Department of Humanities
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Browsing Department of Humanities by Author "Epp, Marla"
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Item Absent animals in Patrick Deville's Kampuchéa(2023) Epp, MarlaThis article focuses on the ways in which encounters with animals, a frequent trope in travel literature, are reworked in Patrick Deville's Kampuchéa (2011) to reflect the current dire ecological situation. Deville's narrator is in South East Asia following the path of French naturalist Henri Mouhot, whose diary of his travels was published in 1868. Although the travel routes are similar and the basic components of a travel narrative remain, Mouhot's literary style is reconfigured to reflect the twenty-first-century traveller's awareness of the violent past of the region and anxiety over the future of the planet. If animals abound in Mouhot's diary, they are remarkable in Kampuchéa primarily through their absence. Deville does not, however, occlude them from his narrative, but rather writes about them in absentia. This article studies the implications of Deville's writing about animals without any meaningful face-to-face encounters. It further considers the repercussions of these lost moments of exchange and argues that Deville's commitment to writing about animals, even those who are absent, works to keep their looming extinction at the forefront of readers' minds.Item Contemporary care in three works about the Spanish Civil War(2023) Epp, MarlaThis article reads Pas pleurer (2014), Dolorès (2018), and Josep (2020) through the lens of care studies. While Lydie Salvayre, Bruno Loth, and Aurel work in different media, they each narrate their account of the Spanish Civil War through a series of flashbacks, with older adults recounting their past experiences. I argue that the notion of care acts as a link between the formal characteristics of these works and their content centered around vulnerable people. The interactive nature of the narrations set up echoes between the different time periods, drawing attention to ongoing, if varied, needs for care.Item Daily life in Un roman russe and L’Origine de la violence(2021) Epp, MarlaThis article focuses on the tensions between the banality of the everyday and a traumatic but unspoken family loss, which are at the centre of Un Roman russe and L’Origine de la violence. I trace the ways in which the effects of the repressed family past manifest themselves in the routines of daily life, arguing that the everyday has become haunted by a transgenerational phantom, to use Abraham and Torok’s phrase. In these novels, the daily routines of the bourgeois families are not only a product of their social standing and privilege, but also a performative means of showcasing and creating this social position. I contend that the texts not only emphasize the ways in which the details of an individual’s quotidian actions are determined by class standing, but also ask to what lengths someone might go in order to protect or improve the day-to-day comforts of their family. Ultimately, I argue that quotidian experiences can be read as both the effects and the catalysts of many of the decisions surrounding moments of major upheaval—that is to say, that the exceptional event and the everyday cannot be easily disassociated.Item La documentation historique comme effet de vérité dans le roman contemporain(2018) Epp, MarlaThis article examines the citation of historical documents in Les Onze and HHhH, two novels inspired by archival materials, with a first-person narrator who styles himself as a historical expert. The citing of documents should, according to historians, be a mark of the text’s reliability, although in these novels it does not always provoke the desired result. Their respective appropriation of a historical style of writing plays with the reader’s expectations and provokes interrogations as to how best to represent history.Item Édith Thomas : l'archiviste de la libération de Paris(2018) Epp, MarlaCet article lit la nouvelle d'Édith Thomas, « Le Bonheur », comme un espace d'archives virtuelles où Thomas préserve des traces de ce qu'elle a vécu pendant la Libération de Paris. L'écriture devient un lieu de préservation, où Thomas se réfugie et où elle préserve les traces de sa vie pendant la guerre. La fiction lui permet d'organiser les événements confus en récit linéaire et cohérent et d'imaginer pour son personnage quasi-autobiographique une mort héroïque. Elle préserve aussi dans sa nouvelle un portrait complexe d'une femme résistante.Item The joy and melancholy of living beings in Mon ancêtre Poisson(2022) Epp, MarlaChristine Montalbetti’s novel Mon ancêtre Poisson (2019) is teeming with descriptions of living things, perhaps not surprisingly given its subject, the life of her great-great-grandfather, the botanist Jules Poisson. In this essay, I argue that the focus on living beings becomes a way of fleshing out her account of this distant ancestor, whose life story she can only piece together from archival documents. As I demonstrate, the narrator, a version of Montalbetti, turns to shared experiences of the physical world as a way of imagining her great-great-grandfather, picturing them walking in the same garden and experiencing similar physiological sensations. The narrator draws attention to the corporeality of both herself and Jules, emphasizing their physicality and carefully positioning them as breathing bodies, part of a complex network of living beings. Ultimately, I show that, for the narrator, the world of living things is a source of both joy and melancholy. Her research into her great-great-grandfather becomes part of a larger process of reconciling the joy of engaging with the abundance of living and growing things around her with the sorrow of accepting the fundamental and inescapable fragility of living bodies, be they animal, plant, or human.Item Physical and figural animals in Patrick Deville's Peste & Choléra(2022) Epp, MarlaThis article studies the ways in which animals are represented as both “real” and “symbolic” fgures in Patrick Deville’s Peste & Choléra (2012). The novel focuses not only on the scientifc and medical developments in which its principal subject, the scientist Alexandre Yersin, was involved, but also presents the corresponding dark underside of this progress and the violence that accompanied the lifesaving and lifechanging innovations. Deville is known for exploring the complicated repercussions of historical events that continue to be felt to the present-day. I argue that throughout Peste & Choléra, scenes with animals serve as particularly sharp reminders that human advancement does not come without a cost. Although the animals appear primarily confned to scientifc laboratories or relegated to the edges of human settlements, Deville writes about them in an expansive style, constructing a complex web of layered biblical and literary references. I contend that, through these passages, Deville encourages a multiplicity of ways of reading animals and refuses to let them be carelessly cast as simply scientifc elements, forgotten victims of modernity.Item Unearthing Montreal’s past in Hochelaga, terre des âmes(2021) Epp, MarlaHochelaga, terre des âmes considers what lies both beneath and above the ground, approaching the past through a study of trees and the natural world as well as through an academic, archaeological dig. Girard celebrates both ways of looking, and, ultimately, like DidiHuberman, shows them to be two facets of the same process of unearthing the past. As Lionel Ruffel contends, a combination of the two is a very contemporary way of approaching the past. The film is also contemporary in another sense, as it actively participates in current discussions around reconciliation in Canada.