Introduction to the dossier.

Charles Bukowski’s prolific oeuvre of poems, short stories, columns and novels celebrate Los Angeles. His writings reference dozens of specific LA streets and the everyday minutiae of the landscape he inhabited. His Los Angeles was the city’s mundane, everyday reality, not glamorous Beverly Hills or the sunny, shiny beaches.

My speech is based on my reluctant meeting with Charles Bukowski who I had only known through his outrageous columns. After experiencing an unforgettable poetry reading, I discovered his poetry, and agreed to photograph this complex figure (reluctant gentleman), ultimately revealing the man behind the myth.

The author Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is notoriously infamous for his blunt descriptions of American lowlife on the edge of society, preferably told from the “I”-perspective of an alter ego named Henry Chinaski. The fashion of his writing is deliberately set to indicate authentic autobiography rather than literary fiction. Since this includes not only the happenings in his work, but also the character of his protagonist, there appears to be some difficulty to separate the real person of the author from his made-up persona. I am going to show that in Bukowski’s case a strict distinction of the two would even mean an unsuitable assumption. Scholarly research has revealed the close resemblance of Bukowski's writing and living. The same applies to his person and his persona.

J’ai choisi de réaliser un parallèle descriptif des deux auteurs sous forme de combat de boxe, ceci après avoir relu toute l’œuvre de John Fante lors de l’été 2024. J’y pointe les nombreuses analogies, mais aussi différences, entre eux, tout en révélant les émotions qu’ils peuvent éveiller chez moi.

Within the context of U.S. settler colonialism, Ojibwe ceded territories in northern Wisconsin have long been shaped by conflicts over sovereignty, state authority and resource extraction. This study examines how the reaffirmation of treaty rights, and the revitalization of practices such as spearfishing and wild rice harvesting, function as interconnected legal, cultural, and environmental forms of resistance. Rooted in Ojibwe spirituality and oral traditions, these practices contribute to the reconfiguration of Native governance, mainly through the creation of intertribal organizations. In doing so, the organizations exemplify innovative collective strategies through which Ojibwe sovereignty is reasserted against the settler colonial logic of elimination.

L’article explore la richesse du patrimoine architectural et culturel réunionnais en mettant en lumière la disparition progressive de l’habitat traditionnel au profit de constructions plus modernes, parfois au détriment des savoir-faire vernaculaires. À l’appui de deux entretiens menés avec un directeur de musée et un architecte, il souligne les tensions qui existent entre préservation et modernisation de ce patrimoine insulaire. L’analyse de ces échanges s’articule avec un projet de recherche-création en art, intrinsèquement lié à la question des mobilités, qui vise à réactiver ces savoir-faire via la construction d’un atelier mobile. Réalisé en collaboration étroite avec quelques-uns des derniers artisans qui maîtrisent ces techniques constructives, l’article détaille la fabrication de cet atelier à l’aide de méthodes et de matériaux locaux adaptés à de nouveaux usages (bardeaux, calumets tressés, vétiver). À travers cette expérience créative collective, l’auteur mène une réflexion sur l’importance de la transmission et de la réactivation de ces héritages pour répondre aux défis, notamment environnementaux, auxquels La Réunion est aujourd’hui confrontée.

Cet article étudie la mise en poème des archives dans Paterson de William Carlos Williams. Les diverses censures observables donnent en effet lieu à un phénomène d’oblitération compensé par des techniques poétiques visant à reconstituer l’événement. Ce processus de reconstitution repose sur l’imagination du poète, et la mémoire apparaît comme transformée sous la plume de l’écrivain. Cette configuration rapproche Paterson des théories de Paul Ricoeur, qui considère la mémoire comme réappropriation du passé. Archives publiques (histoire de la ville), privées (comptes rendus médicaux du poète-médecin) ou intimes (correspondances personnelles) se mêlent au texte poétique. In fine, ce ne sont pas les archives que Paterson contient qui font de l’œuvre un objet de mémoire, mais les archives créées par l’œuvre. Williams projette par exemple sa propre mort dans le dernier livre de l’ouvrage. De tels passages aux échos autothanatographiques anticipent l’avenir et remettent en question la linéarité de la mémoire : elle dépend moins du passé que du présent et de l’avenir à la fin du poème.

In dystopian feminist novels like Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017), and Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), themes of emotional repression, authoritarianism and female agency intertwine to critique patriarchal and capitalist power structures. My reading focuses on the ambivalence of power with regards to emotions: as feminine-coded elements, they must be evacuated from the public realm, but as definitory human traits, they constitute the core of power itself. The authors of these speculative novels depict emotions as subversive forces that challenge patriarchal power structures, blurring boundaries between reason and feeling, body and mind, and human and non-human entities. Such narratives that emphasize the corporeal and emotional dimensions of resistance allow for a powerful critique of societal norms and hierarchical binaries. Ultimately, the paper proposes that feminist dystopian literature is a privileged terrain for the revaluation of emotions like empathy and love for the sake of connection-making–which has come to be termed “care ethics” in feminist studies–which also gives its fair share to a less commonly-valued emotion: women’s anger, conceived as a transformative force.

Shakespeare’s life, in particular the time he spent in London writing his famous plays, has been highly debated. Discourses on what really happened during the Bard’s life are interspersed with doubts and suspicion. This paper aims at showing how cinema has dealt with the undocumented part of Shakespeare’s life and offers two opposite solutions: the film Anonymous validates the multitude of doubts concerning the actual genius of Shakespeare and on the paternity of his plays; All Is True, conversely, sustains the position that the William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon is also the author of the plays. While All Is True records the last and most documented part of the Bard’s life, the considerations on his disposition and thoughts are guided by suppositions. From its title onwards, this film presents the need to respond to popular doubts about Shakespeare’s life, and the atypical biopic retraces the most essential phases therein largely by means of passing allusions. The presence in the film of famous Shakespearean actors—from theatre and cinema—also demonstrates how reality and truth are often grounded on fictional presuppositions stemming from popular culture. The multiplicity of sources produces a multiplicity of experiences of fruition and the construction of the “all” of the narration depends on the audience’s capacity to decipher the various levels of meaning of the film, as well as its dialogue with previous cinematographic works, including Anonymous. In this sense, what is not said acquires a strong signifying potential in the construction of the film’s message. The paper will thus deal with the way in which cinema has often made use of suspicion regarding Shakespeare’s life in order to create conjecture-based narrations.