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Over the last few decades, in the wake of the ‘Ethical Turn’, contemporary literature has been examined through the prism of the ethics of alterity. Yet, this may not be consis­tently the case with Victorian and Modernist literature, since relatively few of the authors of those periods have elicited such critical and ­theoretical scrutiny. The articles in this volume set off to re-read Victorian and Modernist literature in the light of the ethics of alterity and investigate whether the post-Auschwitz, contemporary period breaks away from or favours lines of continuity with the productions of the earlier era. It also strives to address works which do not belong to the canon, focusing alternately on great authors and less known artists, on what has been termed ‘minor’ texts or genres that are less visible than the novel. Approaching literature by examining the relations between ethics and aesthetics, even while adopting an ethical approach, helps the authors in this volume contribute to revising the contemporary, Modernist and Victorian canon in English Literature.

Through its take on ‘the humble’, this volume attempts to reveal the depth and philosophical relevance of literature, its ethical and political dimension as well as its connection to life. Because it can be associated with social class, religion, psychology or ethics, the notion of ‘the humble’ lends itself to diverse types of studies. The papers collected in this volume argue that in the course of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, artists and writers have revisited the term ‘humble’ and, far from treating it as a simple motif, have raised it to the status of an aesthetic category. This category can first foster a better understanding of fiction, poetry, painting, and their representation of precarious lives through various genres and modes. It may also draw attention to neglected or depreciated humble novels or art forms that developed from the Victorian to the contemporary period, through the Edwardian and the modernist eras. Finally, it helps revise assumptions about the literature and art of the period and signals to a poetics of the humble. The works of art examined here explore the humble as a possible capacity and ethical force, a way of being and acting.

Considering literature and the arts through the lens of the humble implies adopting a cross-disciplinary approach. Because it can be associated variously with social class, religion or psychology, the notion of ‘the humble’ lends itself to diverse types of studies and has been of interest both to sociologists and philosophers. In literature and the arts, ‘the humble’ is a topic that immediately calls to mind the concerns of the Victorian writers who staged low-ranking characters and figures i...

Cet article propose une lecture du quatrième roman de Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13, qui emmène le lecteur dans un univers bucolique où le processus d'oubli est saisi dans son instantanéité, au moment-même où les perceptions disparaissent. La démonstration se fonde largement sur les travaux de Freud, de Ricœur et des frères Tadié afin de cerner la puissance créative de l'oubli. Dans un premier temps, ce sont les modalités de l'émoussement de la perception qui sont mises en avant. Le second moment de la démonstration se fonde sur la mise en visibilité paradoxale ou indirecte de l'oubli, à travers la métalepse ou la dissemblance. L'article se clôt sur la catégorie de l'oubli de réserve, empruntée à Ricœur, qui garantit la fonction narrative.

International audience; This article addresses the issue of ruinous memory and testimony in The Gathering, the 2007 novel by the Irish writer Anne Enright. It starts with a consideration of the rhetoric of failure at work in the narrative and concentrates on such categories as tentativeness, stammering and contradiction as ethical devices. In conformity with Caruth’s contention that trauma can only be grasped in the “inaccessibility of its occurrence,” these devices help map out a vision of remembrance as impossible, so much so that the only possible truth is in the act of remembrance, not in the irretrievable memory itself. The second part of the article focuses on the ways in which irretrievability triggers off the compensatory powers of invention. Thanks to family archives and photographic material, the narrator creates the past, which allows her to move beyond the mere act of remembrance to capture some memorial content. Yet, in the process, invention contaminates testimony, as if the invented content acted as a complement to the act of remembrance in a backward movement not unlike that of Nachträglichkeit, when the past is somehow repeated in the present even while the present allows for a refashioning of the past. The last part of the article demonstrates that what is at stake in The Gathering is perhaps less remembrance as act than remembrance as event, when the narrator’s actions are translated into passivity or vulnerability to the radical other that the traumatic content is. The definition of event to be borne in mind is not so much dependent on the traditional vision of event as rupture or innovation as on the Levinasian idea that the meeting of alterity (and of the radical alterity that the other’s trauma and the narrator’s trauma represent) is determined by a surrendering of the self or disinterestedness. In Levinasian terms, the ethical event implies that the subject becomes a hostage to the other, which is seen as opening, exposure and passivity. This is how Levinas defines subjectivity: as passivity and vulnerability. From this point of view, the main figure of remembrance as event is that of the ghost, and the text represents vulnerability (the individual’s, the family’s, the nation’s) even while building up a poetics of vulnerability that owes much to the fraying, tentative, precarious nature of testimony, that hallmark of trauma fiction.

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Cette introduction retrace les conditions d’émergence du concept de vie nue, de Foucault à Agamben, mais aussi De Boever ou Lemke. Elle prend par ailleurs soin de contextualiser cet avènement dans le cadre du tournant éthique qui a caractérisé la critique et la théorie littéraire au cours de ces dernières décennies. Elle établit un lien entre la vie nue et des notions afférentes comme celles de dépossession, qui ont été vulgarisées sous la plume d’auteurs tels que Judith Butler et Guillaume Le Blanc. Elle se termine sur une brève évocation des articles publiés dans ce volume. This introduction traces back the conditions of emergence of the concept of bare life, from Foucault, though Agamben to more contemporary followers like De Boever and Lemke. It also takes pains to contextualise the emergence of the notion within the framework of the ethical turn in literature and theory and connects it with related items like dispossession, that have become influential thanks to the works of Judith Butler and Guillaume Le Blanc, among others. It then goes on to give a brief evocation of the articles published in the volume.

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Cette table ronde poursuit le travail amorcé lors du symposium de 2013 consacré par la SEAC aux évolutions récentes de la littérature Britannique et qui fut publié dans le n°45 d’Études britanniques contemporaines, sous forme d’un supplément intitulé « British Literature in the Present ». La table ronde qui conclut le colloque d’automne de la SEAC en 2013 fut l’occasion de nous tourner vers d’autres développements de la fiction britannique contemporaine, des mutations récentes de la politique éditoriale dont témoigne la liste de nominés au Booker Prize 2013, à la place de la tradution créative dans la fiction expérimentale ou encore à l’émergence de formes hybrides de fiction se confrontant à la radicalité de l’expérience. This round table follows in the steps of the symposium organized in 2013 on new trends in recent British literature and that was published in issue 45 (December 2013) of Études britanniques contemporaines, as a supplement entitled ‘British Literature in the Present’. For the present round table that brought the SEAC 2014 fall conference to a close, we chose to focus on trends, and literary practices liable to further displace the focus, from the evolution of publishing trends as evinced in the 2013 Booker Prize nominee list to the creativeness of translation in recent English fiction or the emergence of hybrid fictional forms that confront the radicality of experience.

Revue disponible en ligne à l'adresse : http://ebc.revues.org/2036; International audience; Ce numéro d’Études britanniques contemporaines se compose exceptionnellement de deux sections tout à la fois distinctes et reliées thématiquement. La première section — ‘Crossing into Otherness’ — prend pour sujet la poétique de la traversée dans la littérature anglaise contemporaine, pour y analyser comment l’expérience de la traversée physique est aussi une expérience éthique de l’altération. La seconde section ‘Outlanding Woolf’ poursuit et infléchit ce thème en se tournant vers la manière dont Woolf invente une poétique de l’ailleurs et est en retour déplacée et transformée par l’acte de réception.

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International audience; Cet article propose une analyse des différents exemples de forme vulnérable à l’œuvre dans le troisième roman de Jon McGregor, Even the Dogs (2011). Il se concentre successivement sur la poétique de la narration spectrale, qui permet d’opérer un renversement de visibilités, sur l’utilisation du présent de narration comme symptôme textuel de l’après-coup, et sur la thématisation de l’inter-dépendance comme nouveau modèle de subjectivité. La forme vulnérable et la poétique de la vulnérabilité qui, à bien des égards, évoquent l’esthétique du réalisme traumatique, sollicitent la responsabilité du lecteur selon des modalités qui ne sont pas sans rappeler les principes et pratiques de l’éthique du care.

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International audience; Ce volume est essentiellement consacré à l’œuvre de Graham Swift, même s’il propose une excursion vers trois autres auteurs britanniques. Les articles sélectionnés ici s’attachent à démontrer que, loin du « déclin des affects » cher à Fredric Jameson, la production swiftienne et, au-delà, contemporaine, explore les possibilités poétiques, esthétiques et génériques du récit pour contribuer à reconfigurer l’expressivité romanesque.

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International audience; This article purports to demonstrate that romance is characterised by a natural affinity with the expression of an ethics of alterity on account of its reliance on the presentation of paroxystic affect. It engages with a series of texts belonging to the canon of contemporary fiction and uses critical and theoretical material concerning romance as mode and the Levinasian ethics of alterity. By successively analysing romance as the privileged locus of the presentation of the other, as the site where the openness of the present is performed and which allows for the disarticulating power of the event, the article argues in favour of the status of romance as operator of exteriority.

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B.S. Johnson is remembered for his experimental novels, but his critical writings have fallen into oblivion over the past three decades (a tendency mitigated by the recent publication of a monograph devoted to his work and a biography). This is all the more regrettable as the introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs expresses a very idiosyncratic theory of the novel penned in a paradoxical, even contradictory, ars poetica. To Johnson, the novel is not the vehicle of fiction but truth, and his faithfulness to this single idea makes him argue in favour of an ethics of truth (as opposed to what has come to be more acceptable as an ethics of truths, over the last decade). By hankering after a naturalist, objectivist ideal, Johnson privileges an ethics of a deontic type, and this may help us situate his oeuvre in a period of transition (the 1960s and ’70s) and see him more as a belated Modernist than a proto-Postmodernist. B.S. Johnson est connu pour ses romans expérimentaux, mais peut-être moins pour ses textes critiques qui révèlent une théorie idiosyncrasique du roman. C’est en effet dans l’introduction à Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs qu’il définit son art poétique en des termes qui fleurent le paradoxe, voire la contradiction. Pour Johnson en effet, le roman n’est pas le lieu de la fiction mais bien de la vérité, et sa fidélité à cette idée unique lui fait faire le choix d’une éthique de la vérité et non des vérités. Sa poursuite d’un idéal naturaliste, voire objectiviste, l’entraîne ainsi sur les sentiers d’une éthique de nature déontique qui contribue à mieux situer son œuvre dans une période de transition, où l’image de l’écrivain maudit moderniste l’emporte peut-être sur celle du proto-postmoderniste.

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