VOLUME 9 | ISSUE 2 | 2024
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Charlène Clonts, "Kaimamiru et écosophie chez Déborah Heissler"
This article explores the protean relationship between poetics and ecosophy in two intermedial works by Déborah Heissler, focusing on the notion of kaimamiru ("glimpse", in Japanese). Examining the intersections between image, space, and text, the study highlights the way in which these works engage in a process of deterritorialization that creates evasiveness, while saturating space to bring out freer life forms (nature, poetry, music). The two books of poetry produce an ecosophy (F. Guattari) thanks to iconotextual processes based on continuous transformation. The act of glimpsing, central to their poetics, is presented as a dynamic interaction that promotes a relational aesthetic. The transfers and exchanges that appear between media (inks, texts, multilingualism), cultures (Europe, East Asia) and spaces (artist book, spaces of mediation, elusive places) contribute to a broader ecopoetic practice, where the impermanent and the ambiguous allow us to rethink the relationship to otherness and the environment.
Keywords: ecosophy, ecopoetics, iconotextuality, poetics of relation, transculturality
Elizabeth Pinilla Duarte & Pablo Valdivia, "Metaphoricity of 'War' and 'Peace' in Twitter Narratives in the Aftermath of the Peace Agreement in Colombia"
This article explores the role of metaphoricity in shaping narratives of war and peace in social mobilization on Twitter (now X) and its impact on the meaning-making of endangered social leaders in Colombia after the 2016 Peace Agreement. By analyzing tweets tagged with #NosEstánMatando from 2018 to 2020, we investigate how metaphorical framings contribute to public claims for justice and influence cultural imaginaries. Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), we examine how war is conceptualized as a persistent condition, a force, a state, a relationship, and a place, while peace is framed as a journey, a goal, a struggle, health, a structure, and a victim. These metaphorical patterns reveal how social mobilization constructs digital narratives that both challenge and reproduce dominant discourses of violence, justice, and reconciliation. Our findings highlight the significance of metaphorical analysis in understanding public discourse and collective action in post-conflict societies.
Keywords: metaphoricity, post-conflict Colombia, peace, war, Twitter narratives
Stefano Franceschini, "'They’re Making Sure I Get Their Stories Right': Horror, Intertextuality, and Metafiction in Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)"
The Adaptations are fascinating phenomena. They simultaneously function as revisions, reductions, expansions, actualizations, and dissections of an anterior text whose aesthetic brilliance, psychological depth and philosophical affordance(s) catch the eye and ears of a reader who decides to bring out the not-entirely-expressed character of said text, whether it be a story, a poem, a novel, a painting, a play, a piece of music, or a videogame, to name but a few. And that is usually the case when the media category into which the ‘original’ artifact is transposed is cinema or television. The semiotic toolkit of filmic language is a close ally to the fundamentally subjective enterprise of the adapter, for adaptations are nothing short of creative acts of interpretation. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s conceptualization of adaptations as both aesthetic processes and products which are not to be shadowed by the obsolete spectre of derivation, this essay proposes to explore director Mike Flanagan’s multilayered method of interpretation at the heart of his most recent work, The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), now available on Netflix. I argue that Flanagan’s rendition of E.A. Poe’s classic tale of horror shows a sophisticated understanding of intertextuality as a compositional device, while efficaciously toying with the trope of metafiction. I am mostly interested in a crucial scene in which Roderick Usher, the show’s protagonist and narrator, voices his concern with getting the “stories right” of his sons, who each incarnate a specific tale or symbol from Poe’s oeuvre. Functioning as a comment on adaptations at large, Roderick’s worry, I contend, echoes Flanagan’s purpose to do Poe’s fiction justice, to get his stories ‘right’, in a subtly ironic way.
Keywords: Adaptation, Flanagan, Intertextuality, Metafiction, Poe
Matthis Hervieux, "Dancing at the Frontier: Lichen as Intermedial Enabler in Uchi-soto by Michel Butor, Pierre Espagne and Gregory Masurovsky"
In this article, the focus is on the photo-book book “Uchi-soto: dedans – dehors” (1995), the joint work of writer Michel Butor, photographer Pierre Espagne and graphic artist Gregory Masurovsky. The book’s title comes from the Japanese concept of “in-groups” (uchi, “inside”) and “out-groups” (soto, “outside”), referring to the dynamic intimate and public social circles one inhabits. I propose to analyse the book and its interplay with various art forms and cultural areas, drawing connections to Japanese butō dance, the grotesque, and the concept of suspension. The analysis begins by examining the connection between the poem in Uchi-soto, written by Butor, and the Japanese butō dance form, known for its emphasis on grotesque aesthetics. Butor's exploration of duality within “Uchi-soto” and his earlier text “Le rêve de l'huître” (1975) is referenced, emphasizing the dualities embedded in both butō and medieval European society. These dualities converge in butō, where the grotesque and the beautiful coexist without contradiction, resonating with the definition of the grotesque that combines the tragic and the comical, the real and the fantastic. The article then delves into the presence of female characters in Butor's poem, shifting the focus from benevolent figures to ambiguous and complex ones. The analysis introduces figures from the Arthurian legend and Loreley, examining their association with dissolution and dissemination. Butor's choice to incorporate these figures underscores the impact of mindless aesthetic fascination and the resulting journey towards death. The analysis explores the concept of suspension as a fundamental element in both butō and Butor's work. Butō dancers are seen as suspended between life and death, emphasizing the grotesque nature of their performances. The text also references Kazuo Ōno's performance "The Dream of the Mother," where the body floats and rises, epitomizing this theme of suspension. Another text by Butor, “Le Rêve des Lichens” (1977) is used to further the analysis of suspension in “Uchi-soto”. The body of Akiko Senuma, captured on the book's cover, is suspended between the human and the lichen. This form of suspension is also present in Butor's writing, characterized by extensive intertextuality and an absence of a clear authorial presence in the quotations he uses. This lack of authorship results in an ongoing process of creation, where words are suspended, forming a corpus without a definite origin or conclusion. The analysis concludes with the idea that “Uchi-soto” revolves around the committal of the body to signs and signs to the body, a continuous cycle representing life and death, creation and destruction, and the balance between tradition and innovation. It emphasizes the importance of creation and the ability to find healing and transformation in the artistic process. In summary, the analysis connects several of Michel Butor's texts, analysing them in light of Japanese butō dance, the grotesque, and the theme of suspension as enabled by Butor’s treatment of lichens. Butor's use of intertextuality, intermediality, and authorless, unacknowledged quotations underlines the ongoing process of creation across the frontiers of media, genre, languages, and cultural areas.
Keywords: butō, Japan, lichen, body, intertextuality
Henning Hufnagel, "Mirrors Without End: Gender, Verse, and Temporality in femmes sans tain (1975), an Iconotext by Régine Deforges, Irina Ionesco, and Renée Vivien"
A peculiar genre of books briefly blossomed during the 1970s: large formats combining erotic photographs with literary texts. The best-known work among them is certainly Rêves de jeunes filles (1971) by David Hamilton with texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the most notorious Temple aux miroirs (1977) by Irina Ionesco, also with texts by Robbe-Grillet, in which Ionesco compiled photos of her 12-year-old daughter in eroticised poses. The most interesting work of this kind is probably femmes sans tain (Bernard Letu et Secle, 1975), and not only because the book is entirely made by women, two of whom – unlike in all the other such books, in which women are only in front of or also behind the camera – rise to speak.
The book begins with an introduction by Régine Deforges, the first female publisher in France. The first book she published was, controversially, Louis Aragon’s Le con d’Irène and later on, too, she concentrated on erotic texts. This introduction describes Deforges’s rediscovery of fin de siècle author Renée Vivien through Colette’s memoir Le pur et l'impur, which, according to its epigraph, focuses on “ces plaisirs qu’on nomme, à la légère, physiques”. This is followed by metrically bound poems by the British but French-writing author Renée Vivien, who was rediscovered in the 1970s as an identification figure of the emerging LGBT movement. Deforges also presents her as such. Interspersed between the poems are black-and-white photographs by Irina Ionesco of (more or less) undressed (adult) women, often made up like dolls or Pierrots and hidden behind veils, among flowers and under jewellery and crucifixes. My contribution reads the text, using a term by Peter Wagner, as an “iconotext” or, in the sense of Michele Cometa, as a “phototext”: a text that only constitutes its full meaning in the combination of the symbolic and the iconic medium, a combination whose complexity in this case is further increased by the fact that it is a pluriauctorial text by three women who, moreover, fashion a position and role for themselves in male-dominated fields: Deforges in publishing, Ionesco among erotic photographers, Renée Vivien among les poètes. In Vivien’s and Ionesco’s case, there is furthermore the crossing of linguistic and cultural borders.
I pay special attention to the interplay between fluctuating gender constructions on the one hand and the strict form of verse and black-and-white photographs on the other, and especially to the entanglement of temporal levels: Vivien refers in her texts to the ancient Sappho, Ionesco in her pictures to the iconography of décadence and Deforges to its later reflection in Colette and in the present of the 1970s, which rediscovered the epoch both scholarly and in popular culture. These infinite reflections of the different levels of the book in each other even include the material design of the book: it is bound in violet silk as if it were taken from the library of Des Esseintes – with violet being a significant colour in Vivien’s private mythology and at the same time the symbolic colour of Colette’s garçonne lesbians of the 1920s.
Keywords: iconotext, francophonie, gender, women-writers, photography
Coraline Refort, "The film Madame a des envies (Alice Guy 1906) through the prism of the visual culture of the Parisian Belle Époque: an analytical proposal"
This Early cinema employed extensive use of fixed typologies of characters, as evidenced by the constant presence of highly clichéd roles. The construction of female subjects especially depended upon this mode of representation, attesting to a patriarchal vision within the then-nascent medium of film. The recurrent use of easily recognizable ‘feminine’ traits more often than not reinforced male dominant norms. However, gender typologies cannot always be seen in a systematically pejorative light, as being either simplifying or rigid. They are also a fundamental part of our cognitive structure, allowing us to grasp complex information coming from our environment. The critical study of typologies within early cinema makes it possible to understand the specificities of this cinematographic period, but also the creation and deconstruction of gender clichés of a given era by means of the Seventh Art whose rules were yet to be codified. What happens when the first female director, Alice Guy, tackles gender clichés? This presentation aims to focus on the development and dismantling of the belief at the beginning of the 20th century that pregnant women have cravings which they cannot resist by analyzing Madame a des envies (1906). The goal of this essay is to demonstrate how particular of a film Madame is in French cinema, because it shows the sexual desires of a pregnant woman, thus creating a new character within Early cinema. I will begin the analysis by illustrating the cliché in itself: the fact of having cravings during pregnancy, its history, and sociological issues in the French Belle Époque. Finally I will talk about how Alice Guy makes fun of the cliché by exaggerating all of its elements, while fixing this film in the heart of the fin-de-siècle visual environment.
Keywords: Silent Cinema, Intermediality, Belle Époque, Alice Guy, Pregnancy, Sexuality
