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Every year, the English-speaking writers invited to the Assises Internationales du Roman write the definition of a word of their choice.

Dans le cadre des Assises Internationales du Roman, Ian McEwan est venu à l'École Normale Supérieure de Lyon pour parler de son roman Atonement. Cette rencontre avec les étudiant.e.s a été organisée par Vanessa Guignery, professeur de littérature anglaise et postcoloniale à l'ENS, membre du laboratoire IHRIM, en collaboration avec la Villa Gillet.

Le 17 janvier 2018, la Villa Gillet a permis à 9 classes de lycée de rencontrer les auteurs Paul Auster et Siri Hustvedt. Les questions portaient principalement sur les nombreux écrits de Siri Hustvedt ainsi que le dernier roman de Paul Auster, 4, 3, 2, 1.

How do writers succeed in submerging us in situations so unlike our own lives? I would argue that, as a reader, I have yet to encounter a situation in literature "unlike" my life. The demographic details may differ: Charlotte is a spider, I am a human; Teju Cole's narrators are men, I am a woman; many of Toni Morrison's characters are mothers, I am not. The list of things that I am not is long: white, male, a parent, a soldier, Chinese-speaking, South American, a witness to any war.

Ce dossier sur le thème des auteurs écrivant à la première personne regroupe trois ressources accompagnées d'exercices de compréhension et de production orales et écrites, ainsi que d'analyse d'image.

Born in north-eastern India in 1970, Siddhartha Deb is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors in the UK and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His latest book, a work of narrative nonfiction, ((The Beautiful and the Damned)), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK and the winner of the PEN Open award in the United States. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harpers, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Daily Telegraph, The Nation, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Like Jewish and Christian commentators, Muslim exegetes understood the Babel story to be a parable of how mankind’s hubris, in the form of a desire for knowledge or an attempt to reach the heavens, leads to divine punishment. The subsequent confusion of human idioms and scattering of peoples is a second fall from grace, an expulsion from the paradise of monolingualism. Henceforth, translation becomes at once necessary and impossible—impossible in the sense that no translation could ever match the transparency of the original Ur-Sprache. So the Islamic tradition, like the Judaic one in particular, comes to bear a tremendous nostalgia for the lost language of Eden.

What is the place of the writer in the literary field of the home country? What contribution can this writer make to the literary field of the target or host country? It's important to understand that the answers to these questions will often be different: a writer can be a marginal figure in his home country and become a vital figure in another country. More often, of course, the reverse is true.

how can reading not add to one’s experience, and in turn influence a person’s writing? And wouldn’t translation especially affect the brain, since translation involves the closest sort of reading, one where the mind simultaneously reads for meaning and tries to access the equivalent word or expression in another language. Wouldn’t reading the word “pelle” in Italian similarly send a message to the brain to access the synaptic record of all past sensory experience having to do with leather: black jacket, kid gloves, car seat, red belt with an alligator buckle, toy-gun holster, shoe shop. Wouldn’t the experiential knowledge of how those various leathers felt be carried along as the translator toggled between two different linguistic systems? And of course each of those leather memories would be connected to other associational memories, some quite rich in subjectivity.

All of the conventions of literary fiction can be successfully broken except one: there must be subtext, a second story beneath the surface. We don’t have to care about a protagonist or even really have a protagonist. We’re not limited to any particular style or structure. But our entire idea of literature being “about” something is based on a second narrative, something else that the surface narrative can point to. What’s interesting to me about this is that we live in a time when surface narratives are taking over. Blogs are generally so worthless for this one reason, that they lack subtext. The online world is, above all, earnest, saying exactly what it means.

Chekhov is well known for his impartial observations of his characters and for his grasp of “realism”. When I first read his description of the lady with the little dog, I discovered that she is “a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a beret.” I was puzzled. This less than enthusiastic description of the woman Gurov will come to love leaves out many basic details such as the colour of Anna Sergeyevna’s eyes and whether she has an attractive figure. I wondered why Chekhov departs from the wordier earlier traditions of written portraiture, and how his simple sketch of Anna illustrated the “realism” for which he is known.

This article intends to study and compare the way Pamela, Richardson's early heroine of the novel genre, and Charlotte Brontë's romantic Jane, rebel. What follows will underscore the path trodden by female fictional characters in terms of shaping the individual, from the Enlightenment period to the romantic era. The patterns of entrapment and self-willed seclusion the protagonists are involved in function as incentives for rebellion. The ideals they rebel for play the role of living forces in a way that is meaningful to comprehend how the essence of rebellion evolved with time. No matter how much the protagonists' respective procedure may differ, from moral conservatism to personal answering of moral questions through rites of passage, the two female heroines are equally conscious of their value as human beings. Their handling of their hardships and their allegiance to God, however, points to the qualitative and quantitative evolution of the notion of equality.

A Londoner by adoption, Kate O’Riordan grew up in the small city of Bantry on the west coast of Ireland. With Le Garçon dans la lune, published in 2008 and Pierres de mémoire, in 2009, O’Riordan signed two new remarkable opuses in which she questions family relationships. A novelist and short-story writer, Kate O’Riordan also writes for the cinema and continues to confirm her legitimate place among Irish authors who count. She came to the Villa Gillet to take part in a discussion on 'Ireland by Irish writers'.

It’s a stormy night in Dublin. My father comes into the bedroom to close the window. But the old sash window is rotten. As he tries pull it down, the wooden frame comes apart in his hands like a piece of fruit cake. The glass is smashed. So my father has to find a way to cover over the gaps. He looks around and picks up the nearest thing at hand. In the corner of the room there is a map of the world, a big rolled up school atlas which he’s kept from the time he was a schoolteacher. He rolls it out and nails the atlas up against the window frame. It’s a temporary solution, he says. Go to sleep. So that’s how I fall asleep, with the wind blowing across the world, flapping at the oceans and the continents. The world is there in the morning with the sun coming through.

Somebody mentioned the word confusion. That is probably the word that describes my childhood most clearly. It was a confusion of languages, confusion between the inside of the house and the outside of the house, confusion between my father’s idealism and my mother’s memories. There’s always been confusion in my life.

"David Shrigley is a multidisciplinary artist who started his career in the early nineties self-publishing art books containing cartoon-like drawings for which he is mainly famous. Their trademarks, which are also recognizable in his varied artistic productions – clumsy execution, sloppy handwriting, disturbing or puzzling text, dark humour and uncanny atmosphere – helped Shrigley to gradually shape a clearly distinctive personality in his work which brought him out as one of the current key figures of British contemporary art scene."

The idea that novels, theater, or poetry often help us live, that they help us feel cleansed or feel stronger, more energized, more alive, or that they at least help us survive by giving us the boost we need to hang on a little longer, is not simply a constant topos of literature, be it western, eastern, or universal. It is an indisputable truth for those who make use of it, whether they write it, read it, comment on it, or transform it into a first-aid kid of maxim-prescriptions and citation-medicines to use as needed.

It is the topic par excellence, the enigma that is impossible to solve. This puppet that we call somewhat pompously “The Self,” what is it in the end? An actor who resigns himself, around the age of thirty, to play only one role, or a born clown who struggles to understand himself, having changed so often?

"The writing project came as the answer to a question that can, in retrospect, be formulated as follows: How can we grieve for a melancholy person, a person who was grieving himself? How can we get to grips with the absence of someone who was never really present?"

Identity and family legacy are partially formed by the family “memory narrative”—a family member, usually our mother or father, tells us stories about what happened before we were born or when we were too young to remember momentous events. But what happens when that narrator in the family is mentally ill, or a compulsive liar? In my case, my schizophrenic mother was the unreliable narrator of our family history. And my alcoholic father, a gifted writer who left when I was four, told my mother’s family grandiose lies about his own past.

As women, we are often identified through our choice of sexual partners. When an “attractive” woman has sex with an ugly man, it is a descent into “abjection.” But why? Clearly, it is because as women, we are still believed to attain most of our identities through sexuality. In the present assimilationist climate, any non-monogamous, non-relational sexual act is read as a symptom of emotional damage. Our culture persists in believing that sex holds the magic key to a person’s identity — which is, of course, wrong — and in behaving as if female writers are uniquely charged with upholding the sacred intimacy of the sexual act.

Since the question of women’s freedom in writing, or “Why stories of transgression or women’s assertions of freedom are less tolerated than those of men?” only highlight ordinary male chauvinism (the answer to the question is undeniably related to cultural issues), I prefer to focus on the counter strategies that can be deployed in response to the insults made to women, like the one Eileen Myles describes in her introduction to I love Dick by Chris Kraus, What about Chris?: “She’s turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man.” In other words, rather than identifying the reasons for the violent reception of women’s transgressive writing, I prefer to think about the strategies that can flow from them.

I like the theoretical ideal of neutrality, of non-hierarchical thinking. I’d like to be a writer, a person, but I am not. None of this naming is my choice. I’m a woman, “still” or I’m “only a woman.” “A good, bad woman, a silly, frivolous woman, an intelligent woman, a sweet woman, a harridan, bitch, whore, a fishmonger, gossipy woman. A woman writer.” What is “a woman writer”? Does “woman” cancel or negate “writer”? Create a different form of writer? Or does “woman” as an adjective utterly change the noun “writer”? “Man writer”? Not used. “Male writer,” rarely employed. Are there “man books” being read in “man caves?” OK, I declare: I’m a woman who writes, a person who writes. But how am I read?

There are people who write from the place that they have been assigned. Some of them with rage so as to get away from it; others, by contrast, who follow the path that has been mapped out for us. There are those who would rather stay on the margin of that space, away from the feminine, off-centered, but are then dragged back to it, kicking and screaming. Their words are women's words, words that are situated. The masculine remains the universal reference. Feminine words stay in the realm of the singular, indexed to the gender of who said them.

Critics and readers, at least in the United States, seem to be slower to recognize the investigative memoir as a narrative mode deserving of attention as such. The American memoir comes burdened with a history of survivor’s tales and evangelical Protestant redemption stories: the writer is usually delivered from bondage: slavery or captivity in the 19th century, Communism, Nazi Europe, or “substance abuse” in the 20th, and into freedom or the light of truth. THE END. Testifying, in both legal and religious senses, is important. Important too is the sense that the author can be written into a social order, given a normal or productive life...

Truman Capote called his 1966 book In Cold Blood the first non-fiction novel. Since then, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have become increasingly blurred. Are these false definitions? At least we could say that novelists are able to articulate the internal worlds – the thoughts and feelings – of their characters while non-fiction relies entirely on evidence.

I wrote a memoir a few years ago (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City), which, in part, chronicled the five or six years my father spent living on the streets in Boston. I’d been a case-worker with the homeless for three years before he got himself evicted from his marginal living situation, ran out of options (he slept in his taxi, on friend’s couches) and eventually ended up at the shelter where I worked. I hadn’t grown up with him, I hadn’t met him, really, before he came into the shelter—that this is where I got to know him is in the Shakespearian realm of the unlikely coincidence that sets the play in motion (think Hamlet encountering his father’s ghost).

Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi (born 10 December 1984) is a British novelist. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school studying for her A levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. Whilst studying Social and Political Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, two of her plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, were performed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen.

"You read of extreme cases of jamais vu in the newspapers. There was one recently involving a husband who, after eighteen years of happy stability with his wife, told her he had a surprise for her. He blindfolded her, then ‘hit her over the head with the blunt end of an axe, fracturing her skull in three places.’ She survived and tried to forgive him, even vouched for his good character in court. The husband-turned-attacker, unable to explain his moment of terminal hostility, deferred to psychiatrists who offered the opinion that it was his past that had caused it. "

Helen Oyeyemi took part in the sixth edition of the Assises Internationales du Roman, organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde. She was kind enough to read an extract from White is for Witching, her stunning Neo-Gothic novel.

Helen Oyeyemi took part in the sixth edition of the Assises Internationales du Roman, organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde. She answered our questions on White is for Witching, a stunning Neo-Gothic novel.

In the context of the Walls and Bridges project in New York, a meeting has been organized for October between an American novelist - Siri Hustvedt - and a French neuroscientist on the topic of "fiction," both mental and literary. This will obviously be the time to ask ourselves: can we imagine a promising future for meetings between the neurosciences of cognition and the world of literary creation? Is this merely the random juxtaposition of two terms to which we are attached, or the genuine dialectical culmination of self-consciousness? An amusing, trendy quid pro quo, or a key moment in our knowledge of ourselves as tale tellers?

The idea of attributing old works to new authors is not original. It has long been practiced by those lovers of literature, our students, who do not hesitate to attribute The Old Man and the Sea to Melville or War and Peace to Dostoevsky. What is interesting is that this kind of reinvention is not always properly appreciated by teachers. Students are not the only readers to practice reattribution. Scientific discoveries have on occasion forced historians of literature - and even more, of art - to ascribe works to creators other than those to whom they were at first incorrectly attributed...

In May 2011, Percival Everett took part in the fifth edition of the Assises Internationales du Roman, organised by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde. He was kind enough to grant us an interview at the Hotel Carlton in Lyon.

Le 12 octobre 2010, la Villa Gillet organisait à l'Institution des Chartreux une rencontre autour de la perception des religions dans notre société. Réunissant des spécialistes français et américains des questions religieuses, cet évènement était l'occasion de faire le point sur ces "nouvelles conflictualités" qui sont souvent la conséquence de préjugés et de pratiques culturelles spécifiques à chaque nation. Ce texte a été écrit par Abdelwahab Meddeb, écrivain et poète franco-tunisien, enseignant la littérature comparée à l'Université de Nanterre.

Toutes les versions du Rêve américain constituent la trame d'un discours que l'Amérique n'a jamais cessé de se tenir et de tenir sur elle-même. Ce Rêve d'une terre de tous les possibles, d'une terre idyllique, ancré dans l'inconscient collectif, c'est tout d'abord la presse qui le remet en question, à l'époque du muckraking notamment. Toute une génération de journalistes et d'écrivains met ainsi en lumière l'envers d'un rêve américain que les images de photographes et de cinéastes engagés ne démentiront pas.

This article analyses the construction of voices in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, in which the paradoxical relationship between printed signs on a page and phonemes uttered by human bodies is fore-grounded. Auster revels in creating lively dialogues that are carefully inscribed within a particular voice through the use of didascalia, but he also celebrates the physicality and euphony of a narrative voice which navigates between elegiac lyricism and sharp-witted humour. The Brooklyn Follies, like all Auster’s books, is a book about books, but this one is also a book about tales and story-telling, about speech and silence, and the very American tradition of tall tales.

Dans le cadre du cycle de conférences "Ecrivains de toujours", la Bibliothèque municipale de la Part-Dieu (Lyon), invite des auteurs à venir parler des écrivains qu'ils aiment. Le 25 mars 2009, elle recevait Alberto Manguel, qui avait choisi, parmi ses multiples amours, l'écrivain écossais Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), auquel il avait consacré un roman, Stevenson sous les palmiers (Actes Sud, 2005).

This document provides a short general overview of Paul Auster’s work. After a brief discussion of Auster’s texts positioning in the literary heritage, it tackles the place and role of the writer in an often alienating environment. It then deals with the representation of the city in Auster’s work, notably Brooklyn, before concluding on the gift for storytelling that so characterizes Paul Auster’s production.

A l'occasion du passage de Paul Auster à Lyon, la Villa Gillet a organisé une rencontre entre l'auteur des Brooklyn Follies et plusieurs centaines de lycéens étudiant cette oeuvre pour leur bac d'anglais. La première partie de l'entretien a été menée par Jocelyn Dupont, puis, dans la seconde partie, les lycéens ont pu poser eux-mêmes leurs questions à Paul Auster.

Une analyse de la figure du chiasme dans une nouvelle de Virginia Woolf, "Kew Gardens". Cet article a été originellement publié dans "Théorie-Littérature-Enseignement", Figuralité et cognition, Presses universitaires de Vincennes, n° 9 (épuisé), Automne 1991, pp. 171-189.

Cet article est un chapitre extrait de "L'Ecriture féminine en Angleterre", de Frédéric Regard, publié aux Presses Universitaires de France (2002) dans la collection "Perspectives anglo-saxonnes".