Editors’ Introduction

A New Normal? I

Tout le monde était d’accord pour penser que les commodités de la vie passée ne se retrouveraient pas d’un coup et qu’il était plus facile de détruire que de reconstruire.

—Albert Camus, La Peste (279)

The question mark seems no longer necessary: This double issue of CF&FS (the second one is coming out next June) emerged from work presented at the thirty-eighth Annual Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium, which took place in March 2021 and, for the first time in its history, in virtual mode. The New Normal had arrived.

Originally, the colloquium was going to be hosted in its normal brick-and-mortar format, but when the world was locked down in the spring and summer of 2020, it was clear that an in-person event would not be possible for 2021 and that an alternative mode had to be found. The colloquium’s steering committee considered some themes that were in the usual genre: evocative-yet-ambiguous; specific, but capacious enough for maximum participation. At first, Transmissions seemed the most viable as it could be tied to the twenty-first-century plague that had been thrust upon us. But, in the end, “A New Normal?” reflected our new, shifting circumstances more adequately.

Two years on, there is no longer any doubt that we are living in a new normal, but what we must now do is continue to try to make sense of it—as we have been trying to do since March 2020. Notably, the “New Normal” does not just comprise the conditions of the pandemic, but rather, as the essays that follow show, a whole host of cultural, literary, and social phenomena. Over the past twenty years, there have been profound changes in our field, and the pandemic has accelerated some of them. There seems to be a marked shift away from the study of traditional canonical authors and literary movements. Visual culture has gained a stronger foothold, as film, graphic novels, bandes dessinées, and video games have attracted considerable scholarly attention and are increasingly explored in the classroom. The lockdown phases of the pandemic accentuated the importance of social media, in particular in the political sphere, where new forms of propaganda have proliferated and, too, are drawing the attention of researchers. On both sides of the Atlantic, there have been significant shifts in gender and race relations and these changes have manifested themselves in scholarly engagement. So many of these developments were apparent in our March 2021 colloquium, and this volume serves as a representative reflection of some of these broader trends.

It is especially fitting to begin with Roxanna Curto’s treatment of the work of Édouard Glissant: Curto’s analysis shows how Glissant’s theoretical lens is suited for understanding global connectivity during the era of the coronavirus. Glissant’s interpretation of concepts emerging from Chaos Theory had an impact on his broader worldview. As Curto argues, this perspective helps us better understand sociocultural relations and diversity in the Caribbean and beyond. It also, notably, sheds light on the global spread of Covid-19.

The pandemic has increased our reliance on technology, including as noted above, on social media platforms, a subject treated by Sara Mejdoubi in this volume’s second essay. Mejdoubi conducts an analysis of what she calls a new semiotic conflict, one that contrasts traditional rhetorical norms with those that have shaped political discourse in digital media, especially social media. Mejdoubi argues that the contract between the speaker and the audience remains in flux, given the ever-evolving rhetorical modes employed on prominent social media platforms. This relationship between speaker and audience is fundamental to Mejdoubi’s analysis, which is a timely one given the new and emerging forms of political propaganda that have roiled the global landscape in recent years.

We move from new and emerging modes of connectivity and communication to studies of innovative intersections between the visual and the textual. First, is Haniyeh Barahouie Pasandi’s analysis of depictions of Sara Baartman, with particular focus on Renaud Pennelle and Abdellatif Kechiche’s graphic novel Vénus noire. This essay contextualizes Vénus noire in the history of the graphic novel and the history of colonialism. Next is Elisabeth Herbst Buzay’s study of Alex Alice’s Le Château des étoiles, which is also deeply informed by history, both real and imaginary. Fitting for the theme of our volume, this study emphasizes the importance of disruptions (both visual and textual) in this bande dessinée series. Central to Herbst Buzay’s analysis is the concept of uchronia, a term dating to the nineteenth century that, she writes, can be defined as “history, not as it was, but as it could have been” (infra).

As noted above, the new normal of the Covid-19 pandemic has overlapped with other seismic shifts, in particular the ongoing movements related to gender relations and identity. Two essays in this volume touch on these movements, which have become manifest in recent years on both sides of the Atlantic. First, is Annie Jouan-Westlund’s analysis of Ivan Jablonka’s distinct perception of masculinity and his attempt to universalize his own experience into a generational, collective idea of manhood. As Jouan-Westlund points out, Jablonka’s perspective, shaped very much by his work as a historian, represents an innovative cross between the social sciences and the literary. Second, is a co-authored piece by Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo and Lucie Nizard, on Vanessa Springora’s memoir Le Consentement. Springora was sexually abused as an adolescent by a prominent (and then-middle aged) figure in the French literary establishment. A courageous reckoning with trauma from her past, Springora’s narrative deconstructs the figure of the French séducteur. Ibáñez Aristondo and Nizard underscore the social and cultural importance of Springora’s account and provide a history of the figure of the French séducteur, tracing its modern origins back to the Great War.

The construction of gender roles is also salient in Flavia Bujor’s exploration of new literary manifestations of the figure of the witch. Bujor uses as a case study Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République, analyzing the multiple feminist discourses embedded in her portrayal of the witch; furthermore, she explores how Delaume critiques our contemporary normality through the construction of an environmental and political dystopia.

Following Bujor’s piece, we move to an exploration of what could be called the “normative” in the field of psychology. Graham Bishop analyzes the work of the French psychologist, writer, filmmaker, and educator Fernand Deligny through a Derridean lens. Bishop’s study explores the ways in which Deligny viewed autistic people in relation to those deemed “neurotypical.”

The two articles that follow examine the work of noteworthy contemporary writers: Eric Trudel’s analysis of the work of Leslie Kaplan and Adelaide Russo’s study of Michel Deguy. Trudel investigates the question of closure in Kaplan’s work. He observes that narrative closure is difficult for Kaplan, and attributes this difficulty to her characteristic tendency to defy and rebel against that which is imposed as “normal.” By resisting closure, Trudel proposes, Kaplan leaves the door open to a world of novel artistic and political possibility. For her part, Adelaide Russo explores the ways in which Michel Deguy has modified his engagement with his audience for the contemporary era, using new forms and new media, particularly during the pandemic. Although remaining loyal to the book, as Russo points out, Deguy has made recent fascinating interventions in the form of billets on the website of the journal Po&sie (which he founded in 1977). Russo also provides a treatment of the film Comme si, comme ça by Marie-Claude Treilhou, which records Deguy’s reflections on poetry today.

The penultimate text in this volume is Weiwei Xiang’s investigation of overlap in the worldviews of Édouard Glissant and select Chinese theorists, in particular, Liang Suming and Shi Xu. Xiang argues that the conditions created by the West in the twentieth century resulted in a sort of cultural hegemony to which Glissant and his Chinese counterparts responded in similar fashion. Xiang’s work puts Glissant and these theorists in dialogue, exploring how they approach (historically, linguistically, and poetically) the relationship between nation and world.

We are excited to have as our closing contribution Dervila Cooke’s wide-ranging interview of the French-Iranian writer Maryam Madjidi, whose autobiographical novel Marx et la poupée won the Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2017. The intellectual suppleness displayed by Madjidi in this fine interview can serve as a model for us all as we seek to accustom ourselves to a new normal, still yet undefined, but here to stay.

Guest Co-Editor Editors

Andrew Sobanet Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin

Roger Célestin is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France from 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin

Eliane DalMolin is Professor of French at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France from 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Andrew Sobanet

Andrew Sobanet is a Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. His research focuses primarily on the intersection of politics and literature. His research interests include the twentieth-century novel, testimony, mass media, and European history. He is the author of Jail Sentences: Representing Prison in Twentieth-Century French Fiction (U of Nebraska P, 2008) and Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Indiana UP, 2018).