ENGLISH
UTOPIAN STUDIES, 
Vol. 34, N°1

The first 2023 issue of American journal Utopian Studies contains, in its "Book Reviews" section, my review of the essay Fabuler la fin du monde. La puissance critique des fictions d'apocalypse (2019) by Jean-Paul Engélibert, which details the way in which apocalypse stories have shifted, over time, from being written from a religious outlook to relying on physical and particularly environmental and climatic inspirations. It then shows the different ways in which the first modern apocalypse stories, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, served as forerunners to today's works devoted to climate change and other current issues. Finally, Engélibert's work strives to prove that by creating an imaginary space of post-apocalyptic tabula rasa (a kairos opposed to the chronos of normal pre-apocalyptic life), apocalypse fiction can help generate pragmatic and dynamic thinking on new conditions and the actions to be carried out from a new context, and therefore motivation rather than discouragement, or what Michel Deguy called L'Énergie du désespoir [The Energy of Despair] (1998).


To that effect, Engélibert mainly studies Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier homme (1805), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Émile Souvestre's Le Monde tel qu'il sera (1846), Didier de Chousy's Ignis (1883), Robert Merle's Malevil (1972), José Saramago's Blindness (1995), Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels (1999), Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Céline Minard's Le Dernier monde (2007), Davide Longo's The Last Man Standing (2010), Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam novel trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), the films On the Beach (1959) by Stanley Kramer, Melancholia (2011 ) by Lars von Trier, 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2012) by Abel Ferrara, and Ghost in the Shell (1995) by Mamoru Oshii, the short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) by E.M. Forster, the drama trilogy The War Plays (1985) by Edward Bond, and the first season (2014) of the television series The Leftovers (2014-2017) by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta.


The journal's review on the publisher's website:

https://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_utopian_studies.html


The issue's page on digital platform Scholarly Publishing:

https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/utopian-studies/issue/34/1


Engélibert's book's page on its publisher's website:

https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/fabuler_la_fin_du_monde-9782348037191

TRAVEL WRITING AND ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS

This multi-authored collection, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing on August 29, 2023 and edited by Françoise Besson, contains my paper "How Bugs, Monarchs and Trees Shape Human Fate and Experience in Peter Kuper's Diario de Oaxaca and Ruins".


This article focuses on the relationship with the environment (sometimes "anthropocentric", sometimes "biocentric" or at least "lococentric" (notions borrowed from US ecocritic Lawrence Buell)), which is developed in two graphic works that American comics author and cartoonist Peter Kuper created about his stay in Mexico from 2006 to 2008: the real-life sketchbook journal Diario de Oaxaca (2009), and the fictional graphic novel Ruins (2015).


This reflection involves, among other things, an analysis of images, and in particular the use of graphic saturation, particularly on a thematic level (with the role given to animals and plants in general, to “bugs” in particular) in two graphic narratives aimed at immersing the reader in the colorful and vibrant and teeming world of Mexico as Kuper experienced it.


The book’s page on the publisher's website:

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-1287-0


Diario de Oaxaca’s page on its publisher's website: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=894  


Ruins’s page on its publisher's website:

https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/ruins


CALIBAN N°65-66


PETERLOO 1819 AND AFTER: PERSPECTIVES FROM BRITAIN AND BEYOND


Années de crises: le massacre de Peterloo en Grande-Bretagne et dans le monde

The collective collection Caliban 65-66: Années de crises: le massacre de Peterloo en Grande-Bretagne et dans le monde/Peterloo 1819 and After: Perspectives from Britain and Beyond, published in November 2022 and edited by Rachel Rogers and Alexandra Sippel, contains, at the end of the issue, in a section devoted to reviews of scientific works on various themes, edited by Nathalie Rivère de Carles and Emeline Jouve, my review of the collective collection 21st Century Dylan. Late and Timely, edited by Laurence Estanove, Adrian Grafe, Andrew McKeown, and Claire Hélie and published by Bloomsbury, which offers many analyses with different approaches, around the cultural figure of Bob Dylan today, his activities, the evolution of his music, his cultural heritage, the way he manages his image as an aging legend, patriarch of folk and rock, etc.


Caliban 65-66's page on its publisher's website:

https://pum.univ-tlse2.fr/produit/n-65-66-annees-de-crises-le-massacre-de-peterloo-en-grande-bretagne-et-dans-le-monde/


My text, as well as the whole issue, can also be read on line:

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/10914


21st Century Dylan's page on its publisher's website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/21stcentury-dylan-9781501363696/


CHA


AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL


CHA


AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL

Cha is an English-language Hong Kong literary journal devoted to Asian arts and cultures. I wrote, for their "reviews" section, an article entitled "Chinese Poetry and Translation: A Multi-Angled Overview of What Happens When Worlds Collide", published on the journal's blog in September 2022.


This long review of the collection of essays Chinese Poetry and Translation. Rights and Wrongs, co-edited by Lucas Klein and Maghiel van Crevel, presents the many issues explored in the book by authors from a wide variety of backgrounds (more or less all of them being poets, translators and scholars specializing in translation studies and/or Chinese literature), and which deal in turn with the influences of Russian, Anglophone, French or German-speaking authors on various Chinese poets, the cultural influence of classical Chinese poetry and the difficulties encountered by translators due to the extreme archaism of the Chinese language used in these ancient texts, of the internal, aesthetic and ideological struggles between the modern proponents of one school of poetry or another, of the approaches that a translator can adopt according to their culture and their personal experience, the place to be given to the culture and experience of the author of the source text, intellectual interactions between poetry, translation and theoretical commentary, etc.


The article can be read at this address:

https://chajournal.blog/2022/09/15/chinese-poetry-translation/


The book Chinese Poetry and Translation can both be purchased or read online for free from this address:

https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462989948/chinese-poetry-and-translation



MIRANDA


REVUE PLURIDISCIPLINAIRE DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE

MULTIDISCIPLINARY PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ON THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD


Issue 22

2

The spring 2021 issue of the journal Miranda, contains, in the section Reviews (edited by Candice Lemaire and Isabelle Keller-Privat), my review of two fascinating Alan Moore-focused books by Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman (and Miracleman) (devoted to the inextricable legal battles that have prevented the continuation of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman et al.'s comic book series Miracleman for almost three decades, and Mud and Starlight. The Alan Moore Interviews, 2008-2016, which is, as its subtitle suggests, a collection of the many interviews with Alan Moore carried out by Ó Méalóid over the years. 
 
The article is, like the rest of the issue, available online at the following address: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/38271 
 
Here is one of the addresses where you can get Poisoned Chalice: https://www.lulu.com/shop/padraig-o-mealoid/poisoned-chalice-the-extremely-long-and-incredibly-complex-story-of-marvelman-and-miracleman/paperback/product-23858084.html?page=1&pageSize=4 
 
 
Here is one of the addresses where you can get Mud and Starlight: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/p%C3%A1draig-%C3%B3-m%C3%A9al%C3%B3id-and-alan-moore/mud-and-starlight-interviews-with-alan-moore-2008-2016/paperback/product-6744gq.html?page=1&pageSize=4


CALIBAN N°63


DYNAMICS OF COLLAPSE IN


FANTASY, THE FANTASY AND SF


Dynamiques de l'effondrement dans le fantastique, la fantasy et la SF

Collective collection of texts on American, British, Irish, Quebec and Filipino literature and TV series (among others). The main dossier, made up of scholarly articles on the theme of societal and civilizational, environmental, economic and political collapse in works of science fiction, horror and fantasy, was edited by Florent Hébert and myself. It is followed by a section entitled "Detours" which includes reviews, small essays, poems and short stories, which was edited by Helen Goethals and James Gifford, and to which Mr. Hébert and I also contributed. Finally, a section of reviews of scientific works on various themes (edited by Nathalie Rivère de Carles and Emeline Jouve) concludes the collection, and includes a review of mine, which is in line with the themes of the other sections. To be published on 25 February 2021.


Back cover: While a variety of future-set science fiction focusing on the effects of climate change (commonly called "climate fiction" or "cli-fi") is developing, more and more voices are being raised, in the scientific community, no longer to prevent a distant apocalypse, but to take notice of a collapse (of climate, biodiversity, energy resources, hence thermo-industrial civilization) already underway. The purpose of this collection is to accomplish part of the technical and anthropological study of this context offered by theoreticians of systemic collapse, or "collapsologists", but to focus specifically on its impact on fantasy, the fantastic and science fiction. The studies featured in this book are about recent works that may have been influenced by the current context of ongoing collapse and about older works that are then re-read in light of the new context. They provide analyses developed from a collapsological perspective, and reflections on the concept of collapse.


The book's page on its publisher's website:

https://pum.univ-tlse2.fr/produit/n-63-dynamiques-de-leffondrement-dans-le-fantastique-la-fantasy-et-la-sf/


The whole issue can be read online, at this address:

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/7118



CHA


AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL


Issue 46

Written for the reviews section of Cha (a Hong-Kong-based, English-language literary journal dedicated to the arts and cultures of Asia), my article "The Fox Spirit of Bluestone Mountain: Female Force, Bridges from Zhiguai to Novel, and a Royal Rumble of Myth" is about The Fox Spirit of Bluestone Mountain, a 19th-century Chinese fantasy novel recently translated into English.


I analyze how the novel synthesizes the different aspects of the figure of the anthropomorphic and seductive fox spirit, a recurring character in Chinese folklore and fantasy, and how the novel uses mythological intertextuality and the conventions of several Chinese literary traditions to create a rich narrative and a particularly complex and compelling fox figure.


The article will be published on line in issue 46 of Cha, at an as-yet undisclosed date (the current issue featured on the journal's homepage is issue 44). In the meantime, the article is already prepublished in the "reviews" section of the journal's blog, at the following address: https://chajournal.blog/2020/08/24/fox-spirit/


Here is also the page of The Fox Spirit of Bluestone Mountain on its publisher's website:
https://camphorpress.com/books/fox-spirit-of-bluestone-mountain/

CHA


AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL


Issue 46

 Written for the reviews section of Cha (a Hong-Kong-based, English-language literary journal dedicated to the arts and cultures of Asia), my article "The Flock of Ba-Hui: Lovecraft's New England Nightmares Meet the Mythical Geography of China" is about The Flock of Ba-Hui, a Chinese collection of short stories that incorporates the fictional world of American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft into Chinese physical and cultural landscapes.

I analyze the ways the author (Oobmab) and his translators and co-authors (Akira and Arthur Meursault) blend the two cultural universes, and I contextualize the experiment, both as part of Chinese fantastic and horror fiction, and as part of Lovecraft's cultural legacy.

The article will be published on line in issue 46 of Cha, at an as-yet undisclosed date (the current issue featured on the journal's homepage is issue 44). In the meantime, the article is already prepublished in the "reviews" section of the journal's blog, at the following address:

Here is also the page de The Flock of Ba-Hui on its publisher's website:
https://camphorpress.com/books/the-flock-of-ba-hui/


STUDIES IN THE NOVEL,
Vol. 47, N°3
Special issue: the graphic novel
On February 3, 2012, the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès organized  a one-day conference entitled "Passages", and supervised by Amélie Dochy, Céline Rolland and Damien Alcade, during which I presented a conference entitled "Sandman, by Neil Gaiman: passage du temps, œuvre-passage (du comic book au roman graphique").

In the collective collection of articles pictured opposite (a special comics-focused issue of the American journal Studies in the Novel, edited by Timothy Boswell and Stephen E. Tabachnik and published in the fall of 2015), there is my article "Neil Gaiman's Sandman as a gateway from comic books to graphic novels", which is an adaptation and an English translation of the aforementioned lecture.

The article and the lecture explore how Sandman was a catalyst for the development of the concept of the graphic novel, both in aesthetic terms (that is, in terms borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin by Andrés Romero-Jodár: a change of chronotope model in relation to comic books' serialization paradigm) and in terms of editorial practices (studied in the light Jean-Paul Gabilliet's work on the comics industry in his compendium Of Comics and Men).

Studies in the Novel issue page on Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/32409
 CALIBAN N°52

CALIBAN AND HIS TRANSMUTATIONS
Caliban et ses avatars
This collective collection of article was published in 2014 as the fiftieth anniversary issue of the journal Caliban. It was edited by Françoise Besson, Philippe Birgy, Roland Bouyssou, Jean-Louis Breteau, Jean-Paul Débax, Albert Poyet and Marcienne Rocard, and it is about the thousand reinventions of the character Caliban, and of Shakespeare's play The Tempest in general, in world culture. It contains my article: "Calibans for the 1990s and 2000s: Shakespeare and Fantasy in the Age of 'Professional Fan Fiction' and Integrative Fiction".

The article studies the rewrites of Caliban and The Tempest in various parodic works or various crossover works of literature and comics belonging to the genres of fantasy, fantasy and/or science fiction, and published in the 1990s and 2000s (specifically: Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics series, Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics series, Nigel A. Sellars's short story "The Confessions of Caliban", and the novels Caliban's Hour by Tad Williams and Iliad and Olympos by Dan Simmons).

Page of the book on the publisher's site:

My article (as well as the whole issue) can also be read online:

 SHOFAR
An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Jewish Studies
Vol. 29, N°2






&

VISUALIZING JEWISH NARRATIVE
Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels
My article "The 'Outsider': Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament" was first published in the winter 2011 issue of the American journal of Jewish studies Shofar, by Purdue University Press in Indiana. The editor of the issue was Derek Parker Royal.

The book Visualizing Jewish Narrative, published in June 2016 by Bloomsbury and also edited by Derek Parker Royal, contains a reprint of all the papers from the original Shofar issue, plus many other articles on the same themes (comics and Jewishness). My article is therefore also reprinted in it.

"The 'Outsider'" studies the radically different effects obtained through the references to the Old Testament in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and in Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament (a multi-authored collection of underground comix parodying the Old Testament, published by Knockabout Comics, and six stories of which were written by Gaiman).

The Shofar issue's page on Project MUSE:

The Visualizing Jewish Narrative book's page on its publisher's website:

The article is also available in an abridged version on the website of artist-interviewer Mia Funk, who published it online alongside her interview with Neil Gaiman:
STUDIES IN COMICS
Vol. 2, N°1
On the weekend of 28-29 May, 2010 the University of Northampton held an international three-day conference on Alan Moore, entitled Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore. This collection contains articles adapted from the various lectures delivered during this series of conferences. So it contains, among other things, my article "Neil Gaiman: Portrait of the Artist as a Disciple of Alan Moore", adapted from the lecture of the same name given in Northampton on 29 May, 2010. The collection was published in 2011, as an issue of the British journal Studies in Comics, and it was edited by Nathan Wiseman-Trowse and Mike Starr, who were also the organizers of the conference.

My article explores different facets of the influence exercised on Neil Gaiman by Alan Moore, particularly through the various continuations and expansions of Moore's ideas that Gaiman has engaged in throughout his career (with Miracleman, which he took over as script writer after Moore, with Sandman and Black Orchid, both of which draw much material from Swamp Thing, and with Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, which positions itself as a restropectively  complementary narrative to Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?).: 

The article (and the rest of the issue) can be bought and read from this address:
MOUNTAINS FIGURED AND DISFIGURED IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
This collection edited by Françoise Besson and published in March 2010 includes my first article, "Fantasy and Landscape: Mountain as Myth in Neil Gaiman's Stories", which contains analyses of  passages from novels, short stories and comics by Neil Gaiman revolving around mountainous settings, raging weather, and the notion of myth.

The article examines passages from the novels American Gods (2001) and Stardust (1997), from the short story "The Monarch of the Glen" (2004) and the Eternals comic (2006-2007). It discusses the use of the mountain motif, analyzing several occurrences of mountainous landscapes, the sublime/Gothic mood some of them help to create, and the way most of them are integrated into the intertextual and mythological systems that structure these stories.

The book's page on its publisher's website:
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