Session 4 - Neo-Mythical fiction (chair : Jean-Michel Ganteau)

COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL ANNUEL
SOCIETE D ETUDE ANGLAISES CONTEMPORAINES

The (Neo-)Historical in British Literature and Visual Arts (20th-21st c.)

Elsa Cavalié (Avignon Université, France), “The concept of anachronism is the historian’s truth: Uses of Anachronism in Retellings of Greek Myth”.

Drawing on Serge Zenkine and Jacques Rancière, Elsa Cavalié investigates anachronism an anachronies as strategies for renewal and defamiliarization in Pat Barker’s Trojan trilogy and Alice Oswald’s poems evoking the Iliad (Memorial) and the Odyssey (Nobody). 

Justine Gonneaud (Avignon Université, France), “A Neo-Mythical Gaze on Medusa: Filling in the Blind Spots of Cultural Memory”

Justine Gonneaud addresses the feminist retellings of the myth of Medusa produced within the last decade, focusing mainly on Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind (2023) and argues that, in the neo-historical vein, the novel aims at reappraising the cultural transformation of the character of Medusa and at questioning the mechanisms that led a collective cultural memory of a founding myth to obliterate key aspects of the original texts.

Claire Hélie (Université de Lille, France), “The Pendle Witch Trials: Exorcising Witches in Neo-Historical poetry”

Claire Hélie examines how  Geraldine Monk, Blake Morrison and Camille Ralphs have recounted the 1612 Pendle witch trials so as to give a voice to their miswritten participants, showing how their poems not only use historical research in their handling of the event but  also interrogate the process of history-making and writing history by experimenting with the poetic form and voice