Résumés des Articles

1Marc AMFREVILLE. Following the lead of Brown’s Wieland (1798), this article revisits the definition of the word «inhuman». Staging a representation of infanticide and insanity that owes more to the sublime than to the bestial, the author challenges the comfortable rejection of certain acts outside the sphere of our possibilities, and promotes a dialectical and infinitely disturbing vision of the «human».

2Chris BALDICK. Constatant que l’inhumain se situe au-delà d’une frontière qui n’est jamais complètement franchie dans l’œuvre de D. H. Lawrence, cet article aborde, par le biais de l’animalité et du totémisme, deux manifestations possibles du « non-humain » dans l’humain. Une étude plus poussée de The Rainbow (1915) et de Women in Love (1920), deux romans sous-tendus pas le motif de l’Arche de Noé, permet de déceler les modalités du passage d’une sphère à l’autre.

3André BLEIKASTEN. For Faulkner the ultimate question is no longer: «What is man?», but rather: «Who is man?» It is no longer a matter of probing «human nature», nor even of dealing with «the human condition», but of mapping a territory, of exploring the indistinct zones between the human and the nonhuman, the human and the inhuman. Hence the novelist's abiding concern with those borderline situations which threaten to deprive his characters of their selfhood: the extremes of desire and despair, madness and death. Man, according to Faulkner, is not an intermediary creature half-way between the divine and the animal, but rather, in Sartre's phrase, «this great divine animal without God, lost from the moment of this birth, and intent on destroying himself».

4Marc CHÉNETIER. The Cannibal, published in 1949, remains one of the most powerful texts John Hawkes has written. Provocatively determined to do away with «plot, character, setting and theme», «these familiar ways of thinking about fiction», it favors a «totality of vision or structure» that is remarkably apt to convey the dehumanization of a world paralyzed by the jaws of war, caught in the «creepy minuet history and the inner psychic history must dance together». The grandeur and permanence of this masterpiece lies primarily in its capacity to be less about inhumanity than to project its causes onto its form.

5Hélène CRIGNON. This article presents an attempt at understanding inhuman figures as they appear in fantastic literature and detective stories of the end of the 19th century. Popular authors such as Doyle, M. R. James, Machen, Stevenson and Stoker reflect the dialectics of fascination and repulsion which characterizes the fictionalization of great scientific issues during a period when the new object of science is the human subject. This reduction of the status of subject to that of object triggers a proliferation of monstrous characters in fiction. Beyond the scientific, social and ontological reasons for such a phenomenon, this study proposes to consider the representation of inhuman figures as a common spring which may account for a thematic convergence between detective stories and fantastic ones in spite of a fundamental divergence in their narrative structure.

6Cornelius CROWLEY. L’article examine l’étrange drame qui se joue dans The Preludé. Il s’agit de montrer comment, chez Wordsworth, l’inhumain est une force bienfaisante, un facteur de santé. La récupération de l’humain a pour condition une mise en disponibilité de la sensibilité, entendue comme la faculté de se laisser affecter par un pouvoir qui dépasse les affairements humains.

7Emmanuelle DELANOÉ-BRUN. Barth's characters experience the intimate inhumanity of their physical nature in a context of disintegrating references and questionable myths. This paper aims at tracing the conflicting relationship John Barth establishes in his fiction between the body and the outdated heroic myths his characters try to recapture, in a failed attempt to reassert their claim to an idealized humanity. The confrontation climaxes with Chimera (1972). Revisiting mythology and the oriental tale, the three stories look for ways out of the narrative and humanistic dead-end presented as the only outcome of the confrontation, by initiating an act of faith towards the fiction of representation as fiction rather than truth or model, engaging Barth's fiction into the narrative overflow characteristic of his later work.

8Aurélie GUILLAIN. This article looks into the ways in which anthropological discourse was used and transformed within the works of two different writers, Sigmund Freud and William Faulkner. Although one was a theoretician and the other a fiction writer, both have written narratives in which the fragile transition from inhuman to human States is endlessly scrutinized. In both their approaches, an implicit analogy is drawn between the history of the individual and the history of the human species as a whole; moreover, in both approaches the permanent threat of a regression towards pre-human States (in individual and/or collective behaviour) stands out as the very characteristic of the human species.

9Patrick HERSANT. While mainstream literature can only offer endless examples of a given human feature (jealousy, beauty, faith...), science fiction stories allow us to define the essence of man by pushing those features to their limits. Is there anything human in an android endowed with free will? Or in a six-legged creature capable of grief and compassion? If not, does this mean the essence of man lies in the number of his legs? Drawing from stories by Philip K. Dick, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and others, this paper examines the process whereby science fiction puts humanity to the test.

10Jean-Louis LAMPEL. Franz Kafka summoned literature to be «the axe which breaks the frozen sea within ourselves». A woman writer of the South of the United States answered his plea in a short narrative published in 1946, The Member of the Wedding. Frankie Adams, the heroine, dreams of a romantic Alaska where otherness can be encountered and tamed. The troubled teenager living in a dreary small town of the South experiences a radical change during a lonely summer of seclusion at home; Mc Cullers investigates her rebirth after being estranged and immersed in the uncanny. Gradually, the protagonist gives up her central fantasy of joining her brother and sister-in-law thanks to a new sensitivity to what could be aptly called «the music of silence and suffering». Born a motherless child, she finds solace in Berenice Sadie Brown, the Afro-American cook in the house who initiates her to an expression of anguish and suffering. Silence and suffering mingle in a rhapsody which suggests music as a cure for inhumanity. A comparison between Marguerite Duras’s use of music in her novels and McCullers’s is drawn.

11Jean-Michel RABATÉ. Beckett read and translated Sade in the 1930s. As this article tries to demonstrate, there are, however, further connections between the two writers. Evidence of these can be found not only in the numerous allusions to Sade in the 1932 Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but also in the type of logic at work in Watt (1953). Showing that an excess of reason is one of the most pervasive forms of tyranny and inhumanity, Beckett’s second novel turns the precepts of reason upon their head in an attempt to criticize and debunk Kant’s philosophical enterprise.

12Stéphanie RAVEZ. The purpose of this paper is to explore the Beckettian «no-man’s land» in the light of its inhabitants’ haunting question: how can I claim kinship to humanity if I cannot be named or even be akin to myself? For it is not so much the absence of a proper name as the impossible adequacy of face and name which founds and fosters identity crises in Beckett’s fiction. Yet Beckett takes the question of «manhood» one step beyond namability and figurability; ultimately, it is the very possibility of saying «I» as a defining feature of humanity that is put to the test. By addressing the rich and intriguing concept of man’s «unnamability» (or «inhommabilité») and by unravelling the interwoven strategies of avowal and denial that underlie it, this paper aims at assessing the complexity of Beckett’s (de)constructions of the fragile and fractured notions of identity and subjectivity.

13Bertrand ROUBY. J.G. Ballard’s Crash is characterized by repetition, as if its purpose were not so much to build a plot as to draw up a catalogue, so that the various rehearsals and repetitions preclude the positioning of the self. This pattern is but the consequence of an economic context in which the self becomes a customized arrangement of flesh and metal. The structure of the novel mirrors this concern by relying on accumulation, so that the organic structure gives way to a principle of «piling-up». The novel aims at sketching out a new logic which is not so scandalous in narrative contents as in narrative form and metaphoricity. The end of humanity, as Ballard sees it, is not the destruction of man, but the elimination of the organic metaphor which governs our representations of man. The eventual pileup is but the metaphor of this narrative «piling-up» which tends to do away with all organic representations of the human body and psyché.

14Florence STRICKER, Isabelle BOOF-VERMESSE. Blurring the terms in which we usually define the opposite notions of human and inhuman, Child of God offers a reflexion upon different modes of appropriation and interpretation. Following in the track of Emerson, Cormac McCarthy rehabilitates «the near, the low, the common» and shows how difficult it may be to «approach» the American world. When the human community impedes ail possible access to recognition, it appears tempting to resort to sheer shapelessness, and death is the only habitable realm left. Yet the power of the sign endures, foreshadowing whatever remains to be conceived and bringing to light the promising venues of self-reliance.

15Pascale TOLLANCE. The inhuman is of central importance in Under the Volcano, a novel where the main character appears as both superhuman and sub-human, but also fails to be entirely heroic by being all too human. Far from delivering any simple humanistic message, the book questions the existence of a middle way between a fatal retreat from reality and the deceptions inherent in the values shared by common humanity. The story of the Consul might illustrate the dangers of self-exclusion as it gives free rein to dark inhuman forces which find an echo in the rise of totalitarianism and the spectre of war. At the same time, the book displaces the limits between the human and the inhuman rather than consolidating them. It transforms the characters into a web of disembodied voices, into text and music. Thus, the disintegration of unity, the blurring of definitions and contours do not simply equate destruction, but take on the form of a positive and liberating exploration of otherness.

16André TOPIA. The various mannerisms and physical convulsions of Dickensian figures point to unbearable economic and social pressure displaced towards more or less controlled somatic manifestations. The episode of Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield illustrates this link between bodily symptoms and economic strategies, between cosmetic trompe l'oeil and commercial transaction. The spatial framing of the figure, in the manner of a tableau vivant, emphasizes the theatrical dimension of the scene. Behind the staging of masculine erotic voyeurism one can feel an effort to domesticate Miss Mowcher's female energy in its physical, social or linguistic dimensions, even though the male master can hardly channel the uncontrolled energy of his creature. Miss Mowcher's polymorphous gestuality creates an enigmatic language governed by disymmetry, imbalance and disarticulation. Both a fairy and a witch, she has all the characteristics of the folktale trickster revisited by the Victorian pantomime. Though her discourse and conduct may appear scandalous and subversive, she ultimately contributes to social order by restoring acceptable aesthetic decorum to the bodies on which she Works. She is in this a perfect representative of the expanding commodity culture and of the art of recycling.

17Paul VOLSIK. Cet article part d’un constat : le mot « inhumain », au sens de ce qui va à l’encontre des besoins, des goûts et de la « nature » de l’homme, est couramment appliqué à l’architecture moderniste (le style international de 1910 à 1965), notamment aux grands ensembles du modernisme tardif. Ce jugement est porté autant par ceux qui y habitent que par les théoriciens et praticiens post-modernistes. Prenant comme points de repère certains aspects des travaux de Le Corbusier, et comme « repoussoir » un poème de W. B. Yeats (« The Lake Isle of Innisfree »), l’article tente de cerner cet usage notamment à travers l’exemple d’une cité anglaise (le « Park Hill Estate » à Sheffield) et de réfléchir aux problèmes de la « lecture » en proposant des analogies possibles entre le désarroi si souvent ressenti devant l’architecture moderniste et celui de bien des lecteurs de la poésie « Modernist ».