L'Atelier

Variations on the Second Person

2025-04-17T12:42:36+00:00

This article provides an overview of potential variations on the second person in diverse contexts of exploitation. Based on a model of possible references, I show that you narratives can play different tunes depending on the set of references that the pronoun draws on the model. I propose a few examples as illustrations. Returning to the etymology of the word “person”, I indicate the reasons why this pronoun is chosen over more traditional ones. Both a spokesperson-pronoun and a mask-pronoun, you is a theatrical pronoun, calling onto the reader as a co-participant to intensively relive the intimate scenes described by the character-narrator. To read a story written in you is to adopt an enactive approach that presupposes alignment or tuning in to the narrative voice in order to access the character's experiential perspective. The musicality of a second-person narrative resonates differently with each reader, but I show that for every type of you, secondary self-assignment effects are possible, revealing its powerfully interpersonal nature. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the listening mode that the second-person perspective encourages, using Citizen. An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine and Open Water (2021) by Caleb Azhuma Nelson as examples. I show how, via a decentring you giving voice to the intimacy of a lived experience, the works invite the reader to pay renewed attention to the force of racist prejudice.

Keywords: interpellation, enaction, personal pronoun, you, self-assignment, listening, inter-listening, attunement

Pronouns, Presence and Authority in John D’Agata’s “Collage History of Art, by Henry Darger” (2001)

2025-04-17T13:20:56+00:00

In this paper, I argue that John D’Agata’s essay “Collage History of Art, by Henry Darger” (Halls of Fame, 2001) is configured by the constant dramatization of the notion of presence. Drawing on a stylistic approach, I explore how its use of deixis directs our attention towards the pragmatic implications of self-reflexivity, effects of address and authorial intention within the specific framework of non-fiction. These considerations naturally connect with D’Agata’s wish to exploit the porousness between factuality and fictionality within the genre of the essay, presumably regulated by what Fludernik calls “the factual pact”. I first examine how enunciation is built in D’Agata’s ekphrastic essay on the work of outsider artist Henry Darger, and the challenges that the reader faces when encountering the pronouns “I” and “you” in a nonfictional context, before engaging with the presence effects that are brought on by the use of “we” and the imperative mood—devices which prompt readers to envisage literature as a conversational gesture, exhorting them to engage with artby taking part in the building of a supposed discursive community.

Keywords: John D’Agata, Henry Darger, deixis, pronouns, stylistics, essay, non-fiction, genre, authority, David Foster Wallace

Impersonalising the We-Narrative: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13

2025-04-17T13:39:07+00:00

Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 is characterised by a poetics of impersonality relying on an idiosyncratic use of personal pronouns. This applies to the characters’ discourse, presented in a hybrid, unusual form, but also to the narrator’s, which at times erases all pronouns while at other times resorting to passive forms and “there was/were” impersonal forms that are concentrated to a remarkable extent. This logic of subtraction is instrumental in mediating the voices of the village, but also, through the juxtaposition of vignettes and cross-species non sequiturs, it helps give visibility and voice to the assemblages of the human and the nonhuman that characterise the life of the valley. In other terms, the novel paradoxically uses the appearance of a third-person narrative to achieve the collective effect of a we-narrative. In so doing, it edges towards nonhuman narration and helps destabilise the tenets of anthropocentrism. It contributes to the development of a brand of material realism that is itself a contribution to the evolution of the novel’s mimetic agenda in an age dominated by the effect of the Anthropocene and the hyperobject of species extinction.

Keywords: Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor, Anthropocene, de-anthropocentrism, impersonality, material realism, nonhuman narration, non sequitur, subtraction, we-narrative

Vous et nous : qui sont-ils ? Variation pronominale, différentiation et identité chez Toni Morrison

2025-04-17T14:05:14+00:00

In an absolute refusal to give in to the injunction of the “white gaze”, Toni Morrison problematizes in her discourse on her own writing the tension between a third and a first person, singular or plural. The article will attempt to show how the pronoun “you”, the second-person marker, enables the author to play with and thwart this tension without evading it or reducing it to a binary confrontation, particularly in Jazz (1992), Love (2003), Home (2012), and A Mercy (2008), where a recurring second-person address is deployed within narrative passages. Through a stylistic analysis of these four novels, based on the theory of predicative and enunciative operations, the article sets out to show how these “you”, in their variety, work on the notion of differentiation in close connection with identity, and place co-enunciation at the heart of the reading experience.

Keywords: pronouns, Toni Morrison, address, co-enunciation

Une « pronounance » amérindienne ? Les enjeux des pronoms dans les premières autobiographies amérindiennes

2025-04-17T14:23:59+00:00

This article intends to focus on the narrative and identity issues at stake in the use of personal pronouns (I, me, you, he/she, them…) in autobiographies written in English by some Native Americans in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. What do these pronouns disclose about the author, his/her identity and his/her place within colonial society? Do pronouns have the same value from an author to the author? Do they have a particular importance as they appear in autobiographical narratives? Do they reveal something particular about the circumstances of the Indigenous peoples in the dominant Anglo-American society? Do they participate in the creation of a literature of “survivance” within a literature of “dominance”, to use terms favored by Ojibwa/Anishinabe author Gerald Vizenor? These “pronoun poses” will be further analyzed through Vizenor’s notion of “pronounance” in order to show that pronouns enable Native American autobiographers to “pronounce” their own narrative sovereignty, even in the English language.

Keywords: autobiography, Native Americans, pronounance, Vizenor, identity

Refracted Selfhood in Breast Cancer Autofiction: A Research-Creation Essay

2025-04-17T14:42:00+00:00

This research-creation essay explores the dynamic of shifting pronouns and narrative temporal positions in a collection of autofictional/autopathographical stories about breast cancer, Blue Breast. The essay opens with a short autofictional text about post-chirurgical tattoos and is written in the manner of New Narrative approaches to essay writing. New Narrative writers mix the personal with the collective, low with high culture, art with literature, to propose alternative modes of debate and conceptualization. The essay studies the collection, Blue Breast, as a “cycle”; the stories focus on specific moments in breast cancer treatment that intersect with the notions of time, dreams, intermedial perception, art and landscape. The formal potentialities of the short story cycle as a system allow the reader to move in and out of perspectives to piece together the narrative of a body fragmented by illness. Overall, the essay underlines the manner in which a strategic use of pronouns in autopathographical short story cycles can portray the collective experience of breast cancer through the prism of the personal experience.

Keywords: research-creation, New Narrative, autopathography, short story, intermediality, transmediation, autofiction, short story cycle, autobiography, breast cancer