Katarzyna Kotowska

In this paper we confront the issue of masquerade in chosen works of contemporary artists Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle. Referring to Joan Riviere's (1929) statement that femininity is a masquerade, we examine the fictional embodiments of the mentioned artists in which the mask not only conceals but also reveals reality. The artistic and literary corpus is composed as follows: Cindy Sherman (Untilted Film Stills 1977, Society portraits (2008) and Flappers (2016-18)); Sophie Calle (La filature (1981), Les histoires vraies (2002) and Prenez soin de vous (2007)). Following the analysis of the artists' projects and their autobiographical or semiautobiographical approaches, we come to reveal the reversal of the techniques used by the artists. It means that Sherman, like the film stills, captures a moment and immobilizes it; Calle, for her part, gives life to the events that she provokes. However, in both cases the masks they wear, the fictitious identities that the artists embody, contribute to revisit the codes of the time we live in.

Fruit of my loins… The embryo typology of « extrême contemporain »

The pregnancy considered as a physiological psychosis reveals the dichotomy of the unity and the duality. Therefore the relationship between the psychoanalytic concept of objet and subject is disturbed. The process is close to the mechanism of abjection defined in 1980 by Julia Kristeva. The possession and the separation are two perspectives for analyze the embryo typology in some examples of contemporary feminine literature (Dominique Mainard, Eliette Abécassis, Chloé Delaume, Valentine Goby, Annie Ernaux, Lorette Nobécourt, Nancy Houston).

The goal of the article is to confront the texts of François Bon (Mécanique, 2001) and Marcin Wicha (Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem / Things I did not throw away, 2017) by relating objects and their losses in an autobiographical context. The place given to objects in the narratives in question is masterful and goes beyond simple cognitive functions in discourse. In order to highlight the complexity of their status, we progressed in this analysis by following three aspects: the structuring object of the narrative, the mnemonic support object and the "metonymic" object.

A surface of a human skin determines a border between outer and inner sphere. Tightness of this division, however, is a subject to permanent perturbation. It makes human skin a fascinating mean of communication. The visual arts (ex. body art) and literature derive from that potential. In that context, human skin appears as a place where Julia Kristeva’s distinction between « symbolic » and « semiotic » diffuses. A body becomes a corps parlant (speaking body). This process of body writing is analyzed by a collation of Lorette Nobécourt’s book La Démangeaison (Itching) and some body art’s enterprises.