Responsables de l’atelier
Vanessa GUIGNERY (ENS de Lyon, Présidente de la SEAC)
Gerald PREHER (Université d’Artois, directeur de publication de The Journal of the Short Story in English)
| Solène CAMUS ● Université Lumière Lyon 2 A Talisman and a Promise: The Issue of Emancipation in Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know |
Résumé
“‘A Corona For Vivien’ remains precious for those who care, a talisman to the survivors and a promise of a better future. A poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet.” These are the words of Tom Metcalfe, a scholar and one of the protagonists of Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know. This statement, made in 2119, reflects the enduring fascination surrounding “A Corona For Vivien”, a poem written by Francis Blundy for his wife, Vivien. Recited on the occasion of her birthday in 2014, the poem was never published and has since been lost, a disappearance that has only contributed to its mythical status over time. For Tom, as for many scholars of his era, this vanished text embodies both a literary enigma and a symbol of hope, crystallizing projections of a better future precisely through its material absence.
This paper aims to examine how Ian McEwan uses the disappearance of Blundy’s poem to develop a reflection on textual emancipation. Both characters and readers are, in effect, denied any access to the poem. Through this absence, McEwan dissolves authorial authority and liberates the text from interpretive constraint. However, this very freedom is quickly placed under tension: while the poem’s absence opens a space conducive to imaginative exploration, it simultaneously provokes an institutional process of reappropriation, as academic circles attempt to reconstruct its meaning and thereby impose a new form of interpretive control.
This paper intends to consider how Ian McEwan situates these questions within a broader meditation on our relationship to the past and our ability to break free from it. This reflection is notably embodied in the shift of narrative voice in the novel’s second part, which is taken over by Blundy’s wife, offering a different perspective on memory. At the same time, McEwan interrogates our relationship to the present, particularly through his portrayal of contemporary social and political constraints. This interrogation unfolds within the framework of what the author himself describes as a “science fiction novel without the science”, centered on the challenges of climate change.
Biographie
Solène Camus currently teaches English at the Université Lumière Lyon 2, where she works as a Teaching and Research Assistant. She is a member of the research unit Lettres et Civilisations Étrangères (LCE) and she completed her PhD in 2025, in Université Lumière Lyon 2. Her work focuses on the notion of monstrosity in contemporary British and Irish fiction.
| Clémence LABURTHE-TOLA ● Université Paris 1 — Panthéon Sorbonne Seeking Freedom when Arranging Flowers in the Modernist Home: Constance Spry’s Emancipatory Enterprise |
Résumé
A revered floral designer, Constance Spry defied the norms of the Victorian fashion for flowers as she advocated for “freedom from convention” (Spry 1937) in the floral compositions she expanded upon in the many books she published as well as in the lectures she gave worldwide and in the workshops she ran in various horticultural schools for young British women. She therefore reads as an interesting figure to read the material culture and the gender politics of the fashion for flowers in 20th-century Great Britain.
While she came from a modest background and first started a career in health education she eventually made a name for herself in floral arrangement and started to gravitate in upper-class circles (Shephard 2010). Yet, despite being commissioned by wealthy patrons, Spry adopted a resolutely democratic posture as she encouraged amateurship when styling flowers and revisiting the gendered genre of the still life. This paper seeks to shed light on Spry’s democratic flower arranging by dwelling on how she reached out to amateurs and made flower arranging as accessible as possible. By examining her commitment to share flowery tips and tricks to amateurs, I also wish to show how Spry envisioned the Modernist home as a laboratory in which she brought the garden to design her floral compositions. As such, home and garden became sites of creativity and freedom, especially for women in the context of wartime.
While Victorian women were encouraged to adorn the domestic sphere with conservatories, Wardian cases and artificial flowers, I also wish to show how Spry challenged these gendered norms and became a respected entrepreneur, encouraging fellow women to design floral arrangements at home and to pursue a career in the horticulture industry.
Biographie
Clémence Laburthe-Tolra is Associate Professor in English studies and Art History at Université Paris 1- Panthéon Sorbonne. Her research specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, garden history, plant studies, and landscape design. She has published on the aesthetic, social, political and environmental representation(s) of gardens and landscapes in 20th-century British literature. She is currently working on two projects, investigating the democratisation of gardening in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Great Britain, and exploring post-war urban ecology, garden design and floral art in the aftermath of the Blitz.
| Héloïse LECOMTE ● Sorbonne Université From Eurydice to Riddy: Emancipation and the Poetics of Irreverence in Kaos (Charlie Covell, 2024) |
Résumé
The character of Eurydice, left voiceless in the original myth, has long been the object of feminist rewritings and “re-visions” (Rich 1979, 35) which aimed at restoring her agency. In the British TV series Kaos (Netflix), director Charlie Covell modernises the tale of Eurydice by making her the wife of a rock star Orpheus who uses her face on posters and billboards to promote his latest album, “Muse”. The series represents the character’s desire to break up with her husband as a rejection of the limitations that go along with the role of the poet’s Muse, even more so in a capitalistic world. Covell’s decision to rename the character “Riddy” partly frees her from her name’s mythical weight and the constraining narrative pattern in which her fate is already decided and endlessly repeated with each retelling.
Throughout the show, the character’s diegetic need for emancipation is framed as part of a wider reflection on dissidence and rebellion: Kaos assembles an array of Greek mythological figures in contemporary Crete, on Mount Olympus and in a black-and-white Underworld whose soulless bureaucracy is reminiscent of border control checks. Though the multiple intertwined storylines stage the display of control exercised by the divinities over the fate of humanity, they also show the cracks in the leaders’ invulnerability and foreshadow the decline of old systems of power and metanarratives alike. Taking their cue from the show’s defiant main narrator, Prometheus (punished for defying the Olympian gods), the characters perform multiple acts of disobedience, both in the divine and human worlds, ranging from silly family feuds to the refusal to take part in dehumanising political decisions. In this paper, I intend to reframe Kaos’sirreverent tone, chaotic storytelling and emancipation from master narratives as an ethical acknowledgement of humanity’s shared vulnerability and rejection of systems of domination. Characters are partly freed from the patterns of mythological stories to serve a broader reflection on contemporary political issues like the threat of authoritarianism or the refugee crisis.
Biographie
Héloïse Lecomte is Associate Professor in British Literature at Sorbonne Université, and a member of the research unit VALE. Her research and publications focus on the poetics and politics of mourning and ecological grief in contemporary British and Irish fiction and life-writing and their interactions with the poetic elegy or visual arts. She is also a co-founder and member of the transdisciplinary research network “Invisible Lives Silent Voices” (https://invisibilitysilence.wordpress.com).
| Katia MARCELLIN ● Université de Perpignan The Future of Breath: Emancipation and Asphyxiation in Clare Pollard’s Delphi |
Résumé
In his afterword to The Life of Breath (2021), Peter Adey notes that “Breath helps us […] commune with collapsing boundaries between bodies, but also scales, from the ‘microcosm or individual person to the macrocosm or the world as such’” (537). Through its capacity to put bodies in contact but also to interpenetrate one another, to put them in flux, breathing might be considered as an emancipatory gesture in itself. Through breath, one exceeds oneself, frees oneself from the confines of one’s own body.
However, this specificity of breath also makes it a threat to one’s integrity. From pollution to contamination, breathing can be seen as a process that exposes us as vulnerable and that needs to take place within the safe boundaries of confined, purified spaces—something our experience of COVID-19 glaringly brought to light. As Butler wrote in her essay What World Is This? (2022), “the lack of contact, physical touch, and social gathering has been unbearable, and yet we do bear these losses in order to protect lives. […] We accept confinement not only to protect ourselves but because we are aware of our capacity to infect others” (55). In other words, social asphyxiation seems to have paradoxically become, in the context of the pandemic, a condition for the very possibility of a future.
I intend to explore the way in which Clare Pollard’s novel Delphi (2022), through its narrator’s obsession with predicting the future as she is locked down with her family, touches on this paradoxical nature of breathing. As an emancipatory gesture that is also a threat, breath must be curtailed to preserve life—just as the future arises from the asphyxiating fumes inhaled by the Pythia (3). Through a discussion of asphyxiation and confinement, this talk will therefore explore the ways in which the relationality of breathing opens up unsuspected avenues for emancipation precisely as it reveals our vulnerability.
Biographie
Katia Marcellin is a lecturer in Contemporary British Literature at the University of Perpignan. In 2022, she completed her PhD, entitled ‘Writing Emptiness: Performative Metalepsis and the Expression of Trauma in Contemporary British Literature’ (under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Michel Ganteau), which addressed the poetic, political and ethical issues surrounding the representation of trauma in contemporary British fiction, particularly through the figures of metalepsis and metonymy. Her current research is situated within the field of medical humanities, focusing specifically on the body and the textual embodiment of sensory experience through the phenomenon of breathing.
| Perry MENDOZA ● University of Turku Rachel Cusk’s Parade and the Outlines of Emancipation |
Résumé
The thematic pursuits of Rachel Cusk’s oeuvre can be neatly summarized by one word, the banner under which her famous trilogy receives its title: Outline. But herein, too, begin the complications of her task. For it may be said that the outlines of Cusk’s narratives undergo a series of shifts, disappearances, and transformations. The movement of these outlines is best exemplified in Cusk’s Parade, where the borders between genders, the roles that plague them, between art and life, creation and identity, the form of the short story and the novel, narration and philosophy are contested. Such a remapping of borders can be seen as an operation of emancipation. The theorist of emancipation, Jacques Rancière, reminds us that emancipation means “the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body.” (The Emancipated Spectator19) The frames of perspectives, exchanged between characters and groups under the economy of emancipation, find their material manifestation in the breaking of the borders delineated by the windows of Parade, where these windows, at once real and symbolic, offer the portals through which characters jump from one lived experience to another.
Fiction, Rancière notes, “has unstated doors and windows: … descriptions that not only portray the setting of an action but also set in place a world of visibility in harmony or in rupture with the relationships established between things and words in the usual order of the world.” (The Edges of Fiction15) Parade straightaway begins with a world inverted, but such a condition is not ready to redeem the mark of emancipation. This paper will trace the lines that attempt to establish modes of emancipation in Parade through their very dissolution, for the principle of emancipation in the work, it will argue, is not expressed solely in the winding movement of characters from darkness to liberation, but more importantly in the collapse of outlines: of windows and perspectives, of identities, and of forms of narration.
Biographie
Perry Mendoza is a doctoral researcher at the University of Turku. His dissertation applies Jacques Rancière’s method of philosophy and aesthetics to works of twenty-first-century literature that deal with experiences of absence. He is an affiliate of the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Climate Justice and a co-editor of Scandinavian-Canadian Studies.
| Armelle PAREY ● Université de Caen Normandie “Look. Look closely: can you see them?” Neo-historical Fiction and the Short Story in Lucy Caldwell’s “Daylight Raids” |
Résumé
In Lucy Caldwell’s short-story collection Openings (2024), and indeed in a wider context, “Daylight Raids” stands out on more than one count. Set during the London Blitz, its historical dimension is arresting given that historical fiction is generally first and foremost associated with the novel rather than with short fiction (see Green and Young), which may bring us to wonder: “what kind of history do we receive within the spatial and temporal limitations of a short story? Do we simply get “less” history, a miniature version, or is it inherently history of a different type?” (Jones 103-104). Besides trying to answer these questions, one may also extend the investigation to how history is conveyed in a short story, especially since Caldwell’s story has a dual temporality and appears highly metafictional with the narrator repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader, whereas historical fiction is often associated with realism. Finally, it calls to mind intertexts like Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, also narrating, in part, a love affair during the Blitz.
My idea is to examine how Caldwell emancipates from narrative expectations related to all three – historical fiction, short story format and literary tradition – and produces a neo-historical short story. This paper will thus analyse how, with “Daylight Raids”, Caldwell delivers an idiosyncratic story that revisits the past in a combination of distance, notably through a self-conscious narrative gaze that will be linked to the comparison between short story and snapshot (Cortazar and Gordimer quoted in Jones 116, also Patea 11) and extended to one with the theatre, with a form of immersion, self-reflexivity with a claim to accuracy and exactness.
Biographie
Armelle Parey is Professor of contemporary literature in English at the Université de Caen Normandie. Her research interests include narrative endings, memory and rewritings of the past, with a special emphasis on neo-Victorianism, and adaptation studies. She has written several articles and co-directed several collections of essays or special issues on the question of endings. She is the editor of Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of Adapting Endings from Book to Screen (Routledge, 2020) and Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media, a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies 15. 1 (2024). Her book Kate Atkinson was published in 2022 by Manchester University Press. She edited Études britanniques contemporaines 69 devoted to “The (neo-)historical in British literature and visual arts (20th-21st centuries)”, which includes her interview of Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell.
| Constance POMPIE ● Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry Emancipation and Subversion: Sarah Hall’s Short Fiction Through the Prism of Posthuman Feminism |
Résumé
My presentation will examine how Sarah Hall transforms the short story into a space of emancipation and subversion of the female body. I argue that Hall’s short fiction aligns with posthuman feminism, presenting the female body as a contested site that must be inscribed in dominant narratives. Hall employs posthuman narrative strategies, such as the transformation of women into animals, and in doing so, she upholds the feminist reappraisal of the short story.
In her essay “Sex, Death and the Short Story”, Hall observes that short stories are uniquely suited to write cognitive dissonance, managing conflicting attitudes and behaviours, “un-simplifying” experiences of normality and abnormality, rightness and wrongness. This tension between conflicting states is central to Hall’s acclaimed collections, The Beautiful Indifference, Madame Zero, and Sudden Traveller. My analysis focuses on Madame Zero, in which emancipation is frequently framed in pathological terms through disease and affliction. The title itself refers to a patient suffering from mental illness, and stories such as “Mrs Fox”, “Theatre 6”, and “Evie” depict women whose emancipation emerges from alienation and disruption of everyday existence, often bordering on illness.
Alienation is also conveyed through supernatural transformations. Building on Clare Hanson’s insights in Rereading the Short Story, which suggest that the form gives voice to repressed experiences and enables women writers to adopt a “squint vision” (Hanson 5) that distorts dominant narratives, I intend to show how Hall’s stories allow the fantastic to permeate realist settings through metamorphoses and the pervasive presence of animals. This interplay between realism and the fantastic underscores Hall’s project of subverting normative conceptions of the female body and articulating alternative modes of female agency. Additionally, the transformation of women into animals imparts the supernatural with an ecofeminist dimension as the oppression of the female body is paralleled with that of animals and living beings. As such, Hall’s short fiction partakes in what Braidotti terms “relationality” and “vulnerability” (Braidotti 2013, 5) between species while shedding light on “the dissymmetrical power relations that underlie the construction of woman as the Other of the dominant view of subjectivity” (Braidotti 1998, 299). It is precisely through the condensed and transgressive poetics of short fiction that Sarah Hall inscribes the female body as a material and visceral entity that resists this dissymmetry.
Biographie
Constance Pompié has a PhD in contemporary British literature. Drawing on ecocriticism, neo materialism, posthumanism and ethics, her PhD investigates Sarah Hall’s use of the pastoral mode as a response to the environmental crisis in her novels and short stories. Constance is currently teaching English studies and continuing her research in environmental humanities at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier in the EMMA research unit.
| Anne ROFE ● Independent Scholar Growing up: Women’s Emancipation in “At the Bay” and “Prelude” by Katherine Mansfield and “Dear George” by Helen Simpson |
Résumé
The short stories I will endeavour to compare are “Dear George” by Helen Simpson (1995) and “Prelude” as well as “At the Bay” by Katherine Mansfield (1918 and 1922). In Mansfield’s two stories I will be concentrating on the character of Beryl, and comparing her to the main nameless character in “Dear George”.
This essay will be concerned with the representation and characterisation of young women as both frivolous and earnest, as both willing to be in love and conscious it’s only make-believe, with disastrous consequences in both cases. Thus, this paper will explore the degrees of emancipation from different states of being: from the characters’ own families and from their social class and destiny. Beryl encounters a predatory man, Mr Harry Kember, who entices her outside, and despite her longing to be free of her family, once outside she feels more trapped than she was inside the house. As for Helen Simpson’s unnamed character, as she reads passages from Shakespeare’s plays, she fantasizes about her romantic interest strangling her, like Othello does Desdemona. This play was written by a male author, in 1622, and inserting a passage from it might be a way for Helen Simpson to ask if Shakespeare’s bloody tragedies are still relevant to teenagers today.
Finally, both Helen Simpson and Katherine Mansfield have been described as only writing about “domestic” concerns. Yet, in the words of Helen Simpson: “you can tell all sorts of things from a small domestic scene. Where’s the money coming from, what are the ideals these children are being brought up with, and so on. Think of some of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, where it’s just family life, or it seems very domestic, this life, but it’s not.” I shall discuss the emancipation both authors felt when choosing purposefully to write short stories instead of novels to discuss the daily realities of women at home.
Biographie
Anne Rofé is an English teacher based in Rochefort-sur-Loire, near Angers. In 2026 she will be starting a thesis on the representation of motherhood in British short stories. She has an M.A in English Literature from Bristol University (2015), as well as an M.A from Nantes University in Teaching (Master MEEF, 2018). Her 2015 dissertation, supervised by Dr Ulrika Maude, was entitled “Looking at women: the other side of the mirror” and received a Merit. She analysed the mirror encounters in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse.
| Emmanuel ROLLIN ● Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour Emancipation through Fiction in John Fowles: Reconfiguring the Relationship between Reality and Narrative |
Résumé
This paper means to explore how John Fowles achieves a rejection of established conventionsand a double emancipation from the dominant postmodern canon of the 1960s–1970s. While postmodern metafiction often celebrates textual autonomy, irony, and the dissolution of meaning, Fowles appropriates its techniques only to subvert their nihilistic tendencies. Through a synthesis of Saussure’s linguistics (the arbitrariness of the sign), Rosset’s philosophy of the “idiocy of the real”, and narrative theory (Ricœur, Bayard), Fowles constructs what may be termed a humanist postmodernism: an aesthetic where the acknowledgment of fictionality paradoxically becomes a source of ethical and existential freedom.
Fowles’ novels — notably The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus — transform metafiction from a self-referential game into a pedagogy of freedom. By exposing narrative artifice (multiple endings, intrusive narrator, unreliable perspectives), he invites the reader to become a co-creator of meaning. Fiction no longer imitates reality but reconfigures it, revealing the narrative nature of human identity. Drawing on Saussure, Fowles transposes linguistic arbitrariness to narrative construction: just as words shape perception, stories shape being. Following Rosset, he refuses metaphysical “doubles” of reality; his characters achieve autonomy not by escaping fiction, but by mastering it.
This rupture with the dominant postmodern canon marks a shift from deconstruction to reconstruction by experimenting an innovative modality: fiction as a conscious process of meaning-making rather than an endless play of signs. For Fowles, narrative remains anthropologically necessary — it enables subjects to organize experience and assert agency within contingency according to an ethics of storytelling grounded in lucidity, responsibility, and choice.
Ultimately, Fowles’s fiction performs a rupture with the postmodern canon by reconciling deconstruction with moral engagement. The acknowledgment of artifice does not destroy truth but redefines it as a dynamic, participatory process. Fiction thus becomes, paradoxically, the privileged space where the confrontation between reality and representation opens a path toward intellectual and existential liberation.
Biographie
Emmanuel Rollin is an Agrégé d’anglais and a doctoral candidate at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour. His PhD focuses on “The Figures of God in the Novels of John Fowles.” He seeks to study how Fowles’ writing fits into a perspective of postmodern deconstruction where the figure of God is put in the background. He studies this vacant place and its impact on the author, the character and the reader, showing how Fowles’ writing proposes a reconstruction after the postmodern crisis. He has presented several papers on Fowles; some of them will be published in the near future.
| Emeline YDEE ● Université d’Artois The Emancipated Android: Escaping the Posthuman Box in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun |
Résumé
This paper means to explore how in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF), emancipates herself from her assigned role within a hierarchized posthuman society in which “lifted” children are technologically enhanced yet socially precarious, and what this process reveals about agency, value, and life. Klara’s function is defined by utility: providing emotional support to Josie, an ill adolescent whose sickness follows from having been “lifted.” Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of emancipation as a break from imposed social positions, Klara’s gradual self-directed actions show a departure from programmed subordination. Her attempts to influence Josie’s fate–culminating in ritualistic appeals to the Sun–exemplify a form of moral and interpretive agency that exceeds functional obedience, situating her emancipation within the stakes of life and death.
Secondly, the novel enacts narrative emancipation. By granting narrative authority to a non-human consciousness, Ishiguro disrupts anthropocentric norms and produces a subaltern perspective aligned with Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge.” Klara’s perception and voice challenge expectations of human-centered storytelling, merging ethical and narrative agency. Her functional autonomy and narrative authority are mutually reinforcing, redefining what it means to act and to tell a story as a posthuman being.
Together, these dimensions of emancipation–functional and narrative– reconfigure boundaries between human and non-human, duty and desire, life and death. Klara and the Sun stages posthuman emancipation not as a metaphorical gesture but as a thematic and structural process, interrogating rigid hierarchies of function, class, and emotional legitimacy. In doing so, Ishiguro expands the ethical and narrative possibilities of contemporary British fiction by granting agency to a posthuman subject, demonstrating that emancipation can emerge from the margins of a technological life as much as from human society itself.
Biographie
Emeline Ydée is a PhD student in English studies at the University of Artois. Her doctoral research focuses on posthuman hybridities in contemporary science fiction with a specific interest in the questions of identity, narrative and translation.