UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

“Incongruities, mysteries”: Freaks and Incongruous Wor(l)ds in Contemporary American Fiction

Identification

Clé publique

radar:r-70e35f704535ea776bdfa3dc969556e9

Auteurs

Elodie Trole

Année déclarée

—

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

ART

Première détection

2026-11-13T15:28:34.877860+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-13T15:28:34.877860+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Institutions déclarées par la source

Transferts critiques anglophones · Université Paris 8

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Reading Ducornet and Eakins’s fictions involves being faced with unusual and surprisingcharacters. From the freaks under the tent that displays “[i]ncongruities, mysteries” in Ducornet’sThe Jade Cabinet, to the weird and shocking Exorcist in her novel The Stain (who transforms intoyet other incongruous characters in Entering Fire, The Fountains of Neptune and Phosphor inDreamland), and to Patricia Eakins’s monstrous hungry girls who devour their way out of theirmothers’ bellies, or of Pierre-Baptiste, the protagonist of her novel, a man who gives birth to fish-men from his mouth, the reader stops and stares in wonder, amazement, and more often than not, inhorror. These reactions are triggered by the incongruity of the characters: they are indeed very much“unusual or different from what is around or from what is generally happening”. Those freaks, monsters and incongruous creatures put to the fore an uncanniness which is partand parcel of everything that is other, that stands at the margin in some way or another. But in spite of this, they appear in fictions which constantly remind the reader of the extra-fictional worldthrough an amazing and complex web of historical, geographical and literary references. The narration thus places highly imaginative, uncanny and incongruous creatures in fictive worlds that thereader can recognize as his or her own; as a result, Ducornet and Eakins’s fictions disturb the balance of the reader’s familiar world, of its knowledge and culture, and of the subsequent expectations it creates. In other words, they question the existence of such thing as an unequivocal realityand shake up the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the extra-fictional world by way of anincongruous fictional world, revealing the existence of multiple realities.The breach that reveals the real’s unheimlichkeit disturbs not only the reader’s understandingof the world, but also meaning itself. In Ducornet and Eakins’s fictions, new incongruous worlds goalong with new incongruous words: they play with linguistic and lexical norms, with language,words and meaning. This article aims at shedding light on Rikki Ducornet and Patricia Eakins’s incongruous fictional representations, and on what they reveal about the nature of the extra-fictional world, fictionand language. For that purpose, this study will focus on Patricia Eakins’s novel and collection of short stories (The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre-Baptiste and The Hungry Girlsand Other Stories) and on Rikki Ducornet’s first five novels (The Stain, Entering Fire, The Jade Cabinet, The Fountains of Neptune and Phosphor in Dreamland).

Identifiants

HAL

hal-04556918

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

article

Types déclarés par les sources

ART

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

HAL · Document 1

• Document · https://hal.science/hal-04556918v1

Statut documentaire

Pertinence à examiner

Bibliothèque

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