Résumé

This paper focuses on the way Percival Everett’s The Water Cure turns language into a “performative utterance” which materializes trauma on the page. It explores how the narrator’s cognitive collapse rips language apart and concomitantly traps the text in a “snowstorm of clarities” which undermines and re-frames the reader’s categories. Under Everett’s playful linguistic ax, letters, words and sentences start “bubbling over” and colliding with one another relinquishing all capacity for meaning making, and ultimately sparking off “wonderful mis-or missed readings.”

L'auteur

Gwen Le Cor is Associate Professor of American Literature and English for Specific Purposes at the University of Paris 8. Her recent research focuses on the nexus of literature and science in contemporary American fiction and poetry. She is currently finishing a monograph on Jonathan Safran Foer’s writing, and published articles on the works of Jen Bervin, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Flannery O’Connor, Art Spiegelman, Stephanie Strickland, Steve Tomasula and Robert Penn Warren.

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