Speaker
Description
Constant video surveillance, facial recognition, instant media and quest of the perfect shot: visual overabundance are pervasive in our daily life to facilitate, admire, protect as well as control, press and manipulate individuals. In the past few years, the causes and consequences of such a visual crisis emerged as a recurrent topic in many contemporary French dystopian novels reflecting on a society that is increasingly dependent on images. Alain Damasio in Les Furtifs (2019), Laurent Gaudé in Chien 51 (2022) and Lilia Hassaine in Panorama (2023) are among these novelists who consider our future, through the way we are looking at it, no matter if our perspectives are prompted by societal change, economic answers, ecology anxiety, or political oppression. From a furtive hybrid being able to hide in plain sight thanks to metamorphosis adaptation, to a society where glass houses allow no room for intimacy and dissimulation, and to a visual addiction that enslaves people’s minds and bodies in their past, dystopian novels reveal the damage and impact of the illusions our societies are blindly contemplating, and unveil the show and hide function that dictates our world.
This paper aims to explore the narrative approach used by some of the most recent French dystopian novels to raise the alarm about our contemporary visual crisis and to respond to it. Studying the obsession for images and its influence on language, the analysis of Damasio, Gaudé and Hassaine’s writings will question the evolution of our resistance and tolerance to abuse of power, loss of individuality and constant destruction, and define the sustainable lens that literature provides in time of crisis.
| Keywords | dystopia, image, visual crisis, novel, narration |
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| julie@commans.fr |