Public Lecture Series: Bénédicte Meillon | College of Arts

Public Lecture Series: Bénédicte Meillon

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Bénédicte Meillon

(Crossways Visiting Scholar from the University of Perpignan)

“The Vertigo of Reiteration through Adaptation of

Paul Auster's fiction: Nicompictopoop

Representations in City of Glass and Smoke”

Picture with smoking men in a cigar store

(Scene from « Smoke »)

Focusing on Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s movie Smoke as well as on the graphic novel City of Glass adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, this paper examines the dazzling reiteration and mirror effects at play in the visual adaptations of Auster’s fiction, and which in the end only deepen the endless mise-en-abîme already present in “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” and in City of Glass. Disenchanted with a postmodern world of fragments and simulacrum, Auster’s patch-work nevertheless strives for a re-enchantment of the quotidian through story-telling and art-making, as means to create pure, inspiring images. Central to Auster’s fiction and their filmic or comics adaptations, many intertextual and metatextual devices bring to the foreground the question of art as language.

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2:00pm – 3:00pm

MacKinnon Building, room 232

Open to the public