Colloque

Lucy, Lexa et ? : performances de l'urbain dans « French Kiss » de Nicole Brossard et « Paper City » de Nathalie Stephens

Elisabeth Tutschek

Membre a labase

Elisabeth Tutschek

Résumé du colloque

Looking at the formation of urban spaces in Nicole Brossard’s ''French Kiss'' (1974) and Nathalie Stephens’ ''Paper City'' (2003), I will investigate the geographies of bodies and encounters that are superimposed on the map of the city – in Brossard’s text explicitly Montréal – and that create the city’s cultural topography. I will read the two narratives diachronically and within a comparative framework, exploring in what ways their politics of sex, gender, and sexuality operate to perform a linguistically (and) erotically charged urban environment. With reference to Judith Butler’s theory of sex and gender as performative, I will show that it is the body-city correlation that generates the revision of topographies in the two novels: “[o]n y confond avec les mots le corps et la cité, une géographie […]” (FK: 7) as “[t]he body’s fictions are deliberate […].” (PC: 7) My aim is to illustrate how Stephens’ imaginary Anglophone metropolis performs a Montréal similar to that presented through Brossard’s literary interventions in Québécois. In both texts language codes converge as bodily and linguistic encounters blur. Once appropriated by writing, in both texts the streets of the city are conquered, travelled, and remapped according to queer performativity.