Adossé au laboratoire IDEA (Université de Lorraine), ce séminaire hebdomadaire en études intermédiales est animé par les étudiants du Master Langues et Sociétés - Mondes anglophones de l'Université de Lorraine à Metz.
Il se déroule en présentiel sur le Campus du Saulcy à Metz, et est accessible en ligne via Teams.
Organisateur.ices :
Diane Leblond, IDEA, Université de Lorraine
Camille Ternisien, IDEA, Université de Lorraine
Le programme des séances du séminaire est disponible ici.
Suivre le séminaire en visioconférence via Teams.
Derniers événements associés:
-
2026
-
20 mars 2026 : Héloïse Lecomte (Sorbonne Université)
Séminaire de 11h-13h
Our Lady of the Underground': Re-Visioning Myth, Staging (Identity) Crisis in Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown (2013) and Charlie Covell’s Kaos (2024)
The character of Eurydice, left voiceless and sidelined in the original myth of Orpheus, has long been the object of feminist rewritings and “re-visions” (Rich 1979, 35) which aimed at restoring her agency, following the lead of poems by H.D. and Carol Ann Duffy or a play by Sarah Ruhl. This paper proposes to investigate contemporary takes on the myth, both onstage and onscreen: in American songwriter and playwright Anaïs Mitchell’s studio album turned stage musical Hadestown (2006) and the TV series Kaos by British screenwriter Charlie Covell (2024).
Hadestown couples the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with the story of Hades and Persephone in a modernised context reminiscent of the Great Depression, in which the protagonists’ movements are shaped by a deep-seated and pervasive sense of collective and individual crisis. Mitchell’s decision to have Eurydice voluntarily sell her soul and body to Hades in order to get out of misery puts the character’s agency centre stage. In the British TV series Kaos (Netflix), director Charlie Covell also rejuvenates Eurydice’s tale by making her the wife of a rock-star Orpheus who uses her face on posters and billboards to promote his latest album, “Muse”. The series represents the character’s desire to break up with her husband as a rejection of the limitations that go along with the role of being the poet’s Muse. Covell’s decision to rename the character “Riddy” partly frees her from her name’s mythical weight and the constraining narrative pattern in which her fate is already decided and endlessly repeated with each retelling.
In this presentation, which will also investigate other mythological couples (such as Hades and Persephone), I will explore the ways in which both Mitchell and Covell stage and debunk the tropes of the male genius and the female Muse by giving renewed significance to the protagonists’ journey of self-discovery into and out of the Underworld. By fully fleshing out the character of Eurydice, both stories also contribute to retrieve previously silenced voices from the shadows.Note bio-bibliographique:
Héloise Lecomte is a lecturer at the Sorbonne Université in Paris, specializing in British literature. Her PhD thesis focused on the theme of mourning in contemporary British and Irish novels. Her work and numerous scholarly articles focus on the theme of death, mourning and loss in literature.
13 mars 2026 : Frédérique Fouassier (Université de Tours)
Séminaire de 14h-16h
A girl in "a masculine usurped attire": gender and genre in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
In Twelfth Night (c. 1600–1601), Shakespeare stages the story of Viola, separated from her twin brother Sebastian after a shipwreck in Illyria. She decides to disguise herself as a page in order to protect herself from the potential dangers faced by an isolated young woman, and thus chooses the name Cesario in order to enter the service of Duke Orsino, with whom she immediately falls in love. However, Orsino himself is in love with Countess Olivia, who is inconsolable after the death of her own brother. Everything becomes complicated when Olivia falls in love with Viola-Cesario, who has come to present the Orsino’s compliments to her. Sebastian’s return will ultimately be necessary for identity and gender to realign and for order to be restored.
Like several of Shakespeare’s other comedies, Twelfth Night centers on a cross-dressed heroine, indeed doubly so, given the Elizabethan exclusively male stage. The role of Viola was played by a young man embodying a young woman herself dressed as a boy and sighing with love for Orsino, thereby reinforcing the erotic ambiguity at the heart of the dialogues and situations. As is often the case in Shakespeare, the question of gender ambiguity overlaps with a play on literary genres and a reflection on language: when appearances are deceptive, words are costumes too and their meaning is unstable.
In Twelfth Night (as in Shakespeare’s other cross-dressing comedies), the play on sexual ambiguity is accompanied by a meditation on the instability of language and a questioning of the conventions of literary genres. After contextualizing cross-dressing practices in early modern England, I will emphasize the strongly metadramatic dimension of the cross-dressed heroine, and finally show that adopting male attire also means appropriating the masculine prerogative of speech. Through this character, the playwright reflects on literary genres and their codes (here, primarily Petrarchan poetry) and on language in general—a reflection through which words appear as the mere costumes of meaning, distorting it… and disguising it.Note bio-bibliographique:
Frédérique Fouassier est maîtresse de conférences en Littérature et Civilisation de l’Angleterre de la première modernité à l’université de Tours et membre du Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance depuis 2007. Son domaine de recherche principal est le théâtre élisabéthain et jacobéen. Elle s’intéresse à la construction des personnages par le discours en utilisant essentiellement la perspective des études de genre, ainsi que les critiques historiciste, présentiste et matérialiste, afin d'analyser les stratégies des dramaturges de l’Angleterre de la première modernité pour représenter le genre et l’altérité en général. Au fil de ses travaux, elle a déployé d’autres axes de recherche majeurs, dans des domaines qui s’éloignent de la littérature et relèvent davantage de la civilisation et de l’histoire des idées. Elle a ainsi publié plusieurs articles et chapitres en histoire de la médecine et en civilisation anglaise de la Renaissance (géographie de Londres).
En 2014, elle a publié en collaboration avec Sujata Iyengar de l’université de Géorgie (USA) la monographie ‘Not Like an Old Play’: Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Parmi ses articles les plus significatifs, on peut citer « Henry VI, Part One: Jeanne d'Arc ou la coalescence des altérités » (PUR, 2010), "’Thou art my warrior, / I holp to frame thee’: The Construction of Masculine Identity in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus". (Men's Studies Press, 2012); “Amnésie collective et réécritures de l'histoire dans les deux tétralogies historiques de Shakespeare” (Textes et Contextes, 2014) ; "’[An] undutiful wife is a home-rebel, a house-traitor’ : la construction du personnage de l'épouse meurtrière dans Arden of Faversham (1592) et A Warning for Fair Women (1599)” (Peter Lang, 2016).
6 mars 2026 : Fanny Beuré (UL)
Séminaire de 14h-16h
Stars féminines et performances de genre dans la comédie musicale hollywoodienne classique
Genre composite marqué par d’importants phénomènse de circulations, la comédie musicale hollywoodienne classique est un terrain de choix pour étudier les questions d’intermédialité. En outre, la performance y est centrale : les numéros musicaux (musical performances), loin d’être de simples pauses spectaculaires, permettent de jouer (to perform) les identités des personnages et leurs relations. Ces dernières sont alors « traduites » en musique et en danse par des mécanismes pétris de représentations symboliques, qu’il convient de décrypter.
Ma communication propose d’examiner trois actrices de comédie musicale classique - deux danseuses (Eleanor Powell et Charlotte Greenwood) et une chanteuse (Doris Day) pour étudier comment leurs styles singuliers de performance ont pu leur permettre de s’aménager des espaces privilégiés où performer le genre autrement, parfois en déstabilisant à la marge les normes et rapports de genre pourtant très codifiés du cinéma hollywoodien classique.Note bio-bibliographique:
Fanny Beuré est Maîtresse de conférences en études cinématographiques à l’Université de Lorraine et membre du CREAT (Centre de Recherche sur les Expertises, les Arts et les Transition). Elle est l’autrice de That’s Entertainment! Musique, danse et représentations dans la comédie musicale hollywoodienne classique (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2019) et de Fred Astaire, le dandy dansant (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2024), co-écrit avec Jules Sandeau. Elle a par ailleurs publié de nombreux articles scientifiques sur les séries télévisées musicales et les films musicaux classiques et contemporains. Ses recherches mobilisent à la fois les analyses esthétiques et socioculturelles, en particulier les études culturelles et les études de genre.
20 février 2026 : Pierre Degott (UL)
Séminaire de 14h-16h
Gender issues on the eighteenth-century operatic stage
This seminar will focus on the issue of “voicing gender” on the English operatic stage of the eighteenth-century. As is usually well-known, in a context where the presence of women onstage was still a relatively recent feature, the majority of major male parts in Italian opera were sung by castratos/castrati, male singers whose vocal range – soprano or alto – was exactly the same as that of female singers. In many instances male and female singers were actually interchangeable, and several parts intended for men could alternately be sung by women without anyone taking notice. If few castrati, at least in England, condescended to act female roles, a certain number of female singers actually specialized in the impersonation of male parts, a feature that could also enhance – or undermine – their erotic appeal, thereby creating further confusion.
The seminar will address a certain number of questions linked to the theatrical practices of the time. How did the mixed rejection and admiration for the castrato manifest itself? How did the public respond to the castrato sound? How did they respond to the physical appearance of male singers whose looks and body could sometimes be affected by their condition? How was the general hostility towards the castrato amalgamated with the xenophobic rejection of Italian citizens on religious and political grounds? In a context where theatrical parts could be played by either men or women, how was the issue of masculinity/femininity perceived, and how did that affect the very genre of opera itself? In other words, the seminar should show how the issue of gender literally informed a musical genre that was just beginning to flourish and find its identity on English soil.Note bio-bibliographique:
Pierre Degott is Professor of English at the Université de Lorraine in Metz, where he mainly teaches eighteenth-century literature. His PhD. (now published at Éditions L’Harmattan) was a study on the themes and poetics of Handel’s libretti for his English oratorios. His current research is on the following subjects: 1. Librettology, and more specifically the reflexivity of the sung text; 2. the representation of musical and operatic performances in Anglo-Saxon fiction; 3. opera and oratorio in translation. Even though his research covers all eras concerned by operatic practise, he mainly concentrates on eighteenth-century musical forms (opera, semi-opera, oratorio, odes, ballad-opera, musical plays…). He has published about a hundred academic articles and organised several conferences, mainly on musico-literary subjects. He was the Dean of the “UFR Arts, Lettres et Langues” in Metz from 2012 to 2022 and he is currently Vice-President for Student Life at Université de Lorraine.
13 février 2026 : Alice Morin (UL)
Séminaire de 14h-16h
What do we talk about when we talk about fashion photography? Photographs’ afterlives, from magazines to books — and back.
This presentation takes as its starting point the tension between the multiplicity and diversity of photographs produced by and for the fashion press; and the formation of a narrow canon of iconic fashion photographs. Positing this dissonance will allow to explore entwined issues relating to the production, circulation, and ultimately reception of fashion images, that have had significant bearings on collective conceptions of gender and gender norms, beauty, taste and class. More specifically, I will use the example of Vogue magazine (1892-) and its editorial photographs from the 1930s (when the magazine started to invest significantly in the photographic medium) until the 1970s (when the said photographs entered museum spaces, attaining institutional legitimation as a form of art). By following the "trajectory" of selected pictures over time and across media, I endeavor to analyze how a mass corpus was produced for magazine uses; then selectively re-used towards branding, in crucially intermedial ways. Processes of selection and hierarchisation, unfolding across several (print) media, will come to the fore, in order to deconstruct dominant fashion photography imagery and replace it within negotiated practices of reception. Questioning fashion photographs' afterlives illuminates how they successively interacted with various audiences in varied geographical and institutional contexts.
Note bio-bibliographique:
Alice Morin is ATER at the Université de Lorraine in Metz. A cultural historian, her research examines editorial uses of photographic images in mainstream magazines, mass corpora scrutinized from their production to their re-uses. She was awarded a PhD in American studies from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (2018), was a postdoc in media studies at the Philipps-Universität Marburg (2020-2023) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities-KWI Essen (2024-2025). She was also scientific advisor to the exhibition Vogue Paris. 100 Years (Musée Galliera, 2021-2022). Her latest work focuses on the transnational and transmedial circulation of photographs in the 20th century, and she is currently drafting a monograph on the transatlantic history of media conglomerate Condé Nast in the 20th century.