Le séminaire de l’axe Transculturalismes du laboratoire VALE (Sorbonne Université), co-organisé par Jaine Chemmachery et Alexis Tadié, reprendra le 3 avril 2025. Nous entendrons une présentation de Neela Cathelain (Sorbonne Université) intitulée : “The Novel and Eschatology as Bildung: (Re)Claiming the Homeland with George Eliot and Yasmin Zaher”, dont vous trouverez le résumé ci-dessous.

Cette première séance aura lieu de 17h30 à 19h à la Maison de la Recherche (28 rue Serpente, 75006 Paris), en salle D040. Les séances suivantes auront lieu de 17h30 à 19h, toujours à la Maison de la Recherche : le programme pour les mois à venir sera précisé ultérieurement.

Abstract:

“The project was to create a new natural order. The idea had come to me from the nature of upstate New York, and the greenhouse in Paris. But I understood that what I needed was different, something older, a regression to my biblical homeland.”

      In The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (2023), the unnamed Palestinian protagonist rebuilds a doomed ecosystem reminiscent of her lost homeland in her New York apartment. This contemporary novel poses a paradoxical question about enterprises of creation, rebirth, or reworlding and their relation to destruction, colonization, and displacement. This paper investigates how Bildung – the traditional trajectory of the novel – may be imbricated in eschatological projects; it focuses on The Coin, and on George Eliot’s 1876 proto-Zionist novel Daniel Deronda. While Daniel Deronda relies on seemingly antithetical narratives and plots – mysticism and realism, messianism and colonialism – The Coin depicts the multi-layered dislocation that results from “bourgeois teleologies of violence” (Khatib). This paper will examine the different ways both novels tackle the inherent negativity of the fantasized return to the homeland, both formally (i.e. the projected return outside the plot, outside the novel as an organized system) and with respects to the protagonists and their own attempts at self-exclusion from the social order.