, in Eliot’s famous prescription, as personal dispossession, the correlative of an all-powerful link to tradition. More specifically, I shall try to remember that in this our post-structuralist world, the now secular notion of impersonality has to be considered in the light of Barthes’s and Foucault’s much advertised obituary concerning the author.1 This, in turn, has to be situated within a more general context in which the notion of the subject has had to bear the brunt of some philosophical propositions that do not comply with the traditional, ethnocentric visions and favour a definition based on the presence of fields of forces and intensities as opposed to the more stable visions of yesteryear (I am particularly thinking of the Deleuzian approach, here).2 In other terms, I shall also take this essay as an opportunity to address the question of our period, characterised as it is by the prefix ‘post’.
2As regards the pole of emotion, and in conformity with the previous developments, this article is not going to be concerned with the author’s emotion, but rather with aesthetic emotion as conveyed by the text and whose effects are expected to affect the reader. True to the precepts of the ‘death of the author,’ it is the pragmatic aspect of emotion that is going to be privileged in the following pages which will consider the text as a vector of effect and affect.
3Now, in between impersonality and emotion, I have chosen the notion of kitsch because it seems to me to be representative of Peter Ackroyd’s fiction in many respects (as will be developed in due course), and because it is an aesthetic category highly characteristic of modernity, dependent on its unprecedented uses of techniques of reproduction,3 for one thing. More specifically, it appears that kitsch may well provide a vast enough ground on which impersonality and emotion, far from opposing each other, may well be seen to act hand in hand and instrumentalise each other. In other terms, it seems to me that Peter Ackroyd’s enlightened use of kitsch may provide a model through which one can observe the contemporary attempt to acknowledge a cultural tradition and, more than this, to interpret it both impersonally and emotionally so as to contribute a definition of Englishness.
4I shall attempt to argue that point progressively, by first concentrating on Ackroyd’s conception of imitation. I shall then move on to kitsch’s cloying impersonality. In a final part, I shall try to assess the finalities of kitsch as present in Ackroyd’s fiction.
5One thing that may not come naturally to mind is Ackroyd’s association with kitsch. Over the last two decades, he has published a series of biographies and novels whose main impulse is towards the dark recesses of the past. Thus, be it in The Great Fire of London or in Hawksmoor, in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem or in London, The Biography, what appears is more a gloomy fascination for sublimity than a smiling nostalgia of the type commonly associated with kitsch.4 However, despite his faithfulness to such genres or modes as the London novel or what is known as Gothic, some of Ackroyd’s detractors have been apt to pinpoint that his literary bulimia (he has published, on average, one novel or biography a year, recently) and his propensity for the sensational and the congruent may well signal a kinship with kitsch.
6Yet, whether they are seen as belonging to the starkly sublime or to the kitschy nostalgic type, his narratives unequivocally point at the past and repeatedly address the questions of the access to the past and of the depth of the present. In other words, what lies at the heart of Ackroyd’s artistic project is a quest for the English music that is the expression of English culture and of Englishness. Such a theme permeates his artistic production and crops up in his critical texts too (reviews, essays and conferences), most of which were collected in a volume aptly—though cheekily—entitled The Collection published in 2002.5 The definition of Englishness is given pride of place in ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries,’ (Ackroyd 2002, 341-351) a text that is essentially devoted to the expression of the spirit of place and is quite telling as to Ackroyd’s fascination for London, and in which the theme of tradition looms equally large. However the lecture entitled ‘The Englishness of English Letters’ (an obvious allusion to Nikolaus Pevsner’s famous though outmoded ‘The Englishness of English Art’ [Ackroyd 2002, 328-340]) gives an even more rigorous definition of what English music is really, one hardly glimpsed at in ‘London Luminaries.’
7Interestingly, the music that Ackroyd sees as representative of Englishness is religious music. In fact, Ackroyd’s canonisation of works constitutive of Englishness is defined according to a series of criteria and topoi among which the most salient are: London and the genius loci (of a dark, sublime, visionary type) that, for him, emanates from the metropolis, such genres as the epic, the ballad and the pastoral, the evocation of the living conditions of the working classes (Ackroyd being much interested in low, common life), the multi-layered narrative (reminiscent of Dickens’s ‘streaky bacon effect’), a decisive taste for the dramatic, the sensational and the promotion of effect (as encountered in such genres and forms as Gothic, music hall or the pantomime). In this last category what appear are the ingredients of an anti-classic vein (relying on excess, impurity, hybridity, loudness). They can be seen as constitutive of some sort of a grotesque vision, some fascination with bad taste which Ackroyd tracks down to nothing less unexpected than Catholic tradition: ‘We all know how the drama was in origin a form of religious ritual, how in this country its beginnings are found in Mysteries and the Miracle Plays and how its deepest source lies probably within the Catholic Mass itself.’ (Ackroyd 2002, 336)
8Such a conclusion may sound surprising, and Ackroyd does not waste time expanding on it. For him, the official English canon has been informed by a secular and Protestant conception of culture (‘it is not hard to understand why that same criticism has tended to ignore the pantomimic, the theatrical, the scenic and the spectacular. Could it be that, by doing so, they are also ignoring the buried traditions of a once Catholic England?’ [Ackroyd 2002, 336]). Now, he adds, Protestant tradition tends to favour the uniqueness of genius, its individuality, as shown in the close relationships uniting Protestantism and romanticism. (Ackroyd 2002, 336-337) That is why Ackroyd wants to promote a more Catholic tradition and cultural practice so as to redefine Englishness, which he does by opposing creative originality based on individual practice (that he considers to correspond to the Protestant vision and which is supposed to be a constant originating in the Renaissance and being confirmed in the Romantic age [Calinescu 60]) to Catholic imitation, more reliant on the pre-modern notion of imitation: ‘So let us fantasize then about a Catholic culture. It might well have returned to an older tradition of creativity that is based upon imitation—until the late sixteenth century originality in literature was not seen in terms of private fabrication but in terms of the individual adaptation and reinterpretation of the best literary work in existence.’ (Ackroyd 2002, 337)
9What I see at work in this vision of tradition based on imitation is an interesting way to address the impersonality issue. In other terms, what Ackroyd seems to vindicate is an individual (as opposed to a more conventionally collective) mode of impersonality in which the reinterpretation of the cultural past is not considered as mere iteration, but as individual reclaim or repossession. In this respect, the author’s function would consist in performing the score of English music in a way that would be both individual and impersonal. Said differently, the artist would let himself or herself be inhabited or haunted by the canon, which is tantamount to defining the artist as pure reliquary, or depositary or medium. What the author lends to the tradition is but an instantiation through which the tradition may be performed or actualised. This constitutes a new version of the modernist dogma of artistic impersonality based on various practices of transtextuality. For in fact, what Ackroyd has become extremely famous for is his ability to resort to intertextuality, hypertextuality (parody and, essentially, pastiche) and architextuality (rewriting of Gothic precedents, mainly) to achieve an aesthetics of plagiarism and ventriloquism, as underlined time and over again,6 the ventriloquist—through the character of the protagonist’s father, in English Music—becoming the emblem of the contemporary artist intent on achieving individual impersonality. Interestingly, it is through the resort to kitsch that such a meeting of tradition and the individual artist may be seen to exist in Ackroyd’s practice.
10That Ackroyd’s production at times seems to evince kitsch traits and effects has already been underlined. His taste for melodrama7 often leads him to resort to hackneyed situations and topoi, such as that of the orphan abandoned in apocalyptic London (at the time of the Great Plague epidemics) or that of the exploited child (in Hawksmoor and English Music respectively). More generally, still, his taste for parody and pastiche systematically leads him to use material from the past and adapt it onto a support of a different, highly reproducible nature, which is one of the most salient characteristics of kitsch. This is made clear in a series of studies devoted to kitsch: they may belong to different periods or critical schools but they more often than not conclude on the same specificities of kitsch, i.e. easiness or congruence and effect. The etymologies of kitsch are quite complex, too. Yet, the word is generally accepted to derive from the German verkitschen, meaning either ‘to make cheap’ or ‘to sell under the counter’ (with a series of side-meanings of a lesser importance, admittedly).8 What this suggests is that kitsch tends to provoke strong reactions. Few critics come up with a favourable appraisal: for instance, Jacques Sternberg is one of the few ‘serious’ critics to praise the abundance and creative excess of kitsch. On the contraty, for the German novelist Herman Broch, kitsch represents nothing less than evil in art.9 Working in the same vein, Alan Greenberg in an essay entitled ‘Avant-garde et kitsch’ and Saul Friedländer in his Reflections on Nazism see the aesthetic and rhetorical role of kitsch as essential in Nazi propaganda.10 Milan Kundera himself has analysed the political power of kitsch rhetoric at the hands of a totalitarian regime, both in one of his most famous novels and in his work as a critic.11 Additionally, as regards the status of kitsch, there is a controversy going on among observers, some of them considering kitsch as art (admittedly, bad art), others preferring the category of ‘anti art’ (even parasitism on true art),12 others still seeing kitsch neither as art or anti-art but considering it to be in a class of its own, i.e. existing in sui generis.13 Now, I have broached a survey of the main theoretical positions and critical attitudes triggered off by kitsch object just as a prelude to introducing the work and analysis of Matei Calinescu who contributed to the analysis of the phenomenon in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism.
11Calinescu’s study comes naturally to mind when working on Ackroyd because his theory of modernity (in which he includes postmodernism) is one based on continuity. In fact, he traces back the origins of modernity to the late Middle Ages and follows the thread of its evolution through the Renaissance and the Romantic period. He relies heavily on Stendhal and Baudelaire’s vision of modernity as the locus of the present, the ephemeral, the transitory, the fugitive, as opposed to the canons and principles of classicism dependent on permanence and immutability. More to the point, what Calinescu sees as the hallmark of modernity is the move from a model of eternal beauty inherent in classicism to the adoption of a vision of beauty as relative, in the modern age—one of the ways in which he will manage to introduce the notion of kitsch as one of the five faces of modernity in the second half of his study. One step further, what Calinescu sees as essential to the definition of modernity is the notion of crisis. In fact, he envisages modernity as dual: he defines a first type of modernity of the rational, objective, industrial, capitalist type oriented towards production, and he moves on to a second type of modernity—called aesthetic modernity—of the subjective, individual type which acts in opposition to the values of the former. Aesthetic modernity becomes for him an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist impulse (taking its cue from Théophile Gautier’s catchphrase: ‘épater le bourgeois’ [Calinescu 45]). Now, what characterises modernity for Calinescu, in the end, is the permanent state of conflict between the two modernities, a sense of permanent crisis and paroxysm that he depicts in the following terms, at the end of his introduction: ‘aesthetic modernity should be understood as a crisis concept involved in a threefold dialectical opposition to tradition, to the modernity of bourgeois civilization (with its ideals of rationality, utility, progress), and, finally, to itself, insofar as it perceives itself as a new tradition or form of authority.’ (Calinescu 10) Now, one can see how this definition is favourable to kitsch, in that it contains this inbuilt selfsame sense of crisis: it is a type of aesthetic, anti-rationalist form of expression (which makes it part of the previously defined aesthetic modernity) that uses the very means of reproduction inherent in the industrial age (Calinescu’s analysis seems to owe much to Walter Benjamin’s, in this respect). It thus presents a face of modernity of the teratological or, at least, of the hybrid type, and as such may be considered as the epitome of the modern. Now, what remains implicit in Calinescu’s analysis is the rhetorical dimension of kitsch and its propensity to instrumentalise effect so as to solicit the reader’s emotion through the impersonal rendition of a special score, i.e. that of English music.
12Once again, I want to make it clear that kitsch does not fully characterise Ackroyd’s production and that such other tonal and aesthetic ingredients as the sublime are also very much present in both his novels and biographies. Still, there is such a thing as a poetics of kitsch present in his œuvre. What comes to mind when assessing Ackroyd’s involvement with kitsch is his choice of thematic, rhetorical and stylistic excess. That his narratives favour the principle of saturation (through metaphoric or metonymic overkill) appears most explicitly in a novel like Hawksmoor. Such a choice relies on recurrences and amplifications of various types. Those appear under the guise of refrains, motifs or structural rhymes which build up into hyperbole through sheer accumulation, hence duration. Saturation of this type is meant to favour ostentation over suggestion and secures the triumph of the explicit over the implicit. In Hawksmoor for instance, the narrative revolves around the notion of the hidden (the scientia umbrarum on which the plot is based), but the hermeneutic dimension (even though it is present through the detective plot) is not what matters. The secret theme is heralded and keeps staring the reader in the face. The notion of secrecy is thematised in a hyperbolically explicit way.
13In the same vein, the resort to topoi and stereotypes is one of the most salient characteristics of the narrative: the type of the hard-boiled detective—both depressive and a little bit perplexed—together with conventional borrowings from the detective plot (with a final unexpected twist, for good measure) are both devices that are meant to create a clear sense of recognition for the reader. The welter of historical and cultural information concerning the period (the early eighteenth century) and the protagonist’s activities (architecture and occultism) might prove heavy enough to ingest, so the preference for stereotype is a way of clearly signposting both form and content and of warranting maximum adhesion on the reader’s part. Now this in itself is a modality of instant reception or, rather, consumption, as evidenced in most analyses of kitsch artefacts (see Calinescu’s insistence on ‘kitsch [as] the triumph of the principle of immediacy—immediacy of access, immediacy of effect, instant beauty.’ [Calinescu 8, Kulka 33])
14Immediacy of effect as creating the conditions of congruent reception is also made possible through the choice of an apposite represented content. In fact, it is a topos of studies on kitsch that kitsch effects are dependent on the choice of an appropriate subject matter that is apt to solicit a violent affective response in itself. This is notably the case with puppies and tearful little girls as favoured by creators of the French almanach des PTT for instance. (Kulka 28) In Hawksmoor, this finds an equivalent in the resort to pathos, with the evocation of the mishaps of young Nicholas Dyer, young Timothy Harcombe’s Augustan ancestor, in English Music. Such borrowings from the melodrama of yesteryear are a way to tap the efficiency of sweet kitsch, while the effects of kitsch of the sour variety are called forth by representing scenes and subject matters of a darker, though immediately pathetic type (among which the evocation of low life, the tentacular metropolis, the effects of the epidemics with mass burials, etc.). All in all, things seem to partly obey the general principle according to which in kitsch the what prevails over the how, even though the linguistic and rhetorical opacity of most descriptions tends to mitigate this fundamental law. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the resort to the poetics of paradigmatic overkill, on account of the oversimplification inherent in accumulation, does tend in a way to respect Kulka’s law of low aesthetic intensity associated with high emotional intensity characterising things kitsch. (Kulka 78)
15All such devices converge towards establishing a prevalence of telling over showing: everything is eloquent in the specifically explicit diction favoured by Ackroyd’s narratives. Besides, and paradoxical as it may seem, what such a kitsch poetics promotes is a dramatic, spectacular, loud theatre of sound quite reminiscent of baroque aesthetics. The narrative thus becomes some sort of an echo chamber in which all fragments of past discourse (the murmurs of the common people, the nursery rhymes, the popular songs and all sorts of shouts and sayings) are peddled in a loud, explicit way. As a consequence, the stress is laid on effect and expression more than on mere representation. If a form of subjectivity is made to emerge, it is certainly the reader’s but not the narrator’s or the author’s as, despite the use of first-person narratives, the narrator’s voice, through the use of the pastiche of eighteenth-century English most notably, becomes an impersonal rehearsing of a previously written or spoken text. One of the main effects of such rhetorical and transtextual choices is to promote a feeling of hominess (or Hemiligkeit) through the use of well-signposted hypertextual, architextual, and rhetorical devices working on pre-determination. The prevalence of expression over representation, of effect over plausibility, or violent affect over hermeneutic pleasure is a way to solicit the reader’s emotions both violently and instantly: unity of effect and the instant consumption of it thus become part and parcel of the reading experience and come to buttress the hedonist imperative that looms so large in all analyses of kitsch.
16Of course, this is but a possible reading of Ackroyd’s work, and it has to be admitted that some of the traditional ploys that may appear as being of a fundamentally kitsch essence are not respected, and that they are even thwarted: some horizons of expectation are installed the better to be subverted and, as underlined above, it is obvious that the criterion of low aesthetic intensity may be applied but partially. In the same way, what a novel like Hawksmoor does is invert and ironise the doxa (i.e., for one thing, the vision of the eighteenth century as the age of reason) to promote paradox (the Augustan period as seen through the unwonted lens of the irrational and the occult), a movement notoriously averse to kitsch. But such considerations lead us into the province of the finalities of kitsch, and kitsch is equally notorious for its capacity to be used ironically and with a certain amount of self-consciousness for instance (in which case it becomes more akin to camp, in Susan Sontag’s terms).14 In other words, what I see as fundamental in Ackroyd’s impersonal rendering of a cultural tradition (through the re-writing of historiographic material, through the pastiche of an older form of English, through the peddling of fragments of popular culture and parlance, through parodies and pastiches of a revisited canon in English Music, for instance) by using a poetics of kitsch is the emergence of a twofold purpose. I would argue that Ackroyd’s use of kitsch so as to recapture the sense of an earlier form of creation based on imitation is meant 1. to subvert realism and accommodate it, to show that in its traditional acceptation it is too narrow a mode that cannot welcome evocations of a supra-phenomenal, less pedestrian experience; 2. to privilege the creation of effect and the expression of affect of a violent nature (verging on sensationalism and instant accessibility and congruence) whose function is to make the reader experience anachronism, i.e. the other of the present, mediated through an other of realism (kitsch acting as an extension of expressionism or romance in this context). In both cases, kitsch—certainly transformed into camp—is put to uses other than the conventionally playful. It is meant to defamiliarise and to teach, it acquires an edifying, almost ethical function which by pointing at new ways in redefining a tradition and canon. Paradoxically, the conventionally cloying propensities of kitsch are instrumentalised to provide an impersonal, ventriloquising and new rendition of the score of English music.
17Through the prism of kitsch, what appears is that Ackroyd revisits the canon of English culture and the modalities of its elaboration and dissemination. By resorting to a poetics of instant emotion, kitsch provides the conditions of an adhesive reading involving the reader’s emotionally compelling immersion into the text. Interestingly enough, this is effected in the impersonal mode and is coincident with an effacement of the author and at the same time, paradoxical as it may seem, of the first person narrator. Both author and narrator thus become the reliquaries or media of a tradition, their function being one of mere projection or expression. The first person as an instrument of phonation, that could be an emblem of the dramatic use to which kitsch is put in Ackroyd’s narratives.
18What derives from such observations is, firstly, that Ackroyd’s contribution to the art of English letters favours continuity over rupture. For Ackroyd, ‘post-’ means ‘after’ and certainly not ‘against,’ which is not completely news. Still, it seems to me that concentrating on Ackroyd’s taste for kitsch allows us to confirm such a reading in a way complementary to those previously explored. Secondly, it appears that through the means of impersonality, the emotion that is conveyed is that of the other, i.e. the reader. Said differently, the represented or representing subjects are demised to the benefit of a subject outside the text that remains an emotional subject. Impersonality—and the impersonality of kitsch most efficiently, as seen above—finds the way towards the arousal and meeting of another site of emotion, i.e. the other. Thirdly, and one step further, Ackoyd’s emotion that refuses to speak in the first person (Deleuze 172) moves away from the subject as emoter or as the locus of emotion and envisages the actualization of the text as a long epiphany, this making the incantatory kitsch text some form of impersonal event. I would ultimately suggest that what the study of Ackroyd’s kitsch poetics allows for is the definition of emotion as impersonal event.
Notes de bas de page
1 Roland Barthes, ‘La Mort de l’auteur,’ Le Bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques IV (1968; Paris: Seuil, 1984) 63-69; Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?,’ Dits et écrits 1954-1969 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) 817-849.
2 See for instance what Gilles Deleuze suggests re enunciation in ‘Lettre à Uno sur le langage,’ a statement that may apply, in many respects, to his conception of the subject. Gilles Deleuze, Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2003) 185.
3 For a precise account of the conditions in which the kitsch phenomenon came into existence, see Matei Calinescu, Five faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke UP, 1987) 226.
4 Peter Ackroyd, The Great Fire of London (1982; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993); Hawksmoor (1985; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993); Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994; London: Minerva, 1995); London, The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus 2000).
5 Peter Ackroyd, The Collection (London: Vintage, 2002).
6 Catherine Bernard, ‘Peter Ackroyd, entre plagiat et élégie,’ Etudes britanniques contemporaines 5 (Dec. 1994): 13-22.
7 Jean-Michel Ganteau, ‘Death and Melodrama’ Etudes britanniques contemporaines 17 (Dec. 1999): 69-90.
8 For more information on the etymology of the work ‘kitsch’ see Thomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) 18-9 and Jacques Sternberg, Les chefs-d’œuvre du kitsch (Paris: Planète, 1971) 9. For a synthesis of etymological possibilities, see Jean-Michel Ganteau, ‘Catholic Kitsch,’ Etudes britanniques contemporaines 15 (Dec. 1998): 83-102.
9 Quoted in Gillo Dorfles, Le Kitsch: le catalogue raisonné du mauvais goût (1968; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978) 71.
10 Alan Greenberg, ‘Avant-garde et kitsch,’ in Dofles 122-134. Saul Friedlander, Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). The gist of the study is to be found in an article entitled ‘Kitsch and the Apocalytic imagination,’ Samagundi 85-86 (Winter-Spring 1990): 201-206.
11 See part 6 in Milan Kundera’s L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être, trad. François Kérel (1984; Paris: Gallimard, 1984) 301-351 and ‘Man Thinks, God Laughs,’ The New York Review of Books 32.10 (13 June 1985): 11-12.
12 Philip Crich, ‘Kitsch,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 23.1 (Winter 1983): 48-52.
13 This is a thesis defended by Thoma Kulka in Kitsch and Art.
14 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp,’ A Susan Sontag Reader (1982; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1083) 105-119. For an account of the ironies underlying and defining camp, see the introduction to Philip Core’s Camp. The Lie that Tells the Truth (London: Plexus, 1984) 9-15.
Auteur
Université Paul Valéry — Montpellier 3
Professsor of modern English literature at the Université Paul-Valéry—Montpellier III. He is the author of a monograph on David Lodge’s melodramatic imagination: David Lodge: le choix de l’éloquence (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2001) and the editor of several collections of essays on 19th—and 20th— century British fiction. He has also published some thirty articles on contemporary British fiction (Catholic literature, the London novel, romance, melodrama, kitsch, the baroque and the sublime). He is very much interested in the relations between the theory of genres and the theory of affect. He is also the editor of Études britanniques contemporaines.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
À la rencontre de la différence
Traces diasporiques et espaces de créolisation
Robin Cohen et Olivia Sheringham Elise Trogrlic (trad.)
2020
L’androgyne dans la littérature britannique contemporaine
Métamorphose d’une figure
Justine Gonneaud
2020
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Cultural and Literary Perspectives
Markus Arnold, Corinne Duboin et Judith Misrahi-Barak (dir.)
2020
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 1
Diasporas and Cultures of Migrations
Judith Misrahi-Barak et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2014
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 2
Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy
Sarah Barbour, David Howard, Thomas Lacroix et al. (dir.)
2015
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 3
African Americans and the Black Diaspora
Corinne Duboin et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2016
Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature
Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dir.)
2013