Brian Evenson's bodies are disemboweled, ripped open, dismembered, brought back to their utmost materiality. Through his short stories and novels, the author stages bodies mutilated to the extreme whose painful contortions recall other bodies, those pictured by Francis Bacon, both obscene and abject, reduced to the state of shapeless flesh.
Those bodies bear the stigmata of Mormonism and offer a scathing critique of the excesses of religious fanaticism. In Evenson's fiction, the characters, immersed into the very heart of mystical rambling, literalize the Scriptures, whose privileged ground becomes the body. This imprint of religious discourse upon the body constitutes one of the prominent aesthetic and moral features of Evenson's complex and protean work. Those bodies annihilated, emptied of any form of transcendence whatsoever become the blank oracles of the a-significance of the world, exhibiting the insuperable gap between the world and its representation through language. Evenson's unique and uncanny use of words maps/charters a language of cruelty, which maims the body and poisons the intelligibility of the world.
If the notion of the body constitutes a nodal point of Evenson's work, it is a non-exclusive entry point into his strange and violent production. We welcome paper proposals on issues related to Brian Evenson's work, among which:
-The link between the body and religion
-The Grotesque, dark humor, and the absurd
-The Gothic genre and its limits
-The obscene and abjection
-Violence and cruelty
-The post-human
-The body as a place of inscription
-The “affective” dimension of Evenson's work
-Body and text
-Generic categorization and its limits
-Evenson's work as a resisting corpus for readers and translators..
Paper proposals may be sent in English or in French (250-300 words) by November 20th 2014 to the following recipients :
Sylvie Bauer sylvie.bauer@uhb.fr
Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar nawelle.lechevalier.bekadar@gmail.com
Florian Tréguer florian.treguer@uhb.fr
