Papers by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
RANAM/Recherches anglaises et américaines, Jul 11, 2023
Cette etude se propose d’analyser les relations entre le paysage, l’ecriture et l’image dans les ... more Cette etude se propose d’analyser les relations entre le paysage, l’ecriture et l’image dans les romans de Jane Urquhart afin de rendre compte des enjeux politiques et esthetiques des interrogations qui sous-tendent l’ecriture paysagere dans son œuvre. En mettant en scene differentes manieres de voir, de regarder et d’apprehender l’environnement, la romanciere fait perdre son caractere d’evidence au paysage, defini comme une vue que le regard du spectateur embrasse. En effet, chez Urquhart, il n’y a pas du paysage, mais des paysages, le texte travaillant les cadres intertextuels et interpicturaux pour faire jouer les ecarts entre les differentes formes que peut prendre le paysage. Il ne convoque pas l’image pour dire le paysage, mais pour mettre en lumiere les limites de sa definition visuelle et esthetique. Ceci nous invite donc a repenser le lien entre visibilite et paysage. Refuser de dire le paysage par le biais de l’effet-tableau et de l’ekphrasis paysagere pour mieux le dissoc...
Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2018
SEPC (Société d'études des pays du Commonwealth)
Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies, 2019
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood's response in text and in image to the acc... more The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood's response in text and in image to the accounts of pioneering by the eponymous nineteenth-century British immigrant, give form to the harrowing questions: where is one's place when one has been displaced? What does it mean, then, to inhabit? Displacement refers to more than the act of emigrating and the psychological and geographical dislocation it entails. This paper contends that its disruptive force generates the sequence's visual and poetic experimentations with representations of space. Avec The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood revisite les écrits de l'immigrante britannique du dix-neuvième siècle par l'entremise du texte poétique et de l'image. Ce faisant, elle donne forme à la question soulevée par l'expérience du déplacement: qu'est-ce qui fait que nous habitons un lieu ? La notion de déplacement est à comprendre au-delà du seul fait d'émigrer et de la dislocation psychologique et géographique qu'il entraîne. La présente étude y voit une poétique générant une expérimentation visuelle et poétique qui vient perturber les représentations traditionnelles du rapport à l'espace.
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
SEPC (Société d'études des pays du Commonwealth)
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
Etudes Canadiennes / Canadian Studies , 2019
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood’s response in text and in image to the acc... more The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood’s response in text and in image to the accounts of pioneering by the eponymous nineteenth-century British immigrant, give form to the harrowing questions: where is one’s place when one has been displaced? What does it mean, then, to inhabit? Displacement refers to more than the act of emigrating and the psychological and geographical dislocation it entails. This paper contends that its disruptive force generates the sequence’s visual and poetic experimentations with representations of space.
Full article: https://journals.openedition.org/eccs/1916
Avec The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood revisite les écrits de l’immigrante britannique du dix-neuvième siècle par l’entremise du texte poétique et de l’image. Ce faisant, elle donne forme à la question soulevée par l’expérience du déplacement: qu’est-ce qui fait que nous habitons un lieu ? La notion de déplacement est à comprendre au-delà du seul fait d’émigrer et de la dislocation psychologique et géographique qu’il entraîne. La présente étude y voit une poétique générant une expérimentation visuelle et poétique qui vient perturber les représentations traditionnelles du rapport à l’espace.
Représentations dans le monde anglophone, 2019
Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere is informed by the contrary dynamics of the centripet... more Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere is informed by the contrary dynamics of the centripetal forces of “emplacement” as “entextment,” and the centrifugal drive of dis-location striving to eschew textual and territorial enclosure. Taking its cue from the author’s suggestion that her text is “a map masquerading as a book,” this paper propose to examine how she unsettles the traditional definition of place to write unmappable, unfixed and unfixing geografictione.
Key words: cartography, map, place, exploration
Full article: https://representations.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/IMG/pdf/4-letessier.pdf
Penser l'art du paysage avec Henri Maldiney, 2018
In Bénédicte Coste (ed.), Penser l'art du paysage avec Henri Maldiney, Presses Universitaires de ... more In Bénédicte Coste (ed.), Penser l'art du paysage avec Henri Maldiney, Presses Universitaires de Dijon, 2018. 91-106
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 40:2 (Spring 2018), 2018
Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass hinges on reconstructions which are informed by the characters’ se... more Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass hinges on reconstructions which are informed by the characters’ sense of depredation and dereliction when faced with places which are but “ruins and vacancies.” This paper proposes to analyse such reconstructions as providing the groundwork for a reflection which attempts to puzzle out the intricate issues of place, land, inheritance, belonging and memory in the post-colonial context.
Full article: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/300
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37:1 (Autumn 2014) , Nov 2014
This paper discusses the plasticity of the ekphrasis as an instance of intermedial crossing in Ja... more This paper discusses the plasticity of the ekphrasis as an instance of intermedial crossing in Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven (1993). In this ekphrastic novel, the Canadian novelist reflects on the performative value of images and probes the mediation of language in the contemplation of paintings. Contrasting discourses on painting will be analyzed in the light of the conceptual opposition French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman introduces between the visible-legible-readable, and the visual.
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33:1 (Winter 2010), Oct 1, 2010
Canadian author Jane Urquhart has never ceased to reflect upon the cultural prisms that mediate o... more Canadian author Jane Urquhart has never ceased to reflect upon the cultural prisms that mediate our perception of landscape and its representation. Her ekphrastic novel The Underpainter calls for a thorough examination of the prevalence of the visual in our experience of space which can be traced back to the etymology of the word landscape. As a pictorial composition, landscape, in figurative art, is structured by linear perspective and the imaginary line of the horizon.
In The Underpainter, Austin Fraser, the narrator, is an American landscape painter who retraces the steps he took in his quest towards originality, a quest characterised first by the paradoxical desire to possess the horizon, to “bring it up close for inspection”. His pictorial experimenting with the structure of perception bespeaks a will to control experience by rational understanding. In that sense, his interpretation of the “eye/I” of Robert Henri’s teaching partakes of an intellectualisation of vision, namely vision as the projection of the mind on a world that can be grasped and mastered by the subject.
The novel’s emphasis on voyeurism and thieving leads to a more disquieting interpretation of the tensions between what is seen and ways of seeing it. The parallel between the canvas of the painter and the grid of the entrepreneur sheds light on the power relations underlying Austin’s representation of his Canadian mistress and her landscape. His turning both into “finished, saleable” pictures is a form of colonial exploitation which is underpinned by his obsession with distance between the subject – the artist – and the object offered to his gaze – be it his model or, by metonymy, the landscape of the north.
Striving to detach himself from the “perfectly composed view[s]” of his early career, Austin develops the concept of “formal ambiguity” inspired by pentimenti, those faint traces of a previous work painted over by the artist. To the optical illusion of depth composition aims at creating, he substitutes the materiality of the hard surface, the superimposed layers of paint veiling the underpainting. His series The Erasure evinces an interest in the indivisible link between revelation and obscuration, the limits and the enigma of the visible. The subject of his paintings becomes the horizon itself, as understood by phenomenology: the horizon against which the visible stands out but which is itself invisible.
Talks by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart's fourth novel, The Underpainter (1997), is a Künstlerroman fraug... more Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart's fourth novel, The Underpainter (1997), is a Künstlerroman fraught with pictorial references, from Cézanne to Robert Henry, in a manner that is akin to name-dropping and which might be seen as requiring elite literacy and education. However, in an age when the reader can access almost any image with a mouse click, as well as a wealth of information on artists, Urquhart chooses to play upon the plasticity of the ekphrastic genre. Indeed, she resorts to a blend of notional and Homeric ekphrasis when describing her character's devising an aesthetic based on the drastic technique of disfiguration which he refers to as " the concept of formal ambiguity: " the alteration of a figurative underpainting through the superposition of layers of paint and glazes. Drawing upon the conceptual opposition between figuration and figurability introduced by French philosopher George Didi-Huberman, I would argue that Urquhart's ekphrastic strategies are evidence of her reflection on the efficiency of painting outside the realm of knowledge and visual skills, because of their relation to discourse. The Underpainter ponders on what paintings visually present without visibly representing, an experience which entails a suspension of the ability to produce meaning and knowledge, to which language bears witness.
Drafts by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
This article studies how, through the dramatization of the “double landscape,” novelist Jane Urqu... more This article studies how, through the dramatization of the “double landscape,” novelist Jane Urquhart’s first novel, The Whirlpool (1986), reflects on the negotiation of the European pictorial tradition in the perception of landscape. Urquhart subverts the rigid opposition between the Old World and the New. The hold exercised by European aesthetic patterns on the characters’ perception may function as a screen which veils the physical environment. The screen becomes a prism, however, when the incongruities between what is seen and what the landscaping gaze wishes to see become a locus of creation allowing the characters to articulate their own sense of space.
Dans The Whirlpool (1986), la thématique du “paysage double” donne à Jane Urquhart le matériau romanesque pour s’interroger sur la négociation de l’héritage pictural européen dans la perception paysagère. Son écriture met à mal le binarisme rigide qui oppose le Nouveau Monde à l’Ancien. L’emprise qu’exerce la nostalgie paysagère sur la perception fait certes des codes paysagers européens un écran occultant, mais l’écran se fait prisme lorsque les incongruités entre l’esthétique importée et l’environnement physique deviennent une forme d’expression paysagère.
Call for papers by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
La catastrophe du 11 septembre 2001 marque, de façon spectaculaire, l'entrée dans le XXI e siècle... more La catastrophe du 11 septembre 2001 marque, de façon spectaculaire, l'entrée dans le XXI e siècle, inaugurant « l'irruption du possible dans l'impossible » (Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé). Depuis, l'essor des thèses déclinistes, de la collapsologie ou de l'effondrisme, a engendré une prolifération de discours et d'images qui prédisent la fin de notre civilisation, anticipent les modalités de sa disparition, et imposent de penser la catastrophe avec une urgence renouvelée. En effet, l'heure ne semble plus à la conjecture ou à la prévision car le discours catastrophiste, que son relais soit scientifique, médiatique ou politique, ne cesse d'alerter sur la multiplication des catastrophes, nous invitant par là même à redessiner les contours d'une notion qui, jusque récemment, se caractérisait par sa dimension unique, inédite, et imprévisible. Signe que sa définition a déjà commencé à muter, la catastrophe est moins envisagée comme un dénouement ou une fin que comme une série de phénomènes sériels qui, par leur irruption répétée dans le quotidien, la placent dans une actualité permanente. Paul Virilio notait que notre société, à privilégier « inconsidérément le présent, le temps réel (…) met en oeuvre l'immédiateté, l'ubiquité et l'instantanéité, met en scène l'accident, la catastrophe » (Paul Virilio, L'accident originel).
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Papers by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
Full article: https://journals.openedition.org/eccs/1916
Avec The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood revisite les écrits de l’immigrante britannique du dix-neuvième siècle par l’entremise du texte poétique et de l’image. Ce faisant, elle donne forme à la question soulevée par l’expérience du déplacement: qu’est-ce qui fait que nous habitons un lieu ? La notion de déplacement est à comprendre au-delà du seul fait d’émigrer et de la dislocation psychologique et géographique qu’il entraîne. La présente étude y voit une poétique générant une expérimentation visuelle et poétique qui vient perturber les représentations traditionnelles du rapport à l’espace.
Key words: cartography, map, place, exploration
Full article: https://representations.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/IMG/pdf/4-letessier.pdf
Full article: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/300
In The Underpainter, Austin Fraser, the narrator, is an American landscape painter who retraces the steps he took in his quest towards originality, a quest characterised first by the paradoxical desire to possess the horizon, to “bring it up close for inspection”. His pictorial experimenting with the structure of perception bespeaks a will to control experience by rational understanding. In that sense, his interpretation of the “eye/I” of Robert Henri’s teaching partakes of an intellectualisation of vision, namely vision as the projection of the mind on a world that can be grasped and mastered by the subject.
The novel’s emphasis on voyeurism and thieving leads to a more disquieting interpretation of the tensions between what is seen and ways of seeing it. The parallel between the canvas of the painter and the grid of the entrepreneur sheds light on the power relations underlying Austin’s representation of his Canadian mistress and her landscape. His turning both into “finished, saleable” pictures is a form of colonial exploitation which is underpinned by his obsession with distance between the subject – the artist – and the object offered to his gaze – be it his model or, by metonymy, the landscape of the north.
Striving to detach himself from the “perfectly composed view[s]” of his early career, Austin develops the concept of “formal ambiguity” inspired by pentimenti, those faint traces of a previous work painted over by the artist. To the optical illusion of depth composition aims at creating, he substitutes the materiality of the hard surface, the superimposed layers of paint veiling the underpainting. His series The Erasure evinces an interest in the indivisible link between revelation and obscuration, the limits and the enigma of the visible. The subject of his paintings becomes the horizon itself, as understood by phenomenology: the horizon against which the visible stands out but which is itself invisible.
Talks by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
Drafts by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
Dans The Whirlpool (1986), la thématique du “paysage double” donne à Jane Urquhart le matériau romanesque pour s’interroger sur la négociation de l’héritage pictural européen dans la perception paysagère. Son écriture met à mal le binarisme rigide qui oppose le Nouveau Monde à l’Ancien. L’emprise qu’exerce la nostalgie paysagère sur la perception fait certes des codes paysagers européens un écran occultant, mais l’écran se fait prisme lorsque les incongruités entre l’esthétique importée et l’environnement physique deviennent une forme d’expression paysagère.
Call for papers by Anne-Sophie LETESSIER
Full article: https://journals.openedition.org/eccs/1916
Avec The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood revisite les écrits de l’immigrante britannique du dix-neuvième siècle par l’entremise du texte poétique et de l’image. Ce faisant, elle donne forme à la question soulevée par l’expérience du déplacement: qu’est-ce qui fait que nous habitons un lieu ? La notion de déplacement est à comprendre au-delà du seul fait d’émigrer et de la dislocation psychologique et géographique qu’il entraîne. La présente étude y voit une poétique générant une expérimentation visuelle et poétique qui vient perturber les représentations traditionnelles du rapport à l’espace.
Key words: cartography, map, place, exploration
Full article: https://representations.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/IMG/pdf/4-letessier.pdf
Full article: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/300
In The Underpainter, Austin Fraser, the narrator, is an American landscape painter who retraces the steps he took in his quest towards originality, a quest characterised first by the paradoxical desire to possess the horizon, to “bring it up close for inspection”. His pictorial experimenting with the structure of perception bespeaks a will to control experience by rational understanding. In that sense, his interpretation of the “eye/I” of Robert Henri’s teaching partakes of an intellectualisation of vision, namely vision as the projection of the mind on a world that can be grasped and mastered by the subject.
The novel’s emphasis on voyeurism and thieving leads to a more disquieting interpretation of the tensions between what is seen and ways of seeing it. The parallel between the canvas of the painter and the grid of the entrepreneur sheds light on the power relations underlying Austin’s representation of his Canadian mistress and her landscape. His turning both into “finished, saleable” pictures is a form of colonial exploitation which is underpinned by his obsession with distance between the subject – the artist – and the object offered to his gaze – be it his model or, by metonymy, the landscape of the north.
Striving to detach himself from the “perfectly composed view[s]” of his early career, Austin develops the concept of “formal ambiguity” inspired by pentimenti, those faint traces of a previous work painted over by the artist. To the optical illusion of depth composition aims at creating, he substitutes the materiality of the hard surface, the superimposed layers of paint veiling the underpainting. His series The Erasure evinces an interest in the indivisible link between revelation and obscuration, the limits and the enigma of the visible. The subject of his paintings becomes the horizon itself, as understood by phenomenology: the horizon against which the visible stands out but which is itself invisible.
Dans The Whirlpool (1986), la thématique du “paysage double” donne à Jane Urquhart le matériau romanesque pour s’interroger sur la négociation de l’héritage pictural européen dans la perception paysagère. Son écriture met à mal le binarisme rigide qui oppose le Nouveau Monde à l’Ancien. L’emprise qu’exerce la nostalgie paysagère sur la perception fait certes des codes paysagers européens un écran occultant, mais l’écran se fait prisme lorsque les incongruités entre l’esthétique importée et l’environnement physique deviennent une forme d’expression paysagère.