Novels of Displacement: Fiction in the Age of Global Capital

World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange, 2018

This issue centers on the different ways in which contemporary fiction proposes a reflection on everyday space. Set aside as the setting for everything that takes place on a regular basis and that practically goes unnoticed, everyday space nevertheless accounts for the diverse transformations and tensions of the globalized world, as wel as the urban dynamics that describe the politics of contemporary everyday life. Considered from the different angles of various literary traditions, this issue raises the question of everyday space in the prose fiction of the last 25 years, particularly in works that venture to explore the diversity of spaces and temporalities that characterize contemporary everydayness through two major tensions: the one between the public and private dimension and the other one between the determining aspect and the creative potential that both have been associated with everyday space.

Social & Cultural Geography, 2020

Literature and the Making of the World. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Journal of World Literature. Special Issue: Rethinking World Literature Studies in Latin American and Spanish Contexts (2017), 2017

This paper reconceptualizes the ways in which marginal modernists have used and appropriated French culture, against the reductionist and pejorative accusation of Francophilia on the part of the critical tradition. It analyzes the tension between their desire for Paris and the French signifier. With special attention to the writings of Rubén Darío and Jules Supervielle, it underscores their attempts to displace and dislocate the worlds of modernism structured around Paris, and how this opens new interpretative horizons to conceptualize world literature, not as a field or a corpus, but as a critical and aesthetic discourse set on dislocating the world. Keywords French signifier – dislocation – negative cosmopolitanism – distance – dis-worlding

In Literature, spaces are neither definite nor static. On the contrary. The dialogic process linking literary production to its reception turns the text into a real 'contact zone', a 'third' space where the author's and the reader's imaginative geographies collide. In the interstice between these two instances opens up a 'space of flows' which prevents solidification and dogmatism. From his or her perspective, the reader can, indeed, alter the landscapes created by the author by blending them with his/her own. Proposing a reading of Le silence des Chagos (The Silence of the Chagos) by Mauritian writer Shenaz Patel, this paper will demonstrate how the entanglement of literary production and reception causes fictional geographies to shift.

Nineteenth Century French Studies, 2003

In his groundbreaking study of nineteenth-century Paris, Christopher Prendergast notes that "problems of readability and interpretation ... are ... in varying degrees of severity, problems in the history of the city throughout the whole of the nineteenth century" (Prendergast 11). Nineteenth-century Parisian urban spaces, and the particular social landscapes associated with them, refuse clear interpretation. Indeed, observers who seek to make sense of Paris, to define or distill its identity as a coherent stable whole, to catalogue and classify the city and its inhabitants, were confronted with a decentred, unstable, and multifaceted city. For writers interested in urban observation, "reading" or "writing" Paris is continuously problematized; the city, unsettled by accelerating circulation and social flux, seems to elude understanding. Balzac's 1833 novel Ferragus exemplifies on several levels this problem of readability, by which I mean the ability to decipher and interpret, and to produce a coherent meaning. In this preeminently Parisian novel, the city on the threshold of modernity is dominated by mobility, both real and symbolic. It is a site not only of constant construction and accelerating traffic, but also of rapidly shifting social class structure and of an increased circulation of money and women, a place characterized by what Prendergast calls "a developing urban phenomenology of speed" (Prendergast 193). Paris, in Balzac's words a "monstrueuse merveille, étonnant assemblage de mouvements, de machine et de pensées, la ville aux cent mille romans," repeatedly defies its characters' attempts to "read" it (Balzac 79).

Paroles gelées , 1992

Visual Worlds: The Aesthetics and Politics of Affect. (eds.) Isabelle Boof-Vermesse, Kornelia Slavova, Elena Dineva. Sofia: Polis Press, 2018. 136-144. ISBN: 978-954-796-066-4.

Building on my previous studies of the origin and nature of electronic literature from the late 1990s onwards from the perspective of the philosophy of technology and the two strands of posthumanism: the technocentric and anthropocentric ones, as I have termed them,1 here I aim to examine the 'reverse' development in the field of fiction. How has digital technology affected the printed book? Clearly, digitality – of which visuality is only one aspect, often perceived as the dominant one – has emerged as the central feature not only of electronic literature, but lies at the core of contemporary printed literature as well. As N. Katherine Hayles claims in her paper, " What is Literature? " published in the New Literary History, " Literature in the twenty-first century is computational " (2007: 99). This is certainly true for electronic literature, which is " digital born, created on a computer and meant to be read on it " (Hayles 2007: 99). The digital medium has become intrinsic to print literature as well and has opened new opportunities for exploration and experimentation. This paper looks at recent visual experimentation in print, which draws on the digital, and leads to playing around with the materiality of the text. This development has led to a further foregrounding of the physical and fictional nature of printed texts in ways that are both original and reminiscent of the modernist experiments with language as a material object: both aurally and visually, in terms of layout and typography, as carried out, for example, by Gertrude Stein, Edward Cummings and many others. Though there is an established tradition of examining electronic literature as an offshoot of postmodern writing and as a validation of all the major tenets of literary postmodernism, it is not by chance that the avant-garde aesthetic practices of electronic literature and print literature in the 21 st century have been interpreted even in quite recent studies as conjoined to the modernist period, for instance in Digital Modernism by Jessica Pressman (2014). Today there is an abundance of literary texts, which merge textuality with technology in hybrids of the verbal and the visual mode by employing the creative potential of the digital medium.