Abstracts/Summaries

Abstracts and Summaries

Keynotes

Morgane AUGRIS, The art of sequence: Brian Evenson’s ecological reading contract, from replication to deletion. 

As ecological concerns infuse Evenson’s later collections, repetition is given a new significance that will notably be studied through four short stories from Good Night, Sleep Tight (2024) mirroring former texts – “The Sequence,” “The Other Floor,” “Servitude” and “Solution.” In view of the environmental crisis the world is facing, the rush for variety and novelty would lead to no good. On the contrary, repetition may paradoxically welcome a salvaging instability. 

Maud BOUGEROL, Mormor/Murmur.

Nawelle LECHEVALIER-BEKADAR, "There was and there wasn't" - Brian Evenson's politics of contingency. 

Labelled "xenomoral", ideologically discharged, unfettered from referential chains, Evenson's work first seems to avoid the world as we experience it. As we pace through the texts' eerie houses and postapocalyptic wastelands, a question arises: could these stories be political?

Papers/Communications

Sylvie BAUER, ‘Extracting data from the darkness’: Mapping the human in The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell;

The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell is a collection of twenty-two stories which echo one another in many ways. Wide as the range of topics and situations may be in this book, the stories nonetheless all converge on unbearable forms of alienation, carried on by the very evensonian refrain that “something [is] wrong”. In worlds which have gone wrong for many reasons, the familiar keeps being distorted, through looking glasses or nightmares that more often than not blend so easily with reality that landmarks of stability vanish. The characters then find themselves in “places between places” that highlight their vulnerability and their inability to navigate the worlds in which they live. Inhuman figures people the collection, like as many spectral figures of humans that inhabit (or do not) uncanny places. This paper wishes to examine the ways in which data prevails over people in such a way as to interrogate the becoming of the very notion of humankind. 

Tom BYERS, What We Talk about When We Talk about Literature: Brian Evenson’s “Literary Horror”.

The existence of this conference of literature scholars engaging with Brian Evenson’s work, not to mention the conference’s funding as literary research, demonstrates that the work lays claim to the (sometimes) honorific category of “literature.” But what makes this writing “literary”? What, specifically, distinguishes Evenson’s fiction from the more “generic” versions first and foremost of horror, but also fantasy and, yes, science fiction, with which he engages? And what is the distinction for, or good for? This paper will vibrate between close readings of identifiably literary features, both formal and thematic, of Evenson’s work, and broader reflections on literary fiction as a generic, a commercial, and an aesthetic category.

Karim DAANOUNE, “Maybe a strange aural effect”: Audibility and Liminality in Brian Evenson’s ‘The Other Ear’.

In Brian Evenson’s tale “The Other Ear” compiled in his short-story collection Windeye (Coffee House Press, 2012), a soldier called István “acquire[s]” an ear during the war, after losing his own in a battle months before. When he wakes in a field hospital, a surgeon tells him that what he assumed to be his lost ear was sewn back onto his head. Though it is and feels alien, István grows accustomed to it. The ear, however, begins to behave in a strange manner, guiding him through the war in ways that suggest that he is no longer in control. The other ear, as it is called, whispers warnings and urges him to act—sometimes to kill, sometimes to hide, and sometimes to leap out of harm’s way. As time passes, István starts to lose his sense of agency and becomes a mere vessel for the ear’s commands. After the war ends, István still hears the voice, which directs him as he moves through the world. The ear, once a foreign object, becomes more conflated with his body and mind. One day, it leads him to a graveyard and a crypt. Unsure of his own role in the journey, István feels compelled to enter, as if the ear has taken complete control of his life. His connection to the ear becomes inseparable, leaving him in a constant state of uncertainty, questioning the true nature of his actions and his mind. 

The transplanted ear enables Evenson to reflect on the porous border of what constitutes the reality of the self and that of the world and extend that porosity by obfuscating several conceptual pairs such as life and death, self and other, presence and absence, the familiar and the foreign to name but a few. Readers are thus maintained in a state of suspension where clear-cut categories are erased and stable ontologies collapse. I would like to argue that Evenson’s text performs such liminality in its poetics by drawing from the acoustic register and its intrinsic capacity to penetrate boundaries and do away with them. 

I will begin by analyzing the context of the war to demonstrate how the text introduces a traumatic dimension that blurs the relationship between the world and Istvan’s subjectivity but also triggers the agonistic context that paves the way for the confrontation of binaries. I will then show how the text posits the metaphor of the dwelling to question the interior/exterior dichotomy and in turn manipulates our sense of what’s familiar and proper, and conversely, of what’s foreign and other. I will end by looking at the ways in which the locus of the crypt at the end offers a dénouement that only further hides what it was teleologically supposed to reveal.  

Béatrice PIRE, Contagion or “the carnival of negativity.”

A space of the negative, a territory placed between the extreme borders of law and impulse, Contagion is a collection of eight strange, disquieting, almost inenarrable stories that defy the laws of meaning and representation, but which, according to Brian Evenson, reveal the undercurrents of Mormonism. A character engaged in the “resolution of all possible language” murders two polygamists, a son wanders the labyrinthine corridors of a family home between a mummified mother and an incestuous father… An apocalyptic book, a parade of nightmares, a cruel gallery of flayed, suffering, hanged, dead or dying bodies, Contagion deploys a clinical, fragmented style, abstract to the point of allegory, while exhibiting an epistemological approach that answers the “question of whether it is possible to know anything at all.” This paper will examine this approach, while referring to the author's own words in an interview which was conducted in 2005 when the work translated by Claro came out in France.

Françoise SAMMARCELLI, The New Facets of Metaphysical Horror in Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson (2024).

This paper aims to explore how Brian Evenson rejuvenates horror literature in a chilling collection of stories that combines the age-old fear of darkness and the unknown with post-apocalyptic motifs and radical ecological concerns. 

The sequence of the collection, with its elegant echoes, subtly displaces the nature of the threat (from human evil, or the monster in the dark, to mankind itself and science), while reflexively inscribing defamiliarization and deconstructing family narratives.

Often pervaded with a sense of isolation, the texts also evince a metaphysical dimension as they stage different forms of consciousness and being-in-the-world, from adventurous children or trapped adults to introspective robots and AI. Thus, uncertainty and hybridity prevail in stories that rely on smooth effects of focalization and a deceptively simple narration, playing with suggestion but often postponing revelations about the nature of the crisis or the identity of the protagonist (e.g. "Annex", or "Mother"). It will be worth examining how these strategies both contribute to the reader’s discomfort and invite her to look at the world from a renewed perspective. 

Anne ULLMO, ‘There's not really a here around here’: the elusive quality of space in Brian Evenson’s Good Night, Sleep Tight.

In Good Night, Sleep Tight, his 2024 deceptively comforting collection of short stories, Brian Evenson foregrounds space not merely as a referential backdrop to his narratives, but as a concept deeply intertwined with hermeneutic and epistemological concerns. As a matter of fact, the recurrent use of internal focalization allows for the expression of deeply felt spatial disorientation thus reinforcing the sense of epistemological instability that is Evenson’s hallmark. Whether they live in apparently familiar domestic spaces or belong to otherworldly realms, the characters – either first-person narrators or third person internalized points of view – are made to experience both the elusiveness of space and the existential, as well as cognitive, unease it entails.  

Not only does such a phrase as "there's not really a here around here," (from the story “It Does Not Do What You Think It Does”, p. 191) precisely showcase Evenson’s idiosyncratic handling of space, but it reveals his playful use of language: far from making up for the fallibility of perception (systematically and ironically challenged for failing to circumscribe reality) language proves as unstable and treacherous as the world it is supposed to define; or, to be more precise, we are soon made to understand that the instability of space precisely stems from a betrayal of language (as one of the entities in “Annex” puts it, “Language has betrayed you, just like it once betrayed me”, p. 45). Indeed, the focalizers’ helplessness in making sense of their environment emphasizes Evenson’s view of space as being relative and forever shifting to the point of being shaped by linguistic practices: the meaning of spatial terms in particular, arises from their use within specific language games reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s absurd dialogues in Alice in Wonderland, not to mention Wittgenstein’s notion that, far from being fixed, our understanding of place is constructed through language and subjective experience.