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International conference :
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The “Contemporary English Language Fiction”
research centre of Paris IV (François Gallix, Vanessa Guignery) and
the Paris-based UFM Institute (Paul Veyret) organised an international
conference on 20-21 March 2003 in Paris on the works of Kazuo Ishiguro
with the support of the British Council, the Scientific
Committee, Doctoral School IV of Paris IV-Sorbonne, and éditions Calmann-Lévy.
Thursday 20 March 2003
Louis Liard lecture room,
Sorbonne, 1 rue Victor Cousin, 75005 Paris
9h00-12h30 9h00
Opening speech Chair : François Gallix (Paris IV-Sorbonne) 9h30 Johann
Berti (Valence) : « Entre souplesse et rigidité : la
double architecture des fictions de Kazuo Ishiguro » 10h Paul Veyret (IUFM of Paris):
« Purloined Memories in The Remains of the Day, Or Did
Mr Stevens Write Any Christmas Cards? » 10h30 Coffee break 11h15 Max
Duperray (Aix-Marseille
1) : « L’hypothèse du portrait de l’artiste dans The
Remains of the Day » 11h45 Jean-Pierre Naugrette (Paris III) :
« When We Were Orphans, or the postponement of home » 12h30 Lunch break 14h30-16.30 Chair : Vanessa
Guignery (Paris IV-Sorbonne) 14h30 Linda Pillière (University of
Littoral-Côte d’Opale) : « The Language of Repression – a linguistic approach
to Ishiguro’s style » 15h Ebbe Klitgård (Roskilde University,
Denmark): « “The language of self-deception and self-protection”:
Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, especially An Artist of the Floating World » 15h45 Claire Pegon-Davison (Aix-Marseille
1): « How to Have Done with Words : Virtuoso Performances in
The Unconsoled »
18h30: Debate
with KAZUO ISHIGURO Friday 21 March 2003
Amphitheatre, IUFM of
Paris, 10 rue Molitor, 75016 Paris
9h00-12h30 9h00 Opening
speech Chair : Paul
Veyret (IUFM of Paris) 9h30 Hélène Machinal (University of
Bretagne Occidentale): « The strange case of Christopher Banks
in When We Were Orphans de K. Ishiguro » 10h Valérie Franceschi (Bastia) :
« Etsuko’s narrative or the
story of a double exorcism » 10h30 Coffee break 11h15 Krystyna Stamirowska (Jagiellonian
University, Krakow): « Silence and absence as strategies of self protection/self
defense in Ishiguro’s confessional narratives » 11h45 Dominique Vinet (Montesquieu-Bordeaux
IV) : « Space-time and tempo in The Unconsoled » 12h30 Lunch break 14h00-17h Chair : Bernard
Gilbert (Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux
III) 14h00 Camille Cantoni-Fort (Strasbourg
2) : « “Playing in the dead of night” : the narrator’s voice
in A Pale View of Hills » 14h30 Pascal Zinck (Cergy-Pontoise): « The
Remains of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Japan » 15h Coffee break 15h30 Isabelle Roblin (University of
Littoral-Côte d’Opale) : « Re-assessing the past : a parallel
reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World
and The Remains of the Day » 16h
Christine Evain (Ecole centrale, Nantes) : « Digression,
destruction and reconstruction in An Artist of the Floating World » 17h End of the conference The goal of this international conference was to investigate a mode of writing which is widespread in contemporary British literature and particularly in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro : the indirect mode, avoidance, vacillation. We will analyse the different forms of deviation in the narration and discern the reasons why certain Ishigurian narrators opt for transversal routes. In lieu of obvious and frontal confrontation and confession, these reticent narrators prefer the obtuse and select narrative shifts. This type of shifting writing may indeed participate in a deliberate strategy of diversion and a distancing from painful subjects, but it also reveals the difficulties inherent in any unveiling, uncovering, exploration of the intimate, anamnesis and exhumation of the public or private past. Reticence, writing with lacunae, strategies of displacement, dilatory figures, narrative with gaps, the art of the feint are all means of circumventing but also of deflecting reality, and therefore of transforming it in order to make it more acceptable and palatable. It is therefore up to the reader to show his perspicacity in order to fill the narrator’s embarrassing silences, to join up the dotted lines which signal a fractured discourse, to cover up the truths and the drama hidden between the lines. The two days of the conference were the occasion to focus on these techniques of deviation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction where the silences and the gaps in the discourse reveal more than they conceal, and where the narrators show themselves to be torn between the desire to confess and the reticence to tell all. We suggested the following angles: - the
intimate and its silence; the reticence of confession
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