Steve Tomasula: The Art of Representation
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1On June 12-13, the first international conference devoted to Steve Tomasula’s work, “The Art of Representation,” took place in Paris, at Université Paris Cité. The conference was organised by Monica Manolescu (Université de Strasbourg, SEARCH/USIAS), Françoise Sammarcelli (Sorbonne Université, VALE) and Anne-Laure Tissut (Université de Rouen, ERIAC) and in the presence of Tomasula himself, with the support of Université de Rouen, Université de Strasbourg, University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Université Rennes 2, Université Paris Cité, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Over two days, the conference gathered scholars from all around Europe and North America, allowing a reflection on questions of New Media, multi-modality, intermediality, humanities, the posthuman, metamodernism, metarealism, and (post-)postmodernism.
2On Wednesday, June 11, the conference was prefaced by a session of the “Texte et Image” seminar organized by Françoise Sammarcelli at Sorbonne Université and dedicated to Tomasula’s latest novel Ascension (2022). Constructed around three different epochs and their respective scientific discourses, the novel is a multi-modal comment on the end of nature. A portion of the seminar was dedicated to the reading of part of the third chapter of the novel, which can be found online. The discussion with the audience focused on the relation between fiction and knowledge, the category of the encyclopedic narrative, and the interaction between science and literature.
3The conference itself began on Thursday, June 12, with preliminary remarks and a warm welcome from the organizers, Monica Manolescu, Françoise Sammarcelli and Anne-Laure Tissut. They presented Tomasula as one of the most exciting, innovative, prolific and interesting contemporary authors, introducing his six novels, his collection of short stories and uncollected short fiction, as well as his critical work and role as the initiator of the &NOW Literary Festival, which gathers scholars and writers around innovative contemporary writing and art.
4The first panel of the conference, chaired by Mathieu Duplay (Université Paris Cité), considered the reception of Tomasula’s work, both creative and critical. In a paper called “Hybrid Modes of Reading in ‘The Color of Flesh’ (Once Human, 2012),” Maud Bougerol (Aix Marseille Université) described the reading experience in one of Tomasula’s short stories. Expanding on the text itself, but also on Maria Tomasula’s drawings which do not simply illustrate the text but assert themselves in the narrative in their own right, Bougerol analysed the hyper-reading mode that emerges from the short story. Using Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of ontological metalepsis, Bougerol explored the way in which the short story points to the artificiality of representation and to its own inherent inadequacy, especially through the use of epanorthosis and thanks to drawings that feel unfinished, engaging the reader in the elaboration of representation in fiction. For Bougerol, the conversation between text and image opens up a non-ergodic reading mode allowing for hybrid reading experiences. In “Conceptualizing Conceptual Writing: Steve Tomasula’s Conceptualisms versus Earlier Anthologies,” Wojciech Drag (University of Wrocław) replaced the 2022 anthology edited by Tomasula in a broader critical context. Drag set out to analyze three anthologies of conceptual writing—Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place's Notes On Conceptualisms (2009), Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011), and Vanessa Place, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Caroline Bergvall’s I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (2012)—and compared them to Tomasula’s Conceptualisms (2022). Pointing out the similarities and differences in terms of definition of conceptual writing, and of identification of precursors and of canonical works, Drag set out Conceptualisms as the largest, most inclusive and most in tune with the present day. Its embrace of hybridity and openness, he argued, made conceptualism into an open-ended activity more than a movement or a period.
5The focus then returned to Tomasula’s latest novel with the first keynote by Mary K. Holland (State University of New York, New Paltz), introduced by Monica Manolescu, and entitled “‘Fi about Sci, not Sci-Fi’: The Posthuman Human in Steve Tomasula’s Ascension.” Analyzing the novel as a posthuman narrative, Holland observed how it overcomes Stendhal’s optical metaphor of the novel as a mirror, representing time and space in scales not visible to the human eye while remaining Tomasula’s most materially-oriented book to date. The talk focused on the novel’s posthuman technologies, those depicted in the narrative such as W.2—the novel’s metaverse, which Holland read as an extension of the world—, but also those incorporated in the reading experience, through the QR codes that permeate the book. Holland argued that such technologies make the reader aware of their posthuman hybridity through an anti-realistic technique that points to the capitalist ideology in which all contemporary narratives are inevitably embedded. Replacing the novel in the context of Tomasula’s critical writing and generic preoccupations, and furthering her exploration of posthumanism in the novel, Holland depicted the “Book People” of W.2 who attempt to preserve literature—an homage to Ray Bradbury, but also a pun, the Book People being literal volumes of famous novels—as allowing for a preservation of humanity in its least commodified and colonizing form. Conversely, she pointed to the inhuman in the posthuman, discussing the Derridean haunting that permeates the digital imaginary of Ascension. The novel, she argued, thus points to the absurdity of a wholly non-human viewpoint, displaying the impossibility for the posthuman to survive the disappearance of the embodied. She nonetheless offered a more pessimistic reading of the final chapter of Ascension, a novel that seems to belong less to the genre of speculative fiction than to a kind of new realism signaling the end of humanity.
6In the afternoon, the second panel, moderated by Brigitte Félix (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis), further explored posthumanist approaches to Tomasula’s works. Laura Shackelford (Rochester Institute of Technology), in her talk entitled “‘Imagination dead, imagine:’ Re/Encountering the Pluriverse to Imagine Otherwise in Ascension: A Novel,” highlighted the multiperspectival structure of Tomasula’s latest novel, as well as its critique of late capitalism’s exploitative relationship with the natural world. She emphasized the way in which the novel imagines a “pluriverse”—as Arturo Escobar writes—, a more-than-human collective, through overlooked forms of life, from bird lice to slime mold, and reveals how capitalism’s systemic totalization paradoxically exposes our entanglement with all life on Earth, as well as late capitalism’s parasitical relationship to the world—both natural and human. In describing the algorithmic success in reducing humans to exploitable material, the narrative, Shackelford argued, invites us to reimagine representation beyond anthropocentric frames and to acknowledge the stories that challenge the logic of algorithms’ calculus and plot. Next, in “⸮ƎMƎM ƎHT UOY ƎЯA,” Aaron Jaffe (Florida State University) explored the shift from the singular perspective of Renaissance art to the fluid representations in contemporary digital culture. Focusing, in particular, on the position that Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas holds in Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture (2006), he looked at how the first disrupts conventional perspective—as famously explained by Michel Foucault—, and the latter turns storytelling into a complex database-like collage. In breaking down a stable perspective, Tomasula’s work reveals how meaning and identity are constantly reshaped by never-ending data and interpretation. Jaffe suggested that in the age of big data and algorithmic excess, representation no longer rests on stable surfaces but fractures into a space of competing opacities and transparencies. This submedial space, in which meaning dissolves into a digital wasteland, is what he called the “zero point of representation.” Finally, in a talk entitled “The Genealogy of Steve Tomasula’s Work: Death of the Author,” Steve Tomasula’s ‘Farewell to Kilimanjaro,’” Cristina Iuli (Università del Piemonte Orientale) discussed Tomasula’s short story “Farewell to Kilimanjaro,” a reinterpretation of Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and A Farewell to Arms, reflecting on authorial authority, media, and narrative form. Iuli offered a posthumanist reading of Tomasula’s short story and traced the ways in which the text reworks Hemingway through typographic experimentation and quotation. Pointing to a shift from conventional storytelling to a simulation of dialogue, she argued that this narrative relocation reflects a broader turn in contemporary literature towards new-media-based ways of seeing and reading. Thus, she placed Tomasula’s work within a “second modernism,” which critically engages with the conditions of storytelling in the digital media era.
7To bring the first day of the conference to a close, Steve Tomasula generously read an extract from his forthcoming novel, Z, in which a zombie who used to be a literature professor “leans into literature to find humor in the zombie condition.” Monica Manolescu, Françoise Sammarcelli and Anne-Laure Tissut then initiated conversation with the novelist followed by questions from the audience.
8The second and final day of the conference opened on the third panel, chaired by Béatrice Pire (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and focused on the question of the shifting scales of Tomasula’s work. Claudia Desblaches (Université Rennes 2) delivered a talk called “‘Emergent Manners of Seeing’ in ‘The Atlas of Men’ from Once Human, Stories by Steve Tomasula.” Desblaches expanded on the notion of emergence, used by Tomasula in his article “Emergence and Posthuman Narrative” (2009). Emergence is broadly defined through a resort to both biology and sociology as a process of cooperation of things of unlike kinds, that is, a process of creation by complexification. The talk, through its analysis of Tomasula’s innovative use of dots, curves, photos, graphs and footnotes, and his satirical take on the way past and present sciences dehumanize humanity, showed that “The Atlas of Men” and its poeticizing of scientific protocols sought to overcome the limitation of print culture. Desblaches argued that the story left room for randomness, allowing for new meanings to emerge, nonetheless revealing a phenomenological core of being in the world that cannot be objectified. In “Of Lice and Men: Multiscale Multimodality of Ascension,” Grzegorz Maziarczyk (John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin) drew on narratological approaches to complex systems and the Anthropocene as proposed by Marco Caracciolo and Erin James, to show how Ascension extends Edward Mendelson’s notion of the encyclopedic novel by combining multiscalarity and multimodality. Ascension, Maziarczyk argued, not only explores an interplay between the particular and the general but also links the past and the future, the real and the virtual, the scientific and the imaginative, opening up the novel to nonhuman-scale realities ranging from the level of microbiology to Mortonian hyperobjects. Maziarczyk sought to show that Ascension combines and transcends the three major types of post-postmodern realism identified by Mary K. Holland: metafictive, material and quantum, proposing the category of multimodal meta-realism as a designation for Tomasula’s creative strategy. Hanna Hadjadj (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) closed this third panel with her talk entitled “Materially Representing a Minority in ‘The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects’” in which she explored how this 2004 short story criticizes scientific and cultural representations of Asian identity in the United States through a layered narrative that blends flawed genetic study with kung fu movie tropes. Hadjadj highlighted how the story mimics scientific structures the better to subvert them, and how hypermediation (film references, storyboard visuals, and shifting voices) challenges representation. She argued that through parodic narrative structures, material elements like graph paper and storyboards, and metafictional commentary, the story exposes the failures of scientific discourse and popular culture to authentically represent minorities.
9The second keynote, given by David Banash (Western Illinois University), and chaired by Françoise Sammarcelli, was entitled “Plotting Change: Situating Steve Tomasula in the Long History of the Novel.” Provocatively describing Tomasula as a traditionalist rather than a form-breaker, Banash argued that the defining characteristics of his works of fiction lie in their embrace of mediocrity and contingency, rejecting the epic grandeur of earlier literary forms. Drawing on theoreticians like Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as on Sylvie Thorel’s work on mediocrity in the novel, Banash outlined how the serious novel pivots from mythic or divine significance to the interior lives of ordinary people—figures whose flaws, limitations, and internal contradictions are central to their humanity. Tomasula’s work, Banash explained, exemplifies this tradition: even when characters are brilliant or achieve great things, they are brought “down to size” by the novel’s form, which emphasizes their vulnerability, doubt, and moral ambiguity. In texts like IN & OZ, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, and The Book of Portraiture, Tomasula blends experimental media forms with the enduring genre of the realist novel to reflect the fragmented, media-saturated condition of modern life. Banash concluded that the novel survives and evolves by resisting transcendence, grounding itself instead in the mundane struggles of interiority, mediocrity, and the unresolvable tensions between individual agency and vast historical or circumstantial forces. Banash thus vividly opposed the novel to what he described as the pop-epic style of conspiracy which rejects the mundane and eclipses realism in the novel. Tomasula’s totalizing fictions and their attempt to make as accurate a portrait of society as possible conversely interrogate the untimely power of the novel in a world dominated by this pop-epic style, Banash argued, to think through the quotidian and beyond wish-fulfillment fantasies.
10The fourth and last panel, chaired by Sylvie Bauer (Université Rennes 2), opened with Matt Roberson (Central Michigan University) and his talk entitled “C-U See-Me: Observations,” in which he discussed digital surveillance in the short story “C-U See-Me,” and the way the characters’ identities are fragmented and mediated through data. He considered the evolution of Tomasula’s “digital” texts: “C-U See-Me,” as well as TOC, the CD “game” narrative that uses most of its multimedia facets to share a constellation of interlinked stories, which both emulate and consider the digital landscape in its ability to foster new types of communication and the voyeurism inherent in those new forms. Through an exploration of his personal photographic archive, Roberson also highlighted the disjunction between lived experience and reductive digital records. He argued that the text’s layered depiction of surveillance, power dynamics, and ambiguous criminality illustrates broader questions about agency and identity in a data-driven world. Then, in “The Book as Collaborative Experience,” Anca Cristofovici (Université de Caen Normandie) analyzed Tomasula’s innovative approach to the novel through collaboration and a focus on the reader’s participation and the reinvention of the novel. From the interplay of word and image to the intermedial component of his work, Cristofovici delineated Tomasula’s engagement with readers as active collaborators and emphasized that while technologies evolve, fundamental tools like the pencil remain constant. Placing Tomasula within a global history of book-object art, drawing parallels with artists and experimental writers such as Claude Simon, she showed how Tomasula’s work challenges the limitations of the traditional codex by mixing verbal and visual narratives, thus adapting to the multimedia landscape. She argued that Tomasula’s work is rooted in a desire to branch out from the strictly literary into mixed forms of representation and knowledge. Lastly, Sheheryar B. Sheik (Dalhousie University) gave a heartfelt and poignant tribute to Tomasula and his pedagogy in his talk, “Future Pasts, ‘Free Time’ & ‘The Mosaic of Time’ Or Collaging ‘Genocides,’” reflecting on his experience as a student of Tomasula’s. Sheik described his own writing process as a fiction writer and the advice given to him by Tomasula. His talk culminated in an artistic performance of sorts: the collective reading by some of the participants of a text he presented, a vetoed but powerful 2024 United Nations General Assembly and Security Council address by the Global South nations, calling for an end to imperialism and injustice through a sustained and total boycott of the Global North. Sheik’s experimental talk, echoing Tomasula’s similarly innovative approach, brought the two days full circle, keeping up with the ongoing exploration of experimental boundaries in arts and literature that had been central to many engaging discussions throughout the conference.
11Steve Tomasula was invited to deliver the closing remarks of this conference. He kept them short, explaining that the event had already articulated many of his own thoughts in ways he had not been able to express himself.
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Valentine Alloing et Charlotte Lamontagne, « Steve Tomasula: The Art of Representation », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/26483 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i21
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