Angles New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 2 | 2016 New Approaches to the Body Performance, Experimentations Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès (dir.) Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/1770 DOI: 10.4000/angles.1770 ISSN: 2274-2042 Publisher Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur Electronic reference Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès (dir.), Angles, 2 | 2016, « New Approaches to the Body » [Online], Online since 01 April 2016, connection on 23 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/angles/ 1770 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.1770 This text was automatically generated on 23 September 2020. Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Video introduction to issue 2 Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès “In Difficulty is Ecstasy”: Physical Experience at the Limits in Colum McCann’s Dancer and Let the Great World Spin Lara Delage-Toriel The Physicality of Writing in Paul Auster’s White Spaces and Winter Journal François Hugonnier Corpo-real: in situ Natacha Grimaud and Alexandre Galopin ‘Bias Cut’ Ailsa Cox Graphic Interlude New Approaches to The Body: Performance, Experimentations James McLaren, Elaine Constantine and Casey Orr When Bodies Go Digital Claire Larsonneur The Brain Without the Body? Virtual Reality, Neuroscience and the Living Flesh Marion Roussel The Body of Los Angeles, Between Commodity and Identity Charles Joseph The Actors’ Bodies in TV series LOST Sylvaine Bataille and Sarah Hatchuel Broke House by the Big Art Group: Queer Transgressions on the Contemporary New York Stage Xavier Lemoine ‘Anthropologists of our own experience’: Taxonomy and Testimony in The Museum of Innocence and The Virgin Suicides Clare Hayes-Brady Varia And: A Complex Little Word at the Heart of Janet Frame’s Language Wilfrid Rotgé An A to Z of Diasporic Life Françoise Král Angles, 2 | 2016 2 Video introduction to issue 2 Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// journals.openedition.org/angles/1772 Transcript: 1 Welcome to the second issue of Angles. My name is Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès and I am this issue's guest editor. 2 This issue contains 13 contributions in various forms and media representing new approaches to the body, performance, experimentations. This issue means to explore new ways of representing the body, of relying on its performing and performative capabilities. 3 We'll see that as the material body seems to be receding in our digital cultures. Many cultural artifacts combine sanitization and semiotization which allows for new nomadic forms of corporeality to appear. 4 The first contribution by Lara Delage-Toriel analyses the body as a prime agent in McCann's narrative plots. Semiotized by a text which it summarizes in turn, the moving body is not only a central theme but also a textual matrix in McCann's fiction which engages the body in the literary process both as sense making and sensitive entity. 5 François Hugonnier also makes a point about the importance of physicality to writing and literary creation. He shows that Paul Auster's novels are fuelled by bodily failures and functions. Auster’s breakthrough experience of a real contemporary dance performance he witnessed in 1978 actually changed his approach to language, style and literature in general. 6 Alexandre Galopin and Natacha Grimaud's dance video clip for its part explores the possibilities for the dancing body to perform on its own and in relation to another body in a peaceful, natural setting according to a triptych-based pattern. Angles, 2 | 2016 3 7 In her short fictional piece of practice-led research, Elsa Cox introduces us to the spectral presence of a female body through the evocation of the silk bias-cut dress so as to raise the key issue of the spectral presence in language of the material body. 8 In ‘The brain without the body,’ Marion Roussel goes to the roots of the uncanny feeling we get when the frontier between the material and the immaterial or virtual body gets blurred. She bases her demonstration on Marcos Novak's experiments in digital architecture. His explorations of the insides of his own brain, for instance, which he externalizes and transforms into an immersive experience for the visitor. 9 The impact of new technologies on the way we conceive of our bodies is analyzed further in Claire Larsonneur's contribution which focuses on the dissolution of the boundaries between the material and the virtual in our digital age. 10 In the next contribution, Charles Joseph chooses the cultural studies approach to explore the relation between real and virtual Los Angeles so as to suggest that L.A.'s urban sprawl is shaped by organic preoccupations. 11 Sarah Hatchuel and Sylvaine Bataille's video clip essay on the centrality of the body to acting in Lost insists on the importance of the actors' bodies to the series. The script was indeed written for the actors and the characters they embodied often had to evolve to fit the actor's own change in physical and personal characteristics. 12 In the next contribution, Xavier Lemoine shows how the Big Art Group's Broke House uses queer performances and transgressive bodies to mediatize gender, racial, sexual and social questioning of traditional representational norms. The Big Art Group which constructs theatre through queer cyber performances blurs the line defining the normative bodies, subjectivities and technological performances. 13 The one last piece in our issue about body is Clare Hayes-Brady’s investigation of the rules of objects in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence where the departed female body remembered through a number of memorabilia by the narrators tends to draw the reader into a voyeuristic position. 14 Finally, this issue's ‘Varia’ section consists of two contributions by Wilfrid Rotgé and Françoise Král. The first contribution is a linguistic analysis of the deceptively simple coordinator 'and' in Janet Frame's fiction, while the second paper presents us with an A to Z of the diasporic body which explores the various facets of diasporic theory and critique. 15 I hope you will enjoy this issue. ABSTRACTS This video introduces the thematic contributions on ‘New Approaches to the Body’. The guest editor then introduces the two contributions in the Varia section. Angles, 2 | 2016 4 La vidéo commence par présenter les contributions thématiques sur « Les nouvelles approches du corps: Performance et expérimentations ». La responsable du numéro présente ensuite les deux contributions de la section Varia. INDEX Mots-clés: vidéo, corps, langue, littérature, danse, humanités numériques, recherche expérimentale Keywords: video, body, language, literature, digital humanities, experimental research AUTHOR ANNE-LAURE FORTIN-TOURNÈS Guest editor of Issue 2. Professor at the Université du Maine. Her research focuses modern British literature, the relationship between text and image, art, trauma theory, the representations of the body, and women’s writing. Angles, 2 | 2016 5 “In Difficulty is Ecstasy”: Physical Experience at the Limits in Colum McCann’s Dancer and Let the Great World Spin Lara Delage-Toriel “In Difficulty is Ecstasy” (McCann 2003: 99) 1 “Words power the punch,” states Colum McCann (2012: Foreword), who believes in a natural affinity between writing and boxing — as if words were fuel that might better propel movement into being and make its impact all the more palpable.1 In both Dancer (2003) and Let the Great World Spin (2009), 2 McCann puts this creed into practice by staging physical performance at its most extreme: the former novel offers indeed a fictional portrait of Rudolf Nureyev, one of the 20th century’s most gifted dancers, whilst the latter revolves around Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope-walking exploit between the World Trade Center towers. Conversely, both these novels make it quite obvious that the writer’s own performance is energized and shaped by physical experience, be it at the level of a character’s heightened perceptions and bodily awareness, or on the larger scale of a narrative structured like a body, each part being interconnected and innervated by a central event (the tightrope walk) or character (Nureyev). 2 This essay is part of an ongoing inquiry into the possibility and usefulness of envisaging a semiotization of the body, along with, or leading to, a somatization of story, in the wake of the theories propounded by Peter Brooks in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Drawing from Brooks’ notion that the body is “a site of signification — the place for the inscription of stories — and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning” (Brooks 1993: 5-6), I wish to explore the ways in which McCann makes the body signify, particularly when it is pushed to its limits. This will lead me to investigate McCann’s politics vis-à-vis the reader and its possible Angles, 2 | 2016 6 repercussions: how do we participate in this signifying process? How may our psychosomatic and empathetic responses affect our position as critics? The Dynamic of the Kaleidoscope: Mc Cann’s Narrative Kinæsthetics3 3 One of the most striking features of both novels is their kaleidoscopic structure, one in which the narrative is not taken in charge by a single prevailing narrative voice but by a rather heterogeneous cluster of focal agents, comparable to the spokes of a wheel rotating around a central axis. In both cases, this nexus is enabled by a non-fictional figure, but McCann shows less interest in the hard facts of Rudolf Nureyev or Philippe Petit’s lives, than in the way in which these focal agents perceive and are affected by them.4 As a matter of fact, Petit’s identity is only given in the paratext of Let the Great World Spin; the author seems to have purposefully withheld the name from the novel itself, always referring to him as the tightrope walker or funambulist, and cutting out the actual scene of his trial, in which his name would have been most likely mentioned.