The Animal Eye and Refugee Vulnerability in Wajdi Mouawad’s Anima

Anima, by Lebanese-born Canadian-raised author Wajdi Mouawad, is a road novel that takes the reader through different locations on the North American continent in order to explore the darkest side of humankind. This approach will focus on the provocative narrative technique used by Mouawad, filtered through the eyes of a significant number of animals and insects, in order to consider the different representations of vulnerability that articulate the text. In the novel, animals and insects are not only the narrators but also fundamental characters. As this analysis will show, their vulnerability represents the uncertainty of fate in contemporary society, being in the hands of those apparently superior creatures that decide when they can live and when they have to die. As an example of a vulnerable text, Anima relies on the theatricality of this animal Greek chorus to represent the need for humans to undergo a process of animalization. The protagonist, Wahhch Debch, reaches a stage of symbiosis with his animal side that allows him to transcend his vulnerability as a child refugee and as an adult who lost his wife, and this new sense of animal self serves him as an empowering element to break ties with his past.

Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon: Lost Children Archive's Reenactment Play

This essay analyzes Valeria Luiselli's 2019 novel Lost Children Archive's attempt to imagine anti-imperialist solidarity aesthetics in a moment of the increasing imbrication of the US literary sphere and settler colonial capitalist surveillance of the US-Mexico border, as well as the nonprofit care regime that has arisen to oppose and ameliorate its effects. Because these structures converge around overt and subterranean investments in settler colonial frontier fantasy, the essay focuses particularly on Lost Children Archive's engagement with the tradition of the white male road novel Western in the Americas—Luiselli's attempts to write both through and against this form—as part of the novel's larger attempt to grapple with the formal problems that adhere in representing the temporality and scale of ongoing Central American Indigenous dispossession and refugee displacement in settler colonial capitalism. In exploring the degree to which the Western genre's tradition of, per Philip Deloria, “playing Indian” might oppose the brutal bureaucratic violence of the xenophobic carceral settler US state, the novel builds a critique of the frontier road novel fantasy that it cannot quite sustain.

Teaching the Road Novel with Jack Kerouac

This essay presents multi-racial/ethnic/gendered responses to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, illustrating how cultural experiences of Beat and Chicano/a gendered identity shape one’s understanding of material and imaginary spaces. In addition to On the Road, the essay discusses Hunter S. Thompsons’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing, Maria Amparo Escandon’s Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co.: A Road Novel with Literary License, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Dérouter le lecteur ou comment dépasser le stéréotype du roman de la route au Québec au XXIe siècle – l’exemple de François Blais

The article discusses the stereotype of road novel in Québec in the 21st century, exemplified by François Blais’s sixth novel entitled Document 1 published in 2012. Blais’s novel appears different from the typical road novels by playing with the genre’s codes in order to create something altogether new. The aim of the article is to shed light on the character development, the representations of place and the journey itself presented in the novel.

Andrzej Stasiuk, tekstowe figury doświadczenia

The aim of the article is to show the role of various metaphorical practices that are a dominant structural feature of Andrzej Stasiuk’s prose, used to construct his textual reality. Comparisons, metaphorical statements, and enumerations represent textual figures that transform the described experience of the world from the perspective of the speaking subject, subjectivising and constructing reality, rather than merely representing it. In both his novels and feuilletons, Stasiuk relates his experiences of the world in different temporal orders, constructing them on a textual level. Yet his thoroughly subjective prose preserves the conventions of realism. At the same time, Stasiuk quite often refers to the genre of the road novel, both in his fiction and in his journalism. Textual figures of experience are his basic means of describing the presented world.

Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues

This article analyses the intertextuality of the novel Volkswagen Blues by Jacques Poulin, a French-Canadian take on the road novel. The aim of the paper is to examine not only the relationships between Volkswagen Blues and its culturally diverse sources, but also to show how those multicultural intertexts permeate the road novel genre. In order to achieve this purpose, the study identifies in the novel instances of intertextuality which are analyzed within Genette’s framework for transtextuality. Considering the intertextual presence in Volkswagen Blues, the analysis ponders whether it is limited to this novel or is a manifestation of Americanness and, thus, a piece of evidence of multiculturality in the hegemonic American discourse. The study shows how Poulin depicts the crucial role of non-Anglo-American identities in contemporary American culture and explains the influence of world literatures in Poulin’s work

“Tudo o que fizemos foi tomar a BR-116...”: a estrada queer de "Todos nós adorávamos caubóis"

O presente artigo tem como objetivo debater acerca do sistema sexo-gênero e da centralidade dos modelos hegemônicos de relações afetuosas no campo da sexualidade a partir do romance de Carol Bensimon, Todos nós adorávamos caubóis, de 2013. A escritora apresenta em sua narrativa duas mulheres protagonistas em uma road novel peculiar, na qual as personagens vagam como forasteiras na própria terra onde nasceram, tentando compreender suas identidades tanto individuais quanto no relacionamento conflitante entre as duas. O estudo possui como norte teórico a pesquisa de Regina Dalcastagnè (2005) a respeito da personagem do romance brasileiro contemporâneo como sintoma da não democratização do fazer literário e a Teoria Queer que se estabelece como uma categoria epistemológica ao dialogar com os estudos literários e com os mecanismos de exclusão das relações de poder frente às diversas manifestações da sexualidade. Portanto, textos de Adrienne Rich (2010), Teresa de Lauretis (1994) e Judith Butler (2000; 2016) são suporte para o entendimento dos efeitos das diversas tecnologias sociais que controlam o comportamento de gênero e da heteronormatividade como regulação do desejo nos interiores da sociedade e do texto literário.

"Le fil des kilomètres" (2013) de Christian Guay-Poliquin : la déconstruction du sens

Cette contribution s'intéresse à la déconstruction de la quête du sens du personnage principal . L'histoire d'un homme qui quitte ce qui rappelle Fort McMurray lors d'une panne d'électricité transnationale pour aller retrouver son père malade, Le fil des kilomètres met en scène un voyage non-initiatique et une sorte de death drive dans un cadre qui devient de plus en plus dystopique au fur et à mesure que le protagoniste anonyme avance vers l'est d'un pays immense innommé. Hanté par un cauchemar qui rappelle le mythe grec du minotaure, le protagoniste se sent poursuivi en même temps qu'il poursuit une certaine plénitude fatale et irréalisable. Porteur d'un discours qui déconstruit de façon implicite l'idéal progressiste de l'Occident, ce roman d'anticipation joue sur la psychanalyse et laisse entendre qu'il est impossible de se débarrasser de la bête et de sortir du labyrinthe qu'incarne le monde. A la fois troublant et fort ironique, le roman constitue une sorte d'anti-road novel. Le fil conducteur du roman se défait et le roman finit par insister sur une certaine immobilité qui se rattache en fin de compte au retour éternel nietzschéen.