CM Dancer Moodle Pour Étus

Littérature LLCER3 s5
DANCER, COLUM MCCANN (2003)

Informations pratiques
 Calendrier
 12h CM
 1h TD toutes les deux semaines (V. Jobert-Martini ou P-A. Pellerin)
 Evaluation
 CM & TD = même évaluation
 TE de 4H commun aux deux cours de littérature
 Dissertation ou commentaire de texte sur un des deux ouvrages au programme
 Matériel
 CM => ordinateurs OK + cf Moodle (PowerPoint & annexes) + livre (version papier)
 TD => cf enseignant•e ; livre (version papier)
 Moodle: ce PWP + doc word (citations & biblio) & docs utiles
Colum McCann
 Born & raised in Dublin, Eire, 1965
 Trained as a journalist
 Aged 21 => crossed the US by bike & started writing fiction
 Lived in Japan before settling in NYC (1994)
 First collection of short stories: 1994
 Several literary prizes in the US & Europe
 Teaches creative writing at Hunter College (NYC)
 International opening (Irisho-Irish lit)
 Contemporary spatial and societal topics/issues
 Form of optimistm (utopia?) w/out being disconnected from
real world
 Co-founder of Narrative 4 https://narrative4.com/
Bibliography – primary sources
Colum McCann’s fiction (main publications):
 1994. Fishing the Sloe-‐Black River. London: Phoenix House

 1995. Songdogs. London: Phoenix House.
 1998. This Side of Brightness. London: Phoenix House.
 2000. Everything in This Country Must. London: Phoenix House.
 2003. Dancer. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
 2006. Zoli. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
 2009. Let the Great World Spin. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
 2013. TransAtlantic. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
 2015. Thirteen Ways of Looking. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
 2020. Apeirogon. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
Bibliography – interviews
 BIRNBAUM, Robert, & Colum McCANN. ‘Identity Theory: Colum interviewed by Robert Birnbaum’. 2002.
URL : http://colummccann.com/interviews/identity-theory-colum-interviewed-by-robert-birnbaum/
 ---. ‘Colum McCann’. The Morning News, 2007. URL: https://themorningnews.org/article/colum-mccann
 DOYLE, Roddy, & Colum McCANN. 2010. ‘Roddy Doyle in Conversation with Colum McCann’. Chaîne
YouTube du PEN American Cente. URL : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ahZCJ8yhv8
 HEMON, Aleksandar, & Colum McCANN. ‘Conversation with Sasha Hemon’. Colum McCann’s official
website, 2003. URL : http://colummccann.com/conversation-with-sasha-hemon/
 HOWELL, Emily, & Colum McCANN. ‘Politics of Empathy: An Interview with Colum McCann’. Barely
South Review, undated. URL:
https://barelysouthreview.com/politics-of-empathy-an-interview-with-colum-mccann/
 MAUDET, Cécile, & Colum McCANN. 2014. ‘Deux entretiens avec Colum McCann’. Transatlantica, n°1 :
unpaginated. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6940
 McCANN, Colum, & Declan MEADE. ‘Dancer interview’. Colum McCann’s official website, 2003. URL :
http://colummccann.com/interviews/dancer-interview/
Bibliography - monographs
 CAHILL, Susan, & Eóin FLANNERY (eds.). 2012. This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum
McCann, Reimagining Ireland vol. 17. Berne: Peter Lang AG.
 CARDIN, Bertrand. 2016. Colum McCann : Intertextes et interactions. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de
Rennes, 2016. (BU)
 CUSATIS, John. 2011. Understanding Colum McCann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
 FLANNERY, Eoín. 2011. Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.
 MAUDET, Cécile. 2018. L’autrefois et l’ailleurs : Poétique de la rupture dans l’œuvre littéraire de Colum
McCann. Oxford : Peter Lang. (BU)
Bibliography - articles
 BOURDEAU, Marion. 2017. « Du bodyscape au mindstyle : (re)construction par le corps dans Dancer de Colum McCann ».
Études de stylistique anglaise n°11. URL: https://doi.org/10.4000/esa.593
 CAHILL, Susan. 2012. ‘Choreographing memory: the dancing body and temporality in Dancer’. In This Side of Brightness:
Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann, Reimagining Ireland vol. 17, Susan CAHILL & Eóin FLANNERY eds., 75-101. Berne:
Peter Lang AG.
 DELAGE-TORIEL, Lara. 2015. ‘“In difficulty is ecstasy”: physical experience at the limits in Colum McCann’s Dancer and Let
the Great World Spin’. In New Approaches to the Body - Performance, Experimentations, dirigé par Anne-Laure FORTIN-
YOURNES. Angles: French Perspectives on the Anglophone World, vol. 2. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/angles/1779
 GILLIGAN, Ruth. 2016. ‘Towards a "Narratology Of Otherness": Colum Mccann, Ireland, and a New Transcultural Approach’. In
Studies in the Novel vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 107-125. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26365025
 MIANOWSKI, Marie. 2014. ‘The Choreography of Exile in Colum McCann’s Fiction’. Nordic Irish Studies vol. 13, n° 2: 31-42.
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24332407
 MIKOWSKI, Sylvie. 2012. ‘Nomadic Artists, Smooth Spaces and Lines Of Flight: Reading Colum McCann Through Joyce, and
Deleuze and Guattari’. In This Side of Brightness: Essays on the Fiction of Colum McCann, Reimagining Ireland vol. 17, Susan
CAHILL & Eóin FLANNERY eds., 129-147. Berne: Peter Lang.
Introduction
 First impressions => ? 2. ‘What we, or at any rate, I, refer to
confidently as a memory – meaning a
5 or 6 keywords (plot, form, effects etc). moment, a scene, a fact that has been
 Quick summary = ? subjected to a fixative and thereby
rescued from oblivion – is really a form of
storytelling that goes on continually in the
1. ‘This is a work of fiction. With the mind and often changes with the telling.
exceptions of some public figures whose Too many conflicting emotional interests
real names have been used, the names, are involved for life ever to be wholly
characters and incidents portrayed are the acceptable, and possibly it is the work of
work of the author’s imagination.’ the storyteller to rearrange things so that
they conform to this end. In any case, in
talking about the past we lie with every
+/Vs. breath we draw.’ – William Maxwell
Introduction
 Historical fiction?
 ‘Historiographic metafiction’?
3. “Novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical event
and personages.” (HUTCHEON 1988, 5)
4. “ HM is written today in the context of a serious contemporary interrogating of the nature of
representation in historiography.” (HUTCHEON 1989, 47)
5. In challenging the seamless quality of the history/fiction (or world/art) join implied by realist narrative,
postmodern fiction does not, however, disconnect itself from history or the world. It […] asks its readers to
question the processes by which we represent our selves and our world to ourselves and to become aware
of the means by which we make sense of and construct order out of experience in our particular culture.
We cannot avoid representation. We can try to avoid fixing our notion of it and assuming it to be
transhistorical and transcultural.” (HUTCHEON 1989, 51)
Introduction
 Rudi
 Rudolf Nureyev (French spelling = Noureev)
 * 1938 (Soviet Union)- †1993 (Paris)
 Kirov
 Defected in Paris in 1961
 Royal Ballet London; head of the Paris Opera Ballet)
 Rock-star like personality
 Cultural & historical references aplenty; unfamiliar with them?
Look them up!
 Rudi (golden thread) and/vs.? vast array of other characters
1/ DANCER IN CONTEXT: MCCANN’S FICTIONAL UNIVERSE
Dis(-)placement and lust for a fantasized Elsewhere
Recurring motives (food for thought!)
Caractéristiques stylistiques & esthétiques
Influences et inspirations
2/ POSTMODERNISM & ETHICS
Postmodernism: main tenets
PM in D: duality, fragmentation & obliquity
PM in D: The exceptional & the mundane - ethics and aesthetics
PM in D: polyphony, hybridity
3/ TEMPORALITY
Outline Historical context
Rhythm
Suspension
Artistic performance: a different space/time?
4/ BODY, MIND, SOUL: INTERCORPOREITY &
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Tenets in McCann’s works
Body and/in mind: a corporeal text
The body as a tool
Intercorporeity and intersubjectivity
5/ READING DANCER
Empathy, sympathy & their limits
The reader’s role: from spectator to choreographer?
1/ Dancer in context: McCann’s fictional universe
1. Dis(-)placement and lust for a fantasized Elsewhere
Cf Pessoa, The Book of Intranquillity: 6. "to move is to live" (1999, 47).

 U-topia
 “Song of a Wayfarer”
 Compulsive wandering/movement => constant in-betweenness.
Cf Definition of exile by Edward Said (1994, 39):
7. "Restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled and unsettling others. You
cannot go back to some earlier or perhaps more stable condition of being at home;
and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation."
8. She wakes, someone shouting her name from around the

doorframe. Margot, Margot, Margot! [...]
She takes the cotton balls from her ears and says: I was just back in
my good years, Erik. I was dreaming.
But it is Rudi, not Erik, who steps forward with a bathrobe, holds it
open. She rises from the bath as he places the robe around her
shoulders and kisses her forehead. Behind Rudi stands Erik,
smoking. She feels a flush of warmth, these two beautiful men
spoiling her.
We phoned, says Erik, pulling hard on his cigarette, but nobody
answered. Rudi was afraid you were drowning. (229)
9. Margot's generosity with everyone but herself is stunning. This of course is

the ultimate kindness. Given all the fuss with Tito she is terribly tired. Still she
managed to arrange a parcel for Mother and Tamara. [Margot packed the box
herself, to be carefully sent through the Finnish embassy (203). (Rudi’s POV)
10. If anything, she had been a mother to him, increasingly so over the years.
(310) (Margot’s POV)
2. Other recurring motives
 Balance
 Suspension (cf Chap 3)
 Lines & connections
 Water ("for everything is water", Derek Mahon)
3. Aesthetic and stylistic characteristics
 Alternation between short stories and novels w/ dialogues between the two genres
 Collage technique
 Polyphonic narrations + frequent use of direct or indirect free speech/thoughts =>
 fluidity and liveliness
 disorientation
 numerous deictic changes
 alternation between singular and repetitive modes of narration
 Playing w/ the unsaid + decentering strategies
3. Aesthetic and stylistic characteristics
 Multiple exophoric coming & goings between the Discourse World & the Text
World(s)
 Empathy
 Meticulous descriptions
 Body & the senses
 Balance/unbalance dialectic
4. Influences & inspiration
11. "Three major influences operate in Colum McCann's fiction: his Irish
upbringing, his extensive reading and his penchant for international
travel.” (CUSATIS 2011, 13)
 Dylan Thomas
 John Berger
 Emile Zola
 Hunter College
 The Beats
 Irish literary tradition
12. "The Irish have always resided in a problematic world or space; in terms of
physical space within Ireland and in terms of cultural belonging." (HAND 2012,
51)
13. "Thus [... ] the post-colonial project concerns attempts at reclaiming the
space, and the narrative of space, of taking control and making it one's own
imaginatively. (HAND 2012, 46)
14. [These writers] show their willingness to end the dialogue, most often conflicting,
established by their elders between fiction and the Irish nation. It is no longer a question of
helping to define the national identity, of forging "the conscience of their race", even
through contradiction. Moreover, the Irish nation, strengthened, at least as far as the
Republic was concerned, by its active participation in world trade and cultural exchanges,
no longer needed to question its "difference" from other nations, including Great Britain
(MIKOWSKI 2004, 273).
 McCann, Joseph O'Connor, Colm Tóibín, Donal Ryan, Sally Rooney, Sara Baume…
15. Crossing borders is not only about geographical displacement; it is also about crossing
and expanding the boundaries of a literary tradition that is certainly recent [...], but
nevertheless threatened with sclerosis by the recurrent use of the same themes and narrative
structures. (MIKOWSKI 2004, 217)
16. "If I never set a book that touches the notion of Ireland or Irishness again, it still
won't matter to the claim, in fact, that I'm an Irish writer" (BIRNBAUM &
McCANN 2002, unpaginated).
17. “A nationalism which remained caught in this [cultural] chauvinistic phase could
not only lapse into racism but become itself a tool in the subjugation of people, and
so bring about the very negation of its own original impulses” (KIBERD 2005, 4)
 Transculturalism
18. "Vodka. Song. Sadness. Poetry. Exile. Violence. In other words, I found Ireland.“
(McCann in CUSATIS 2011, 126)
19. “Because McCann positions Ireland in a global framework, the Irish story is suddenly
'everywhere'" (TUCKER 2010, 111).
20. "A call from Gilbert. The suicide notion. If you don't come back soon, Rudi, I will leave a
gap between the floor and my feet. [...] I told Ninette that, as a Tatar, I had spent centuries
contemplating the gap between floor and feet. She shot back that she was Irish and had
already spent hundreds of years in the air.” (219)
21. “The novels’ formal structure indicates their preoccupation with cultural exchange. […]
Because McCann’s narrative structure collapses the boundaries between individual and
collective histories, it offers another way of looking at the relationship between self and other.
By reconceiving this dialectic, these novels create a poetics of alterity that does not seek to
draw boundaries between nations and cultures, as cultural pluralism does, nor erase these
lines, as universalism does; rather it allows readers to see beyond them.” (TUCKER 2010,
109)
 Benedict Kiely
22. “[In Kiely’s work,] McCann found not only ‘a symphony of sound’ but also a synthesis of re-‐
appropriated songs, ballads, myths, colloquialisms, snippets from the popular culture, a richly textured
style that continues to impact him” (CUSATIS 2011, 18-19)
 Seamus Heaney/Irish folk/oral tradition
23. “[McCann uses] highly rhythmic syntax, which relies heavily on sentence fragments and is often
given further cohesion by rhyme and fixed meter as well as assonance and alliteration” (CUSATIS 2011,
18).
 Short story
24. “The short story is the form which renders the lives of the marginal and the isolated” (KIBERD
1995, 494), of “these lonely people who live on the fringes of society because of spiritual emptiness or
material deprivation” (KIBERD 2005, 48)
25. “Contemporary Irish short stories can be read as adaptations of anecdotes, of news items, of unusual
minor events of everyday life, which are nevertheless pointers to changes in society” (CARDIN 2014,
§10).
 26. “the first appearance in fiction of the Little Man” (O’CONNOR 1963, 15)
 27. “In the modern short story, […] the teller no longer seeks to flee from his
humdrum surroundings, but rather to confront them in all their banality […]. Such a
literature describes no longer the exploits of kings and princes, but rather the minor
triumphs and small sadnesses of the commonplace man.” (KIBERD 2005, 47-48)
2/ Postmodernism & ethics
1. Postmodernism: main tenets
 https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy
 28. “What I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably
political.” (HUTCHEON 1988, 4)
 Post-colonial phenomena + postcolonial thought
 cf HUTCHEON 1988, esp. ix-xiii, 3-4 & 12:
 Paradoxical & contradictory
 Polymorphous & proliferating (metafiction & intertextuality)
 Self-reflective & investigatory
 Subversive & anti-establishment
 Resisting limits and impermeable boundaries
29. “By the mid-1960s, critics like Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan had begun to point out some of the characteristics,
in Europe and in the US, of what we now call PM. They argued that the work of PMists was deliberately less unified,
less obviously ‘masterful’, more playful or anarchic, more concerned with the processes of our understanding than
with the pleasures of artistic finish or unity, less inclined to hold a narrative together, and more resistant to a certain
interpretation, than much of [modern art] (BUTLER 2002, 5).
Butler (2002):
 Resisting grand narratives (capitalism, Marxism, etc)
=> 30. “the basic attitude of PMists was a skepticism about the claims of any kind of overall, totalizing explanation” (15).
=> 31. “The typical PMist conclusion [is] that universal truth is impossible, & relativism is our fate” (16).
 Deconstruction (cf relativism): 32. “Truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing intellectual
frameworks of the judging subject” (16).
 -> Relativist claims= 33. “the world, its social systems, human identities even, are not givens, somehow guaranteed by a
language which corresponds to reality, but are constructed by us in language, in ways that can never be justified by the
claim that this is the way that such things ‘really are’. We live, not inside reality, but inside our representations of it.” (21).
 Playing with the text (cf Nouveau Roman) (21).
 The death of the author: 34. “Attention to an author would privilege quite the wrong thing, [… ie] seeing him or her as an
origin, or a delimiting authority” (23). <- intertextuality: 35. “The novel will inevitably reproduce or re-present earlier
positions, earlier ideas, conventional modes of description, and so on […] All texts are seen as perpetually referring to other
ones, rather than to any external real.”
=> greater imp of the reader, given more space to interpret & construct the meaning of the text => 36. “The text, as really
constructed by the reader, was thereby liberated and democratized for the free play of the imagination” (24).
 Metaphor <- incapacity of language to truly translate experience.

 Rewriting history: 37. "The basic PMist claim is that the notion of objective [historical] reconstruction according
to the evidence is just a myth" (33)
 38. “An exact correspondence bet narrative & ‘the past’ is not possible. We can describe the ‘same’ event in many
≠ ways, our access to the evidence is always mediated, nothing is simply transparent, & there are always absences
& gaps & biases to be dealt with. But narratives can still be more or less adequate to the (interpreted) evidence,
& new evidence can still overturn narratives” (36).
 cf Soja (1989, 22) & crisis of the modern novel
 39. “It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And this is because
we are too aware of what is continually traversing the storyline laterally. That is to say, instead of being
aware of a point as an infinitely small part of a straight line, we are aware of it as an infinitely small part of
an infinite number of lines, as the centre of a star of lines. Such awareness is the result of our constantly
having to take into account the simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities.”
2. PM in Dancer: duality, fragmentation & obliquity
40. "The boy grinned. Some soldiers began clapping in rhythm but, just as the dance
was about to end, the boy almost fell. His hand slapped the floor and broke the
impact. For a moment he looked as if he were about to cry.”
41. "both devil and demi-god" (CUSATIS 2011, 141)
42. "[Rudi] will serve as the consummate vehicle to explore dichotomies that are
at the heart of McCann's fiction" (Cusatis 2011, 132).
43. Yulia "lives between two worlds“ (TUCKER 2010, 114)

44. "Images of doubles [...] proliferate throughout the text, particularly in its second
half.” (CAHILL 2012, 92)
45. “I [Yulia] had often caught a glimpse of him [Rudi] looking in the mirror, as if
he were willing himself into someone else's body.” (162)
// 46. "At the party, having drunk too much, I [Rudi] was struck by the idea that, as
life goes on, there is a double for everyone, no matter whom [...] On searching for
myself I realized there was nobody" (225).
 47. Rudi suddenly joined the table – hey Rudi, this is Victor Pareci – and Victor felt a pit of despair in his
stomach as Rudi looked at him, they detested each other immediately, they could see the cockiness but
they could also see the doubt, that volatile mixture, fire and vacuum, both men knowing that they were
similar, and their similarities galled them, […] that they were the edge of a coin and no matter how many
times the coin was flipped they would always remain the edge, […] but after a while they began dueling
across the dancefloor, […] and only Victor could live in a duel with Rudolf Nureyev […], and who was
there across the floor but Rudi, still and majestic, and as the music jumped back into life they grinned at
each other and they recognized at that moment that they had somehow crossed chasm, that they were
standing on the same side of the divide, knowing with a deep certainty that they would never touch each
other […], and the realization was a balm, a salve, an unspoken pact, they had no need for each other’s
bodies, but still they were inextricably tied, bound not by money of sex or work or fame, but by their
pasts, and now, having met in a crosswind, […] the dancer put out his hand and they shook, laughed in
unison, went to a table where they ordered a bottle of vodka and spent the hours talking, […] finding
suddenly that they were talking about things they hadn’t talked about in years […] and they could have
been talking to mirrors, finding each other by finding themselves [.] (263-4)
48. “They had their arms around each other and their shadows made them look like one person” (329).
49. ‘Reflections […] are also a means of imagining oneself differently and of projecting oneself out of the
body, to cross borders’ (CAHILL 2012, 91).
50. ‘His face against her thigh, her hip, her stomach. Both of them burning away, they are one movement,
a body nation’ (215).
51. ‘The dancing still spun in me [Yulia] – Rudi had stood upon that stage like an exhausted explorer who
had arrived in some unimagined country and, despite the joy of the discovery, was immediately looking
for another unimagined place, and I felt perhaps that place was me’ (161).
52. ‘His body odour was severe but still I wanted to draw closer and inhale him, his energy’ (103).
53. ‘A fan […] said that until he saw me perform he did not know who he really was’ (189).
54. He has rouged his cheeks with a red stone and darkened his eyes with black liner
stolen from the Opera House. His eyelashes have been thickened with a paste and
his hair swept back with pomade. At home alone, he smiles and then grimaces in the
mirror, creates a series of faces. Stepping frontways to the mirror, he adjusts his
tights and his dance belt: the mirror is tilted downwards so he can see no more than
his mid-torso. He stretches his arm high beyond the reflection, takes a bow, and
watches his hand re-entering the mirror. He steps closer, exaggerates his turnout,
tightens the upper muscles of his legs, brings his hips forward. (68-69)
 Elizabethan Stage Irishman (cf 55)
 56. “There was a real sense in which Irish people chose to occupy the assigned role, if
only to complicate and ultimately challenge it. [The tactic was to] take a racist
stereotype, occupy it until it became one's own, and thereafter invert its meaning.”
(KIBERD 2005, 130)
 57. ‘I conceal my fear in loudness, including performances’ (192)

 Derrida (1992, 106)'s idea that any choreographic text is necessarily choral.
 Cf etymological link bet. khoros, the Greek polyphonic choir, and khoreia,
choreography:
58. Derrida's appeal for a choreographic text is a demand for a work that dances [...] It
is a text that challenges, questions, and refigures the ground it traverses while
maintaining a chorus of voices [...] The structure of Dancer, with its multiple narrators,
its chorus of voices and stories, could be seen to approximate such a choreographic text
(CAHILL 2012, 99)
 Andy Warhol
3. PM in Dancer: the exceptional & the mundane - ethics and aesthetics
 Gestalt theory as opposition bet. figure & ground:

59. “The figure/ground opposition originated in Gestalt psychology. It was
developed at the beginning of the 20th century and was later introduced into
cognitive linguistics and cognitive stylistics. Originally, the opposition between
figure and ground was exclusively visual. (...) An element is said to be the figure
when it becomes more prominent than others which, as a result, come to constitute
the ground.” (JOBERT 2014, 64)
(JOBERT 2014, 64)

 "refigur[ing] the ground" (Cahill)

60. 'Despite the world's destructiveness, the creative force, the need for beauty, is ultimately
indomitable' (CUSATIS 2011, 198).
61. “McCann depicts the artist as one cursed to ignore his practical duties in order to respond with
beauty to the world's ugliness [; in order] to fulfil his aesthetic obligation of liberating beauty,
then, the artist must embrace the human condition with all its confusion and corruption, both
personal and political. (DALY & SOMER 2000, xvii)
62. 'The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small" (TA, 291).
63. “ce qui est estimé bon", RICŒUR 1990, 200, original italics)
 Frank O'Connor’s 'Little Man’ + Zola

 64. 'He [Zola] saw the job of the social novelist as rewriting history as life, creating experience out of
raw facts. In this way he could restore the possibility of decency to the 'ordinary' man or woman. In the
end, he was in fact making a huge leap into imagination, but this time the imagination was carrying
questions of great social importance.
Part of Zola's genius is that he was aware that one of the functions of the social novel is to find purpose
even in the supposed nullity of things. Even when it expresses the most terrible despair, or when it
looks upon the anonymous, or when it finds life reduced to dust, or even when it is discouraged by
itself, the novel must also serve as a consolation, reviving our enthusiasm, our capacity to believe in the
other. (McCANN, “‘I Am Here To Live Out Loud’. In defence of the social novel: an essay on Emile
Zola”)
65. "No matter who you are - if you are a rent boy, if you are a maid, if you are a soldier or a
washerwoman, if you are a translator - no matter how much you are seen on the periphery, […] your
stories matter' (BIRNBAUM & McCANN 2002, unpaginated).
66. “[PMists] adapt Foucauldian arguments with great success to show how
discourses of power are used in all societies to marginalise subaltern groups. [...]
Many of these eccentric marginal figures are found in postmodern fictions"
(BUTLER 2002, 56).
67. “Postmodernist thought, by attacking the idea of a notional centre or dominant

political ideology, has facilitated the promotion of a politics of difference" (BUTLER
2002, 56).
68. "Pluralist identity politics [...] often involves the conscious assertion of a
marginalised identity against the dominant discourse" (BUTLER 2002, 57).
69. Some poets follow Yeats's example and use the mingling of the mythical and of the prosaic
that characterises his work. When Lennox Robinson speaks of reconciling 'poetry of speech’
with 'humdrum fact’, he is referring to Synge and O'Casey but this may actually be the
motto of modern Irish poetry. What has changed is the weight given to the two elements. The
heroic element becomes a distant echo, like a memory of what we are not, while the poet's
love is for the daily, the mundane. (GENET & FIEROBE 2004, 221-222).
 Single meta-narrative vs. protean and multi-centred /kaleidoscope-like narrative

70. "Suite rapide d'impressions, de sensations vives et variées" (Larousse, "Kaléidoscope")
 Impressionist/pointillist
(Homework)
 /!\ Groupe 231: new instructions!

 Pour séance 4 (TDs 7 et 8)
 Finir plan sur dissert #1
 Faire repérage sur commentaire #2
4. PM in Dancer: polyphony, hybridity
71. “The idea that you can be sprung from some sort of dry well and somehow
have a voice is patently absurd. We are an accumulation of others. Which means
that we're also an accumulation of other places. E pluribus unum. This is our DNA.
We are bound to it” (GARDEN & McCANN 2014, 15)
 72. '[Postmodern texts are] hybrid texts in their use of [...] a mixture of voices, perspectives and
genres’. (INNES 2007, 69)
 73. « Le roman polyphonique […] est bien situé sur cette brèche du ‘moi’ […] où explose la littérature
moderne: pluralité des langues, confrontation des discours et des idéologies, sans conclusion et sans
synthèse – sans ‘monologisme’, sans point axial » (KRISTEVA 1998, 15, original italics).
 Cf Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1986): counterpoint: implies
 simultaneity of narrative lines (embedded narratives or digressions = polyphony)
 a strong thematic connection bet. the different lines (see KUNDERA 1986, 93-94).
 equality of the ≠ lines or voices
 indivisibility of the whole
 The inclusion of other non-novelistic genres (74. “nouvelle ; reportage ; poème ; essai", KUNDERA
1986, 93)
 “Strange attractor”.
 Physics + mathematics & dynamical systems theory. Attractors =
75. « Région de l'espace des phases vers laquelle converge […] le point représentatif d'un système
dynamique » (Larousse, entrée « Attracteur »)
“Strange" attractors have 76. "a fractal structure, which is very often the case in chaotic systems"
(MAJOLA-LEBLOND 2015b, 171).
77. 'It is a major feature of chaotic dynamics to be confined to what is known as an attractor,
revealing and structuring folding and stretching of trajectories [in this fractal structure]'
(MAJOLA-LEBLOND 2015b, 169).
78. “[Metamodernism] emerges from, and reacts to, the postmodern as much as it is a cultural logic that
corresponds to today’s stage of global capitalism.” (VERMEULEN, GIBBONS & VAN DEN AKKER
2017: 5-6)
79. “MM oscillates between what we may call [...] postmodern and pre-postmodern (and often modern)
predilections: between irony and enthusiasm, between sarcasm and sincerity, between eclecticism and
purity, between deconstruction and construction and so forth. Yet ultimately, it points to a sensibility
that should be situated beyond the postmodern.” (VERMEULEN, GIBBONS & VAN DEN AKKER
2017: 11)
 Informed naivety/ pragmatic idealism
 PM culture of relativism, irony & pastiche vs MM cult of engagement, affect, & storytelling. (cf
VERMEULEN & VAN DEN AKKER 2010)
80. “MM artists attempt to move beyond the worn-out sensibilities and emptied practices of the
postmodernists – not by radically parting with their attitudes and techniques but by incorporating and
redirecting them towards new positions and horizons.” (VERMEULEN, GIBBONS & VAN DEN
AKKER 2017:10)
81. “Recent narratives take their cue from postmodernist insights and deconstructive
impulses, but explore the ways in which fictionality and meta-referentiality may serve
in the endeavour to reconstruct some kind of meaning that allows for intersubjective
communication, for human connection and for a paradoxical authenticity.
(VERMEULEN, GIBBONS & VAN DEN AKKER 2017, 153)
82. “a literature of reconstruction”
 Affect (cf Gibbons 2017, 85).

3/ Temporality
1. Historical context
 D: Second World War, Cold War & communism, Kennedy’s term as President &
assassination etc.
 + Socio-historical context: pop culture in the 1960s & 1970s, the beginning of the
AIDS epidemic…
3/ Temporality
2. Rhythm
3/ Temporality
3. Suspension
 Liminality: 83. "It has to do with the passing of a threshold and therefore with
transition", THOMASSEN 2014, 15)
 epiphany
3/ Temporality
3. Suspension
84. [I] got up, went to the window, pulled aside the curtain, looked down. I was tired – I - Importance of sight // Joyce ‘A
had been working on several translations – and I had to blink many times before my spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its
vision to an exact focus’
eyes adjusted. Beyond the courtyard, out towards the football field, a few hooligans
were clustered around mounds of freshly dug soil […] The hooligans had found a couple - Minor mode
of short white sticks and had shoved them into the ground as goalposts. […] They
picked through the dirt until they found a white ball and began kicking it. - Sentence(s) translating the epiphany,
With a dreadful shiver, I realised that it was a skull. first micro then macro
The floor seemed to sway. I grasped at the window ledge. […]
The words of a song returned to me, the dead turning into a soaring flight of cranes. I - Joy
trembled, wondering whether the bones were German or Russian and then I wondered
if it even mattered, and then I thought of my small china dish hidden away and - New impetus
wrapped. Beneath the window frame I sat and curled up against the abandon of what
- In-betweenness: fulfillment yet/and
we had become.
transition = ephemeral & redeeming
I pulled the curtains together, watched Iosif snore. I was exhausted yet exhilarated, as if
instability
something terrible was dragging me down and at the same time shoving me forward. I
wanted to wake Iosif, to say that we would survive, that we would get through this, we
could transform, we could learn. I wanted him to do something soothing and kind for
me, but I didn’t wake him, nor did he stir, and I knew then that the opportunity was
3/ Temporality
3. Suspension
85. 'Watching people pick up their copies of the New York Times, thinking: I'm up in a million arms.
The photograph caught me in a perfect line’ (198, original italics).
86. 'Such fine choreography. (Finally, he learned his lesson.) For the second act, he showed us a
photograph of a kingfisher throwing its prey into the air after stabbing it, the (living) bird and (dead)
fish spinning gloriously in the air’ (218).
87. ‘Perhaps one should die in the middle of a dance, in the air, have the performer auctioned, frozen,
sold to the highest bidder’ (187).
88. ‘She begins to work with him on jumps - she tells him that he must above all create what his feet
want and that it is not so much that he must jump higher than others but that he must stay in the air
longer.
Stay in the air longer! He chuckled.
Yes, she said, hold on to God's beard.’ (54)
3/ Temporality
3. Suspension
 Cf p.198 (1st edition) + p. 219 (1st edition):

89. ‘(Nijinsky declined to come down
at all. Perhaps every madman
prefers it in the air.)’
90. ‘A call from Gilbert. The suicide notion. If you don’t come back soon, Rudi, I will
leave a gap between the floor and my feet. […]
(I told Ninette that, as a Tatar, I had spent centuries contemplating the
gap between floor and feet. She shot back that she was Irish and had
already spent hundreds of years in the air.)’
3/ Temporality
4. Artistic performance: a different space/time?
91. ‘[Dance is] an expression of joy, an antidote to fear and suffering, an affirmation of life.
For Nietzsche dance defied what he called 'the spirit of gravity', which seduces men into lives
of servility’ (CUSATIS 2011, 133, cf Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
92. 'Only in performance can he elude the superficial roles and identities that have been
granted to him, that have begun to stand for any degree of authenticity' (FLANNERY
2011, 152).
93. 'The body in performance cannot be held or stilled [...] Performance is its own
annihilation and performance becomes through its own disappearance' (FLANNERY
2011, 146).
3/ Temporality
94. “Dance seems to evade and resist any attempt to freeze it in representation. Rudi's
dancing body yearns for movement and the creation of 'a blur'. However, the goal that Rudi
strives for in dance is to achieve the impression of stillness, to pause time through the body's
movement.” (CAHILL 2012, 98).
95. 'The dance is still in their bodies and they search for the quiet point the still point where
there is no time no space only pureness moving’ (216-7).
96. 'The tension between weight [the body] and lightness [movement] destabilises bodies
before they themselves undergo a metamorphosis. Dancing movements are thus interpreted
as incessant metamorphoses' (MIANOWSKI 2017, 167).
3/ Temporality
97. 'Dancing movements, gestures, leaps and skips enable the characters to trace links
between the past and the present and give meaning to what could not otherwise be
expressed' (MIANOWSKI 2017, 169).
98. 'In tracing into space the time of imminence, dancing movements and gestures also
open out onto a form of eternity' (MIANOWSKI 2017, 167).
3/ Temporality
 Alexander 'Sasha' Pushkin (72):

99. ‘The magic of a dance, young man, is something purely accidental. The irony of this is
that you have to work harder than anyone else for the accident to occur. Then, when it
happens, it is the only thing in your life guaranteed never to happen again. This, to some, is
an unhappy state of affairs, and yet to others, it is the only ecstasy.’ (72)
 Sisyphus
 Intercorporeality phenomena
 Mirror mechanisms (cf chap 4).

4/ Body, mind, soul: intercorporeity & intersubjectivity
1. Tenets in McCann’s works
 Body/touch
 Sight:
 Figure & ground /visual salience (// linguistic salience)
 close-ups and wide shots (through deictic pushes & pops, for inst)
Þ kaleidoscopic aesthetic + very part. rhythm
 Expansion/contraction dialectic //breathing

2. Body and/in mind: a corporeal text
 Mindscape:
100. 'The range of a person's thoughts and imagination, regarded as a panorama
capable of being contemplated by another person; mental landscape or inner vision'
(OED, entry 'Mindscape’).
 Mindstyle
 Cf Fowler (1977, 76) then Leech et Short (2007, 28)

101. ‘Cumulatively, consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to one
pattern or another, give rise to an impression of a world-view, what I shall call a ‘mind style’’
102. ‘The notion of mind includes all aspects of our inner life, namely not just prototypically
cognitive activities such as thinking and perceiving, but also dispositions, feelings, beliefs and
emotions’ (SEMINO 2007, 4)
 Conceptual metaphors:
103. Conceptual domain (a) is conceptual domain (b), which is what is called a conceptual metaphor.
A conceptual metaphor consists of two conceptual domains, in which one domain is understood in
terms of another. A conceptual domain is a coherent organization of experience.’ (vs. metaphorical
linguistic expressions = words/other linguistic expr. that come from the language or terminology of a
more concrete conceptual domain (i.e., domain B) (KÖVECSES 2002, 4)
104. “A number of studies have shown how idiosyncratic patterns of metaphor use can be exploited in a
variety of ways by fictional authors to convey a sense of the individual world view and cognitive habits of a
particular character." (SEMINO 2007, 7-8)
105. 'Don't allow critics to make you so good that you can't become better. Likewise, don't allow them to
rip the gristle out of your carcass’. (190)
106. “[Margot] dances from the inside out. For the pas de deux she took tiny faltering steps, dropped them
perfectly on-stage like tears.” (192)
107. “She soared high and arched her back so far that her nose actually touched her leg, like a scissor blade
meeting the round thumb-hole. It was as if she had no bones at all. Then she snapped her legs together with
wonderful violence.” (219)
108. “At first Erik was dancing like three buckets of shit, but then he braided his feet back and forth in the
air beautifully.” (221)
109. “The problem is that they see dance as an aperitif, not the actual bread of their lives.” (193)
110. “Tamara’s letter sat in my pocket like a wound.” (202)
- collage of memories and
111. Erik lay back and fell asleep. (1) (I recalled Anna making Sergei’s impressions (1)
imprint on her pillow.) His breath was uneven and (2) stank of cigarettes. - in medias res beginning +
(3) Song of a Wayfarer. I kissed him and packed. presupposition (4)
- imp of senses (2)
Instead of coming through a tunnel (4) the limousine driver wanted to
cross the upper deck of a bridge. He said I should see (4) the city lit up.
- impulsiveness (5),
My escorts thought it would be uninteresting, they said the bridge was - rude/ politically incorrect
old and decrepit, but I (5) shouted: Let’s go across the (6) fucking bridge! phrasings (6)
The driver grinned. - Sentences stimes long
The city was (7) a crazed jewel. I stuck my head out of the window. One
(accumulations) => frenzy //
of the escorts kept repeating that fewer apartments were lit up as it was a stimes short and/or marked by
Jewish holiday. Another neurotic (6) kike. binary structures (pause and/or
balance?)
(5) I couldn’t stand their chatter anymore so I switched seats and sat with
the driver up front. On instructions he closed the glass screen behind us.
- cultural references, memories
He was listening to Charlie Parker (3). He says they called him ‘Bird’ & associations of ideas, creating
because he never had his feet on the ground. parentheses (3), stimes literal (7),
(7) (Nijinski declined to come down at all. Perhaps every madman prefers
3. The body as a tool
112. "Victor wondered what might happen if Rudi toppled into the water, if the Seine itself would
dance" (269)
113. "He danced perfectly, light and quick, pliant, his line controlled and composed, but more than that
he was using something beyond his body - not just his face, his fingers, his long neck, his hips, but
something intangible, beyond thought, some kinetic fury and spirit' (102-3).
114. 'Inform her [their mother] that her son dances to improve the world’ (182).
115. [Erik] detests my idea that dance makes the world a better place. […] I want to make a statement
about beauty, but Erik (who spends his time watching the news from Vietnam and Cambodia) says that
dance changes nothing for the monk who set himself aflame and the photographer who watched
through the lens. (234-235)
116. 'One could feel the audience straining forward. (You can tell how good the work is from the way it
shapes itself into the crowd.)’ (222)
117. 'The audience leans forward, necks craned, mouths open’ (215)
118. A fan was waiting outside the Palais in the rain […] He stood in the spill from the gutter and said
that until he saw me perform he did not know who he really was. […] (189)
// The Le Monde critic said she had begun to feel immune to beauty but, after the Bayadère pas de deux,
she wobbled out of the theatre with tears of joy in her eyes. (190)
119. When I entered the room Iosif was still sitting at the table, drunk. […] I tried to guide him into
making love to me against the wall, but he was hardly able to hold me, drunk as he was. Instead he
pulled me to the floor, and yet I didn’t care, why should I care, the dancing still spun in me – Rudi had
stood upon that stage like an exhausted explorer who had arrived in some unimagined country and,
despite the joy of the discovery, was immediately looking for another unimagined place, and I felt
perhaps that place was me. (161)
 // (262):
120. Then something happened, Fonteyn gave Rudi one of those glances that seemed to change
everything, Rudi lifted her, Fonteyn’s face was glorious in the light, and the two dancers seemed to
melt into each other, and Victor realized that this was more than ballet, more than theatre, more
than spectacle, it was a love affair, a public love affair where the lovers did not love each other
beyond the stage, which made Victor want to rise from his seat and perform, not ballet, but to move
his body wildly and freely, and it was painful to watch such beauty without being a part of it, he
resented the look on Rudi’s face, his energy, his control, so when the curtain fell Victor felt
inexplicable hatred, he wanted to go up to the stage and shove Rudi into the pit, but he stayed
motionless, shocked that the world could reveal such surprises […] and it made Victor wonder, what
else he was missing, what else was lacking in his life, and in the foyer afterwards he waited in line to
collect his escort’s fur coat, Victor felt flush with heat and cold so that he shivered and sweated
simultaneously, he had to go out into the night air […] and Victor had to abandon his ageing
escortee, he jumped into a taxi and went downtown to dance and forget[.]
 Mirror mechanisms & mirror neurons (Giacomo Rizzolatti, 1990s):

121. “The same neural structures activated by the actual execution of actions or by the subjective
experience of emotions and sensations are also active when we see others acting or expressing the same
emotions and sensations. These mirroring mechanisms have been interpreted as constituting a basic
functional mechanism in social cognition, defined as embodied simulation. Embodied simulation is
engaged also when actions, emotions and sensations are displayed as static images”. (GALLESE 2001,
2)
 Neuroscientists agree that Embodied Simulation processes are particularly active while humans are
exposed to artworks, whatever their nature might be. Cf
122. “A fundamental element of aesthetic response to works of art consists of the activation of
embodied mechanisms encompassing the simulation of actions, emotions, and corporeal sensations.
Mirroring mechanisms and embodied simulation can empirically ground the fundamental role of
empathy in aesthetic experience. […] Empathic involvement […] encompasses a series of bodily
reactions and bodily feelings of the beholder” (GALLESE 2010, 2)
 Cf 159-60:
123. When Rudi entered, exploding from the wings to a round of applause, he tore the role open, not so much by
how he danced, but by the manner in which he presented himself, a sort of hunger turned human. […] I began to
realise how terribly hot I felt. […] I grew hotter and hotter. […] The air was packed with intensity. My face
flushed and sweat collected at my brow.
When the intermission came, I stood up quickly, only for my knees to buckle and my legs to fold beneath me. […]
With the help of a gentleman I got back into my seat. […]
He’s wonderful, isn’t he?
I was just hot, I said.
He has quite an effect, said the gentleman.
124. “Our capacity to empathize with others […] is most likely mediated by […] the activation of the
same neural circuits underpinning our own actions, emotional and sensory experiences […]. Following
this perspective, empathy may be conceived as the outcome of our natural tendency to experience
interpersonal relations first and foremost at the implicit level of intercorporeity.” (GALLESE &
WOJCIEHOWSKI 2011, unpaginated)
125. “Embodied Simulation [enables] a more direct and less cognitively-mediated access to the world of
others. Embodied simulation mediates the capacity to share the meaning of actions, basic motor
intentions, feelings, and emotions with others, thus grounding our identification with and
connectedness to others. According to this hypothesis, intersubjectivity should be viewed first and
foremost as intercorporeity.” (GALLESE & WOJCIEHOWSKI 2011, unpaginated)
126. "When we read a text, scientists tell us, we experience in our body what we are reading
about, and this, independently of any empathy hierarchy, and of [...] the sacred frontier erected
by generations of narratologists between reality and fiction" (MAJOLA-LEBLOND 2015b,
188).
127. "Sensations transcend time and place for character and reader alike” (MAJOLA-
LEBLOND 2015a, 320).
128. ‘L’empathie non seulement me donne accès à l’autre mais, en me

permettant de me retrouver dans sa personne et de découvrir ‘son unité de sens’,
me procure un contact plus profond avec moi-même’ (Edith Stein, thèse de
1916).
5/ Reading Dancer: the dancing reader
1. Empathy, sympathy & their limits
129. ‘For the reader, empathy is easiest with the subject of the speech act, i.e. with
the speaker/narrator’ (MAJOLA-LEBLOND 2015b, 177).
130. "empathic maze” (MAJOLA-LEBLOND 2015a, 311).

2. The reader’s role: from spectator to choreographer?
131. Books are made between the words and spaces left by the writer on the page and the
reader who reinvents them through her own embodied reality, for better and for worse. The
more I read, the more I change. The more varied my reading, the more able am I to perceive
the world from myriad perspectives. I am inhabited by the voices of others […]. Reading is
creative listening that alters the reader.
Siri Hustvedt, ‘On Reading’, Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), 140-141.
 But cf Grice & Cooperative Principle (1975, 41-58) => impetus to ‘cooperate’
 (showing vs. telling)

132. ‘Storytelling is the glue of a scattered people. We need our stories to hold us
together' (GARDEN & McCANN 2014, 5).
133. ‘I believe in creative reading as much as I believe in creative writing’ (McCann’s

website, This Side of Brightness itw)
134. “Understanding a narrative crucially involves the reconstruction of the

functioning of the minds of characters, which enables us to make sense of actions and
events" (SEMINO 2007, 4).
 Cohesion (formal/linguistic balance, cf. HALLIDAY AND HASAN 1976) => coherence
((psycho)logical/cognitive balance, cf. ROTGÉ 1998, 184).
 Inference = the activity of understanding meaning in a given context, usually in conversation or while
reading. cf Paul Grice, "Logic and conversation", 1975, + "Some further notes on logic and
conversation", 1978.
 Grice = conversational inference (or 'implicature’) = taking into account the meaning of the spoken
sentence + background knowledge + Grice’s pragmatic maxims, to determine what the speaker may have
meant (cf GIBBS 1987, 563).
 Bordwell (1991, 2-3) = distinction bet. interpretation and inference:
135. “I shall use the term interpretation to denote only certain kinds of inferences about meaning. […] Most critics
distinguish between comprehending a film and interpreting it […] Roughly speaking, one can understand the plot of
a James Bond film while remaining wholly oblivious to its more abstract mythic, religious, ideological, or
psychosexual significance. […] Comprehension is concerned with apparent, manifest, or direct meanings, while
interpretation is concerned with revealing hidden, nonobvious meanings.” (original italics).
136. 'Margot has a projector set up, dozens of cans of film [...] Sat up all night unravelling the cans
of film until I found some of Bruhn. His glorious formality’ (194).
137. 'Erik arrived in the lobby at the Savoy. Tall and lithe. He wore all white, even the stitching
and zip teeth of his jacket’ (194)
138. 'Rudi has anticipated her desires’ (203)

139. 'Margot packed the box herself, to be carefully sent through the Finish embassy’ (203)
 ‘Monsieur’
 'Seine’ & 'Thomas Aquinas’
 140. 'The pastries were baking in the kitchen', 'The kettle boiled for the fourth
time as I waited for Monsieur to wake’ (293)
 141. 'I had bought him a white bathrobe for one of his birthdays which, in
appreciation, he had begun to wear every morning’ (293)
142. 'Soviet Dancer to Arrive in London - a story he knows well since the sketches
of the feet came in last week. (134)
143. 'Defected my arse! Defective more likely! He's a bleeding commie ain't he?’
(136)
144. ‘I had a brother, he is gone [...] In his leaving he has forced me home.’ (138)
145. “[…] Non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur de texte" (BARTHES 1970,
10, original italics).
146. ‘Reading itineraries are known to imply tracing cohesion networks that involve
jumping over bits of text, making anaphoric or cataphoric moves, drawing oblique
lines to make connections […] They might also possibly even entail exophoric
excursions to the real world to make better sense of words on a page.’ (MAJOLA-
LEBLOND 2015b, 172).
 Oblique reading process (cf. serpentine line)
147. ‘Because of its brevity, it suggests a maximum with a minimum of words. It

does not dwell on details but calls for decoding and incites the reader to be active.
To take up Roland Barthes’s terminology, the short story is a “writerly” text—un
texte scriptable [cf BARTHES 1970], which makes demands on the reader who has
to work things out, look for and provide meaning.’ (CARDIN 2014, §11)
 Choreo-graphy

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Littérature LLCER3 s5

DANCER, COLUM MCCANN (2003)

 1994. Fishing the Sloe-­‐Black River. London: Phoenix House

Cf Pessoa, The Book of Intranquillity: 6. "to move is to live" (1999, 47).

8. She wakes, someone shouting her name from around the

9. Margot's generosity with everyone but herself is stunning. This of course is

 Irish literary tradition

 Metaphor <- incapacity of language to truly translate experience.

41. "both devil and demi-god" (CUSATIS 2011, 141)

43. Yulia "lives between two worlds“ (TUCKER 2010, 114)

 Elizabethan Stage Irishman (cf 55)

 57. ‘I conceal my fear in loudness, including performances’ (192)

 Gestalt theory as opposition bet. figure & ground:

(JOBERT 2014, 64)

 "refigur[ing] the ground" (Cahill)

 Frank O'Connor’s 'Little Man’ + Zola

67. “Postmodernist thought, by attacking the idea of a notional centre or dominant

 Single meta-narrative vs. protean and multi-centred /kaleidoscope-like narrative

 /!\ Groupe 231: new instructions!

82. “a literature of reconstruction”

 Affect (cf Gibbons 2017, 85).

 Cf p.198 (1st edition) + p. 219 (1st edition):

 Alexander 'Sasha' Pushkin (72):

 Mirror mechanisms (cf chap 4).

 Expansion/contraction dialectic //breathing

 Cf Fowler (1977, 76) then Leech et Short (2007, 28)

 Mirror mechanisms & mirror neurons (Giacomo Rizzolatti, 1990s):

128. ‘L’empathie non seulement me donne accès à l’autre mais, en me

130. "empathic maze” (MAJOLA-LEBLOND 2015a, 311).

 (showing vs. telling)

133. ‘I believe in creative reading as much as I believe in creative writing’ (McCann’s

134. “Understanding a narrative crucially involves the reconstruction of the

138. 'Rudi has anticipated her desires’ (203)

 Oblique reading process (cf. serpentine line)

147. ‘Because of its brevity, it suggests a maximum with a minimum of words. It

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 1994. Fishing the Sloe-‐Black River. London: Phoenix House