The fiction of asking “what if?". Reading Angela Carter’s Speculative Fiction in Comparison with its Intertextual Sources (Lausanne)

Organised by the English Department with the support of the Centre Interdisciplinaire d'Etude des Littératures (CIEL) of the University of Lausanne, this study day will explore the role of speculative questions in British author Angela Carter's creative and critical responses to her intertextual sources. 

This study day will explore Angela Carter’s speculative fiction, which she conceptualised as the ‘fiction of asking “what if?”’ questions as starting points to rewrite stories (Interview with Anna Katsavos 14). Carter’s fiction is famous for its range of intertextual references and its creative and critical engagement with a wide variety of literary, artistic, and critical sources. While many of these intertextual relationships have been well documented, new ones are still being discovered today. Bringing together acclaimed and emerging Carter scholars, this study day will specifically focus on Carter’s three speculative novels – Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977) – and investigate the ‘what if’ questions they are asking their intertextual sources. These include understudied literary texts (from medieval romances and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, and J.G. Ballard’s science-fiction books), as well as theoretical writings in disciplines as varied as psychology (Freud), anthropology (Levi-Strauss), and philosophy of language (Wittgenstein). Asking specific ‘what if’ questions in fictional form in her three novels is Carter’s key strategy to respond to these wide-ranging intertexts and create new stories which stimulate the reader’s own speculative imagination and curiosity.

With Vanessa Joosen - Marie Mulvey-Roberts - Michelle Ryan - Caleb Ferrari - Kirill Melnikov - Marie Emilie Walz