1Organized by Maud Bougerol (LERMA/HVL, Aix-Marseille Université), Jean-Yves Pellegrin (VALE, Sorbonne Université), Anne-Laure Tissut (ERIAC, Université de Rouen) and Aurore Clavier (ECHELLES, Université Paris Cité), the conference took place at Université Paris-Cité on May 6th and 7th 2025. Aurore Clavier offered the opening remarks and welcomed the attendees and speakers coming both from Europe and the United States to the conference and Maud Bougerol introduced Brian Evenson, underlining his extensive and prolific career. For his special address, Marc Chénetier recalled his first meeting with Brian Evenson in Utah, thirty years ago. He underlined his long career and his work as a translator and saluted his rejection of conformism in an age of anti-intellectualism. He took the opportunity to note the recent passing of Robert Coover and introduced Evenson by quoting from Vachel Lindsay’s poem “When Brian Speaks.” Brian Evenson thanked Marc Chénetier for his participation to the present conference as well as the first one on his work ten years prior in Rennes. The author stated that the conference was an opportunity for him to absorb what people think about his work. His latest book Membre Fantôme (Payot et Rivages), translated by Jonathan Baillehache, was set to be published the next day in France, a year before the American release.
2Eric Athenot (Université Paris Est Créteil) described the collection Windeye as a “hostile writerly territory,” a volume comprising stories about seeing and unseeing, shielding the reader against diegetic revelations which they could not endure. The fiction of Evenson cultivates an aesthetic of self-erasure in a genre so prone to unsettling the reader. Athenot was also interested in the eponymous story, calling it a “story of clinical disintegration” where language becomes an uncanny vehicle for unreliability. It reveals a fear of and a paradoxical trust in its performative power. Athenot suggested that the uncanny could be read through a single word (the parallel between eye and I) opening into a new reality as well as new uncertainties. He explained about the reading experience that the further he progressed through the collection, the less secure he felt, as though the text itself were gradually eroding his sense of safety.
3James Baxter (University of Reading) focused on the collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019) and the motif of circularity within it. The circle is a dominant spatial figure where characters find themselves trapped. He examined the author’s deployment of the idea of the magic circle in the collection and linked it to the philosophy of Eugene Thacker on horror fiction, which the author has acknowledged as an influence. For Thacker, this genre necessitates a paradoxical awareness to allow the hiddenness of the world to reveal itself. The circle in Evenson’s fiction becomes subject to faintness and diffusion. The texts offer narratives of obsessive circularity and bring about a discussion about the porous relationship between text and paratext and how both contaminate each other.
4Julian Caradec (Aix-Marseille Université) examined the stories in the collections Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019) and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021) and how they establish an uncanny frontier between the domestic and the unknown only to sometimes meld, sometimes blur and every time unravel both. “The Shimmering Wall” (2021) suggests a world beyond a membrane-like wall, a distorted familiar whose artifacts resemble warped versions of our everyday objects. The story “Song for the Unraveling of the World” sees the protagonist, on the run from the law after kidnapping his daughter, struggling with the language to describe the house they squat in, as he tries to create a simulacrum of domesticity which cannot hold. Finally, in the story “His Haunting,” a man is haunted by a presence in the threshold of his room only to become himself the haunting presence when he stands in the same threshold. The doorsill becomes the place of a haunting without apparent reason. The mere fact of standing at the frontier between the domestic and the unknown gives rise to the Freudian Unheimliche.
5Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar (Université Bretagne Sud) addressed the question of genre when tackling Brian Evenson’s fiction and explained that it would be reductive to call his fiction contemporary or postmodern gothic. His stories are aware of the genres in which they evolve, and his texts tend to fold back the effects of the gothic onto the text itself: in a self-reflexive turn, literature—and, by extension, language itself—becomes a source of terror. In an interview she conducted with Brian Evenson, he stated that the gothic was something that haunts his stories rather than their genre. Evenson toys constantly with the paratext, which is meant to establish a limit between the text and the world. It circumscribes the text and distributes the spaces for fiction and reality. Several of his stories renegotiate that limit—the three chapters of the novel The Open Curtain (2006) are all numbered “1” for instance. The paratext abdicates and no longer protects us against the text.
6Using the framework of object-oriented ontology, Morgane Augris (Université de Tours) brought into focus what the texts of Brian Evenson share with ecological thought regarding language and mimesis which are seen as obstacles to a true ontology of things. The representational nature of language is insufficient to convey the urgency central to ecological thought. Evenson’s aesthetics of repetition are used in an ecological reading contract as a means to favor sensation over mimesis, thwarting the tendencies of language to have a mere performative impact on every single thing and object. The speaker underlined the need to acknowledge language beyond its ability to “serve,” a necessary exercise to unravel the ontological “servitudes” language sustains and propagates. Augris stated that “challenging the reader’s pleasure is now part of the ecological reading contract, which opposes the exploitation of the environment through strategies of literary replication.” Repetition in Brian Evenson’s work is used as a means to prevent a straightforward access to the text and to language, one way to deflate human hegemony over things and their representations. Inscribing some of Evenson’s stories into the larger field of speculative fiction, Augris quoted Stéphane Vanderhaeghe’s observations regarding the genre and its “endeavor to break free from […] the mimetic or referential hold […] [t]he writing that shapes such fiction would […] in one way or another turn against […] language mechanisms.” Finally, the speaker stressed the importance of the ecological reading contract in destabilizing language, even at the peril of breaking the literary object in order to renegotiate our relation to the world, something observed in the works of Brian Evenson where “reading is translating.”
7Béatrice Pire (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle) tackled the subject of the virus in Brian Evenson’s collection Contagion, opening by quoting Gilles Deleuze: “the world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man” (3). She read the landscape in Contagion as mutilated and the frontier as a place of violence. The motif of the virus and its articulation with language is an apt entry point into postmodernism. Jacques Derrida conceived his philosophy as a virology: “All I have done is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology. The virus is a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder. It derails the mechanism of the communicational type, it is coding and decoding. Neither living nor non-living” (12). Following this description, Béatrice Pire described Evenson’s fiction as a virography, an intermediate state between life and death similar to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. She noted the history of viral metaphors such as the language used to describe terrorism after the 9/11 attacks: “Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere […] ready to awaken everywhere as a double agent” (Baudrillard).
8Tom Byers (independent scholar) suggested that literary horror is a boundary between horror and literature and the transgression of that boundary represents a mixing or contamination of horror with some other literary virus. Within this framework, he wondered how writers of stories thought actively about language and its possibilities. Byers touched on the novella Dark Property (2002), the music of its prose and the tension about the surfacing of style in the text where characters are being split and fragmented. He explored the influence of Franz Kafka in the collection A Collapse of Horses (2016)—where a government worker is incarcerated after making a report—and Michel Foucault in the story “Wanderlust,” with its themes of surveillance and masochistic masculinity celebrating castration as a way to patriarchal honor. Evenson wields language as something that could be inflicted upon someone. He lets horror de-sentimentalize the literary project. The literary is therefore pitted against the facile, the generic, the unasked, and the repressed. Crossing between horror and literature, the pleasures of both are at least in part masochistic. Literature disrupts us and thereby can scare us. It also confuses us, makes us struggle, deceives us, and slips away.
9Françoise Sammarcelli (Sorbonne Université) addressed Brian Evenson’s latest collection of stories, Good Night, Sleep Tight (2024) where he rejuvenates horror with old motifs of fear of the dark and the unknown. The collection alternates between human and non- or post-human protagonists, adhering to the Lovecraftian ethos stating that the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is the fear of the unknown although it is mankind itself that serves as the haunting force in Evenson’s stories, rather than ancient demons. Internal focalization forces us to share the protagonists’ disorientation. Otherness itself is redefined, as humans are seen by robots in terms not metaphysical at all, but simply as beings made of flesh and blood. Sammarcelli also drew parallels with the prose of Edgar Allan Poe, through the use of free indirect style or the motif of premature burial in the story “A True Friend,” and showed how George Bataille’s influence is felt in “The Thickening” where a lipless mouth opens to reveal “what seemed at first a large dirty-white marble, but then turned to reveal itself to be an eye.” According to her, the hybridity of the collection allows for a decentering, offering a total absence of certainty about anything, with the duplicity of language contributing to this effect. In the eponymous story, an AI asks: “which of us is the real me?” (102). Sammarcelli ended her presentation by asking: What is the future of beings whose role is to care for others when there is no one around anymore?
10Maud Bougerol (Aix-Marseille Université) unpacked the meaning of the term “mormor” which appears in several stories in the collections Windeye and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. “Mormor” describes the maternal grandmother in Scandinavian languages. It is a foreign word and a repetition of the same syllable. Although the word doesn’t sound English, it resembles some words in French (duplication of mort-mort, mord-mord). The word mormor is only found in “Grottor” (Windeye) and “Myling Kommer” (The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell) and in both instances, the meaning is implied but not explained. The mormor is an elusive figure, a strangeness that seeps into the protagonists’ life as if the repressed linguistic haunts the story. The word suggests a powerful and unsettling figure, but its presence is too limited in Brian Evenson’s body of work to explain its importance. There is, however, a paronymic proximity with the word “Mormon.” Another proximity observed is to the word murmur, ubiquitous in Evenson’s fiction. At some point in history, murmur was pronounced mormor. By returning obsolete words to language, Brian Evenson subverts prose and highlights themes of haunting, return and the perennial latency of words in language. Maud Bougerol believes that Mormon and murmur are latent in the word mormor. Many German, Latin American, Scandinavian words and names can be found in Evenson’s early fiction. In the word mormor we find a doubling at the root of the feeling of unsettlement (uncanny). The dialogue between what is heimlich and what is unheimlich stays unresolved. Recognition is a trick that Brian Evenson wants us not to fall prey to. Following Merleau-Ponty’s theory of latency in language, Bougerol contended that every story by Brian Evenson may be seen as an extension of a pre-existing mythology. For instance, the “partitioning curtain swaying” in the story “Myling Kommer” is reminiscent of Mormon temple rituals in Evenson’s novel The Open Curtain. She stated that her entire body of work on Brian Evenson and literary reception theory was sparked by her encounter with the word mormor. Bougerol quoted American philosopher Alphonso Lingis: “to enter in communication is to struggle against the noise, the interference and the vested interests” (72). Communication is a form of cooperation to “hear the distant rumble of the world.” The word mormor embodies a decisive hopeful aspect, namely, that communication occurs even when all communication seems impossible.
11As chair of the roundtable, Brigitte Felix (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) opened the discussion with a quote by Raymond Federman: “Fiction is called experimental out of despair” (7). Brian Evenson explained that he is not necessarily comfortable with the term experimental fiction; where the term is interesting is when it describes the unsettledness of literature. Stéphane Vanderhaeghe evoked French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in saying that horror is a way to maintain “correlation in circles.” Brigitte Felix explained that he conceives of fiction in a binary way: the commercial fiction that adheres to the rules and writers who do not want to go by the rules. The label “experimental” is redundant as fiction is experimental by definition. Brian Evenson didn’t think of the category of fiction he fitted in when he began writing and finds the usefulness of generic categories limited. Brigitte Félix asked if experimental fiction requires experimental teaching in a university context. Stéphane Vanderhaeghe answered that all literature seems experimental for students who are not specializing in the field of literature, citing his experience teaching Ben Marcus to third-year students as a failure. Conventional fiction is the background against which the meaning of experimental fiction should be examined. Brian Evenson remarked that students at the California Institute of the Arts are very much demanding to tackle experimental fiction, but need to be provided the appropriate background before starting, as many first-year students do not read and are resistant to how narrative works through language. Brigitte Félix asked Stéphane Vanderhaeghe whether translating provides insight into the contemporary scene. Vanderhaeghe explained that he has a pragmatic approach to translation. In translation, meaning is far less important than the performative aspect of the sentence. In his work, he aims to replicate the effect he finds in the original sentence. Evenson stated that what mattered to him when translating was to focus on what he felt was important. The feeling of the text is what must be restituted. One must think of sentences as units rather than words. When he translates something for publication in the US, it is because he believes American fiction would benefit from it.
12Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar (Université Bretagne Sud) began her keynote address with a question: are Brian Evenson’s stories reactive to the world or are they an escape? Are these stories political in a context of rampant fascism? Although it is not a matter of prescriptive or descriptive morality in his work, the question remains. Between post-apocalyptic wasteland and haunted houses, even though the text won’t allow escapism, the mimetic frame is not the primary concern. The bulk of Evenson’s prose finds solace in eschewing the world as we know it, undoing it rather than striving to recompose it. She borrowed from the writings of Sandra Lucbert to indict overtly political fiction as frozen and referential: “une littérature du c’est ainsi” (15) Brian Evenson stated that his fiction is “definitely reactive to the world, but projectively or slantwise.” Nawelle Lechevalier-Bekadar used Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of extro science-fiction or “fiction des mondes hors-science” to describe the worlds in Evenson’s fiction as defective, coming undone one way or another. She reads in it an extreme fragility which converges towards the principle of contingency, opposed to necessity: what cannot not be, what cannot be otherwise. Extro science-fiction states that we do not need to redo the laws of physics to adhere to them. Sometimes rules simply do not work. Evenson’s fiction offers a glimpse into what a world thus struck by contingency would look like. She drew an equivalent between the Arabic equivalent of the phrase once upon a time—kan ya makan fi qadim az-zaman—(translating to “There was, there was not / There was and there was not”) to a passage from Song for the Unraveling of the World: “She had to be in the house. Only, she wasn’t in the house.” She presented this as an example of what Brian Richardson dubs denarration (168-175): a kind of narrative negation in which a narrator denies significant aspects of their narrative that had earlier been presented as given.
13Karim Daanoune (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry) established the porous border between self and world through the ear in Evenson’s fiction. According to him, the author drew from the acoustic register to do away with boundaries and therefore include the reader as a potential hearer or listener. “The Other Ear” depicts a war between unnamed belligerents, opening thus: “István acquired the other ear during the worst days of the war.” The story offers a confrontation with the foreignness of the ear. The hierarchy between the host and the graft becomes unstable and the relation to the ear is competitive in nature: “Cutting it off, he couldn’t help but feel, would mean somehow that the ear had won. Won what? he wondered again as he charged.” Through the aurality of the language in the story, the readers are confronted with a liminal space where inside and outside are conflated. The homophony “I am hear/here” pervades the story and destabilizes the reference of deictics as the text exhibits a phenomenology of hearing which involves the position of the readers. They are present too, near István, as readers but also as those being addressed. As readers are hearing and listening and may consider ourselves like another ear if not like the other ear. Readers are caught in a moment of autophonic resonance as some degree of vocality, of hearing is always involved in reading.
14Sylvie Bauer (Université Rennes II) observed how the familiar is shaken in the collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. The motifs of uncanny prosthetics, haunting presences and post-apocalyptic landscapes share a referential instability. In the stories, the unbearable forms of alienation are encapsulated in the phrase “something is wrong,” which recurs when subjectivity collapses. A world gone wrong is revealed through the familiar, distorted by looking glasses and nightmares. The characters find themselves in places between places and bodies are swallowed up or maimed to the point of being invisible. Humans are modified or lack any real agency. The reader is invited to question the status of the human in the stories where people are being replaced by data in a world gone wrong. Access to what the protagonists see, or feel is denied or secondhand, similar to dreams; an extraction from a reality understood as a tangible relation to the world. The story “In Dreams” mentions “extracting data from darkness.” The narrator of the story is the unwilling host and guest of a haunting entity. They are erased, swallowed by darkness and no revelation comes at the end. “Data” also suggests that an archival endeavor as transmission is a central theme to the collection. In the story “Curator”, the protagonist preserves data for future creatures, human or not, and decides to wipe all records of humanity that ever existed. Continuity comes at the price of disillusion when mapping a humanity whose end had already been reached.
15Anne Ullmo (Université de Tours) opened her presentation by underlining the title Good Night, Sleep Tight, which suggests children’s storytelling, that is to say, a form of delightful horror. The stories of the collection draw us in different types of space and question how we are meant to experience space as it is intricately bound to epistemological concerns. The stories depict motels and diners, that is to say motifs of the American thrillers, places Marc Augé dubbed “non-lieux” or transitory places where people do not really connect. In the story “The Sequence,” where two twins play a strange game, we are confronted with spatial distortion and the sequencing of trauma. The space in the stories, without distancing us from soma, subject us to a strange ritual which involves the body. The twin realities of the children are unfolding: “Step where I step, exactly. Move like me. It should be easy for you because we have the same size feet. If we weren’t twins probably only one of us could play.” Roger Caillois argued in Les Jeux et les Hommes (1958) that play constitutes the creation of a pure space where one follows arbitrary and self-contained rules, separated from society. The double meaning of je/jeu allows just enough looseness to allow for disruption.
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