PRINT BOOKS/EBOOKS
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:
MYTHE ET FABULATION DANS LA FICTION FANTASTIQUE ET MERVEILLEUSE DE NEIL GAIMAN
Academic essay (critical analysis of novels, short stories, comics and films written by Neil Gaiman
mainly, but also of works by
Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Lovecraft, Philip José Farmer, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Roger Avary, and many others). Released in October 2018
and adapted from my doctoral thesis.
Back cover:
Neil Gaiman’s fantasy works are often deemed postmodernist since they experiment with self-reflexivity and mix it with a supposedly antagonistic impulse towards popular fiction. Typical postmodernist works mostly emphasize their attacks against the fictional illusions of referentiality, character or plot. On the contrary, Gaiman’s works unapologetically remain within the bounds of fantasy, a genre in which imagination and storytelling are paramount–along with their related issues: characterization, plot, emotion and suspense. Thus, Gaiman’s fiction is not experimental fiction enhanced with elements of popular fiction, but actual popular fiction made self-reflexive. Thanks to that peculiar mood, studying Gaiman’s work is a very fruitful means of investigating the distinctive features of popular fiction, and its inherent emphasis on storytelling–or, as Henri Bergson called it, “fabulation.” Both Bergson and Frank McConnell focused on this notion which they saw as the essential link between ancient mythmaking and today’s fiction writing. Gaiman’s fiction mostly relies on such a dialectics between myth, popular fiction and storytelling or fabulation. His fantasy stories constantly rewrite ancient, religious myths, modern myths or the “myths” of popular fiction, and feature many fictional and historical writers, traditional storytellers, or Gaiman’s own personae, so that in paratext as well as in the heart of a narrative, in the quiet and supposedly reliable words of an introduction as surely as on the most striking comics panels, fiction is portrayed as myth, writers as mythical avatars of some archetypal storyteller, and storytelling as the one, quintessential human act.
Page of the book on the publisher's website:
CIRCULATIONS ENTRE LES ARTS
Interroger l'intersémioticité
Interroger l'intersémioticité
This collective collection published online on December 4, 2016, and edited by Muriel Adrien, Marie Bouchet
and Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud, contains my article "The collaborations of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean", adapted from a communication bearing the same title, and presented on January 29, 2009 at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, as part of the ARCA
seminar (Atelier de Recherche à la Croisée des Arts) by Marie Bouchet.
The article deals with various works written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by the experimental artist Dave McKean, from modernist comics Violent Cases
and Mr Punch
to the fantasy comics series Sandman
whose covers McKean designed, to children's books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish
and The Wolves in the Walls, and the film MirrorMask
(screenplay by Gaiman, direction by McKean). The analysis focuses on the theme of mixtures between art forms, which is recurrent in these works, creating a mirror effect in relation to their form, since McKean systematically has a hybrid approach to visual arts, always mixing painting, computer graphics, photography, etc.
The article is, like the rest of the collection, available online, at this page:
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:
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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