Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire

Always growing, always transforming, contemporary literature resists all summaries. It is bent nonetheless by the strongest undercurrents of our era and has become permeated by its visions of loss, decadence, and apocalypse. This research project, titled “Narratives of the Fall: Contemporary Poetics of Ruin,” interrogates the myriad ways these visions have shaped the French (and to a lesser extent Québécois) literatures of the twenty-first century. It is the motif of ruins, most of all, that stands at the heart of dozens of narratives, sustaining a sense of dread and urgency that the recent pandemic, conflicts, and population displacements have heightened rather than provoked. It participates in a rhetoric of wariness that circulates through popular culture, politics, and environmental discourses.