Résumé

This paper, based upon Lacanian and deconstructionist tools, intends to show in what way Everett’s stories, notably The Fix and The Appropriation of Cultures, confront the fundamental division of American society in a metafictional way, constantly combining semiotics and politics. Indeed Percival Everett deals not only with the issue of black identity but also with the structuring of the subject through the symbolic, that is through language and strategies of what Derrida calls differance. Desire is thus first differed in the short stories in order to reach jouissance (as the symbolical re-appropriation of the usufruct of a property but also as pleasure). As the re-appropriation of meaning, empowerment and sublimation of desire, it is therefore central to Percival Everett’s Damnedifido stories and solves on the page the fundamental alienation between the black subject and the Other.

L'auteur

Isabelle Van Peteghem –Tréard defended her PhD thesis on Jouissance and the Sacred in Alice Walker’s Novels in Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle. She has published articles on Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Angela Davis, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Tennessee Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Vladimir Nabokov. Her book, La sublimation pourpre d’Alice Walker, will be released in 2013. She is also currently working on the notion of sublimation in American cinema. She teaches in 1ère Supérieure and Lettres Supérieures in Nantes.

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