Feather And Freedom: A Fabled Land In The Mind,
2026
Dalian University of Technology
Feather And Freedom: A Fabled Land In The Mind, Yuan Tao
Living in Languages
Set in the deceptively tranquil Honest Town, “The Feather of Sister Zandan” is narrated from the perspective of Zaan, a younger brother, revealing his complicated feelings toward his sister. Written in a fable-like style infused with magical realism, the story explores the tension between restraint and longing, culminating in an abrupt and poignant ending that evokes the emotional sting of an O. Henry-style twist. The short story won the Gemini Prize for Short Fiction of China in 2021. According to the award citation, Lan Du’s writing demonstrates emotional depth, dazzling imagination, and striking narrative tension. Her storytelling defies conventional …
Introduction,
2026
University at Albany
“Neither Living Nor Dead”: From Nazgûl To The Sídhe In Tolkien's The Fellowship Of The Ring (1954),
2026
University of Vigo
“Neither Living Nor Dead”: From Nazgûl To The Sídhe In Tolkien's The Fellowship Of The Ring (1954), Noelia Ramos
Journal of Tolkien Research
This study explores the influence of Celtic supernatural folklore, particularly the banshee tradition, on Tolkien’s depiction of the Nazgûl in The Fellowship of the Ring. Using W.B. Yeats’ Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and the Celtic Twilight movement as a comparative framework, it analyses “A Short Cut to Mushrooms” and “A Knife in the Dark”, focusing on liminality, spectral presence, and supernatural dread. These parallels are further contextualised through reference to early Irish texts The Táin Bó Cúailnge and The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn, central works within the Celtic literary compilation known to Tolkien …
"Deep Down Here By The Dark Water Lived Old Gollum": The 1927 Public Opening Of The Wookey Hole Show Caves And 'The Hobbit',
2026
Central Connecticut State University
"Deep Down Here By The Dark Water Lived Old Gollum": The 1927 Public Opening Of The Wookey Hole Show Caves And 'The Hobbit', Kristine Larsen
Journal of Tolkien Research
One central scene in The Hobbit – in which Bilbo Baggins finds the One Ring – takes place in a large subterranean cavern featuring a small island set within a body of water and reachable by boat. While this fictional location bears little resemblance to the caves of Cheddar Gorge, it closely parallels a series of caverns at Wookey Hole, located seven miles by road from Cheddar Gorge, that were opened up as public show caves in 1927. Now designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Wookey Hole was already well-known in the 1920s for its unique geology, ancient …
Simulating Rewriting Style: Algorithmic Reproduction Of Camus’S Literary Voice In Machine-Generated Texts,
2026
University of Calabar- Faculty of Arts
Simulating Rewriting Style: Algorithmic Reproduction Of Camus’S Literary Voice In Machine-Generated Texts, Peter Akongfeh Agwu Ph.D
Department of French Studies Graduate Student Association Conference
Virtual Presentation
Des Arbres Comme Des Lignes De Vie – Pascale Cassagnau Et Suhaib Gasmelbari En Conversation,
2026
Chercheuse et critique d’art
Des Arbres Comme Des Lignes De Vie – Pascale Cassagnau Et Suhaib Gasmelbari En Conversation, Pascale Cassagnau, Suhaib Gasmelbari
Regards
As part of a study day organized in September 2025 at the University of Grenoble Alpes in partnership with the Centre National des Arts Plastiques entitled “The Loss of Images: Research and Creative Narratives,” Pascale Cassagnau and Suhaib Gasmelbari discussed his film Talking about Trees (2019), focusing on the film’s sources and structure, the history of Sudanese cinema that it reveals within the film itself, and the metaphors of trees and plants as lifelines and living archives at a time when images have disappeared.
Résumé
Dans le cadre d’une journée d’études organisée en septembre 2025 à l’Université Grenoble Alpes en …
Introduction – Carnets Filmiques, Carnets Sonores : Des Essais Intimes Et Collectifs,
2026
Université de Poitiers
Introduction – Carnets Filmiques, Carnets Sonores : Des Essais Intimes Et Collectifs, Robert Bonamy, Aude Fourel, Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau
Regards
Le sens à attribuer à la notion de carnet filmique ou de carnet sonore suscite quelque indécision, en raison du caractère composite et mouvant des cas envisagés. L’enjeu principal ne paraît ainsi pas ici celui d’une définition serrée d’un objet, mais plutôt une attention accordée à des tentatives de réalisation. De surcroît, si la forme-carnet permet à peu près tout, elle n’interdit donc véritablement rien : l’esquisse, le brouillon, l’approximation, voire l’échec et l’interruption.
[...]
Du Journal De Deuil À L’Œuvre De Sépulture : « Lo » (Thanassis Vassiliou, 2021-2025),
2026
Université de Poitiers
Du Journal De Deuil À L’Œuvre De Sépulture : « Lo » (Thanassis Vassiliou, 2021-2025), Marie Martin
Regards
After his mother’s death in 2017, Thanassis Vassiliou returned to Greece and began filming. The instinctive act of recording aimed both to come to terms with the now definitive absence in places still filled with memories, and to document his own reactions, attempting to preserve them even if he could not fully understand them. These filmic notes could perhaps, later on, allow another perspective, according to the dynamic that Antoine Compagnon aptly analyzed as paradoxical in relation to Barthes’s Mourning Diary: “mourning and narrative are antinomic, but [...] only narrative [...] is capable of expressing the experience of mourning, …
« From Ground Zero » Et « Letters » : Carnets Polyphoniques En Quête D’Intersubjectivité,
2026
Université de Poitiers
« From Ground Zero » Et « Letters » : Carnets Polyphoniques En Quête D’Intersubjectivité, Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau
Regards
The two polyphonic films From Ground Zero (2025, produced by Rashid Masharawi) and Letters (2025, produced by Josef Khallouf) bring together, in response to the war in Gaza, unique short films, letters and chronicles that address collective questions. How do these films take charge of the urgent need to problematize, aesthetically and politically, the relationship between subjectivity and the collective? From the Palestinian enclave or neighboring Lebanon, they seek irreducible singularities and intersubjective connections in the face of the horror of genocide. Caught in a complex combination of places and times, their address to our spectatorial gaze thus reveals the …
Le Vent Du Sud, « La Nuit Et L’Enfant » – Récit D’Une Vidéo-Correspondance Avec Zoheir Mefti,
2026
Université Grenoble Alpes
Le Vent Du Sud, « La Nuit Et L’Enfant » – Récit D’Une Vidéo-Correspondance Avec Zoheir Mefti, David Yon
Regards
Entre 2011 et 2012, Zoheir Mefti et David Yon ont entretenu une correspondance autour de la réalisation filmique. A travers leurs échanges, ils questionnent la nécessité de l’image. Zoheir Mefti travaille un geste filmique de l’urgence, tandis que David Yon prépare un film en Algérie dans un temps plus long. Après les mots, ils partagent des images et des sons, tels des carnets filmiques, dans lesquels ils donnent leurs positions et interrogent les liens entre la vie et le cinéma.
Carnets De Bord. Tables D’Orientation « Tariq Teguia »,
2026
Chercheuse et critique d’art
Carnets De Bord. Tables D’Orientation « Tariq Teguia », Pascale Cassagnau, Tariq Teguia
Regards
This interview by Pascale Cassagnau with Tariq Teguia puts into perspective the Algerian filmmaker’s work notebooks, which are both autonomous objects and working documents, linked to the film itself. A medium for thought, the notebook is a space for language, a score and a cartographic space that gives shape to the writing of the film in a graphic way. A discursive space parallel to the space of scriptwriting, the notebook accompanies the development of the film from its inception, collecting the writing of thought in no particular chronological order.
Résumé
Cet entretien de Pascale Cassagnau avec Tariq Teguia met en …
« Voi(E)X De L’Exil, Formes De La Pensée » : Le Cinéma-Essai De Borhane Alaouié »,
2026
Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth, Beyrouth, Liban
« Voi(E)X De L’Exil, Formes De La Pensée » : Le Cinéma-Essai De Borhane Alaouié », Elie Yazbek, Farah Alhashem
Regards
This article offers a comprehensive study of Borhane Alaouié’s work, a central figure in modern Lebanese cinema, situating it within the tradition of the essay film. Through an analysis of Lettre d’un temps d’exil, À toi où que tu sois and Khallas, it examines how exile, wounded memory, and fragmentary thought shape the filmmaker’s aesthetic and ethical approach. Exile is explored not only as a geopolitical condition but as an interior state, a persistent uncertainty that structures voices, narratives and images. The study highlights the importance of voice-over, fragmentation, memory-driven editing and epistolary address, while positioning Alaouié’s work …
The Personal Is Collective: Egyptian First-Person – Documentary Cinema As Post-Revolution Diary,
2026
Queen’s University
The Personal Is Collective: Egyptian First-Person – Documentary Cinema As Post-Revolution Diary, Eman Elharmeel
Regards
The 2011 Egyptian revolution marked a watershed moment in the reconfiguration of individuality, autonomy and self-expression within Egyptian society. Challenging long-standing collectivist frameworks, the revolutionary moment opened new spaces for individual agency and subjective reflection. This paper examines how these shifts intersect with the rise of first-person documentary cinema as a powerful medium for articulating post-revolutionary subjectivity in Egypt.
Focusing on The Past Will Return (2015) by Dina Hamza, Happily Ever After (2016) by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir, and Little Eagles (2016) by Mohamed Rashad, the paper analyzes how filmmakers negotiate personal desires, familial pressures and collective belonging …
Triste Souvenir Et Sombre Avenir, « Lettre À Ma Sœur » (2006) De Habiba Djahnine,
2026
Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis
Triste Souvenir Et Sombre Avenir, « Lettre À Ma Sœur » (2006) De Habiba Djahnine, Boualem Khelifati
Regards
This article explores how Letter to My Sister (2006), a film by director and poet Habiba Djahnine dedicated to her sister Nabila, a democratic and feminist activist who was murdered by Islamist terrorists in Tizi Ouzou in 1995, revisits the fate of the direct and indirect victims of Algeria’s dark decade of the 1990s and the repressive religious and state policies towards women. It employs a narrative structure that combines several film genres – film-letter, film-journey, film-poem, and film-archive – showing situations in which memories and pain are shared, as well as the necessary perpetuation of a struggle that is …
Beyrouth 1978-1982 : Le Fonds Photographique De Monica Maurer – Une Collection Contre L’Oubli Et La Destruction,
2026
Université Grenoble Alpes
Beyrouth 1978-1982 : Le Fonds Photographique De Monica Maurer – Une Collection Contre L’Oubli Et La Destruction, Aude Fourel
Regards
It was while searching for unused film footage on the Palestinian struggle for a documentary essay that I discovered the filmography of German director Monica Maurer and her work restoring and preserving Palestinian films. For the past four years, we have been working together to digitise and catalogue the photographs and documents she still keeps at home.
I reflect on the paths opened up by the writing of a film in the making, on the formatting of Monica Maurer’s photographic collection, and on the initial prospects for visual and historical studies of this material in the particular context of the …
Sonorisation De L’Anarchive Ou La Palestine Comme Projet Politique – À L’Écoute De « A Fidai Film » De Kamal Aljafari Et De « Partition » De Diana Allan,
2026
École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
Sonorisation De L’Anarchive Ou La Palestine Comme Projet Politique – À L’Écoute De « A Fidai Film » De Kamal Aljafari Et De « Partition » De Diana Allan, Judith Abensour
Regards
Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film draws on Palestinian archives confiscated by Israel in Beirut in 1982. Diana Allan created Partition using archives from Mandatory Palestine held at the Imperial War Museum in London. The film notebook not only refers to a type of fragmentary editing, but also allows us to revisit the relationship between sound and image, thus offering an exercise in remembrance in the present. By adding sound to images, the two filmmakers question the contradictions inherent in archives, their erasure or their resistance to authoritative or propagandistic discourse. Thus, under the guise of sensory and sound anthropology for …
Videotracts For Palestine : Images Et Contre-Images,
2026
ENS de Lyon – Institut d’Asie Orientale (IAO)
Videotracts For Palestine : Images Et Contre-Images, Lola Maupas
Regards
This article examines the political and aesthetic gesture of Videotracts for Palestine, a collective founded on Instagram in November 2023 in the context of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Heirs to the ciné-tracts of 1968 and, more broadly, to international militant cinema, these very short anonymous films also mobilize contemporary digital tools and produce what might be called a counter-visuality of resistance. The study highlights how the collective situates itself within a tradition of images as weapons of struggle while inventing its own forms, shaped by the massive circulation enabled by the Internet and social media. The videotracts deconstruct …
Des Sons Pour L’Histoire. Correspondance Avec Mohammed Yaghi,
2026
Université Grenoble Alpes
Des Sons Pour L’Histoire. Correspondance Avec Mohammed Yaghi, Aude Fourel
Regards
Sounds for History. Correspondence with Mohammed Yaghi
Mohammed Yaghi was born in 1992 and trained in sound engineering in Gaza. He has worked for UNRWA television and collaborated with Palestinian and international documentary film production companies.
These sound recordings for films, educational programs and interviews were the first step in the sound diary that he has kept on building on a daily basis.
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Résumé
Mohammed Yaghi est né en 1992 et s’est formé aux métiers du son à Gaza. Il a travaillé à la télévision de l’UNRWA et collaboré avec des maisons de productions palestiniennes et internationales de films …
Tolkien's Oriental Sources? Renunciation Of Immortality And Fairy Nature,
2026
Friedrich Schiller University, Jena
Tolkien's Oriental Sources? Renunciation Of Immortality And Fairy Nature, Giovanni Carmine Costabile
Journal of Tolkien Research
Thompson motif F302.6.2.2. Fairy gives up her fairy nature and becomes mortal to be able to return to her mortal husband and its combination with H310. Suitor tests and H1010. Impossible tasks are Oriental motifs, to be found only in the Tibetan tale of The Boy with the Deformed Head in O'Connor's 1907 collection and in the 9th century CE Japanese Taketori Monogatari. In this light, it appears necessary, assuming that Tolkien had a source for his idea of Lúthien sacrificing her Elven immortality and Elven fate, that his source must be found in the aforesaid narratives, both available …
Reconfiguring The Category Of 'Sudan' Through The Literary Field: Representation, Disposability, Ambiguity And The 'Magical' In Four Post-Colonial Novels (2002-2022),
2026
American University in Cairo
Reconfiguring The Category Of 'Sudan' Through The Literary Field: Representation, Disposability, Ambiguity And The 'Magical' In Four Post-Colonial Novels (2002-2022), Mourad Farahat
Theses and Dissertations
In this thesis I shall argue that contemporary African literature, with ‘’both its ethnographic imagination and anthropological complexity’’ (Orock, 2022, p.3), its use of ‘disruptive’ characters, and its focus on the embeddedness of the ‘collective’, the ‘common’ and the ‘vulgar’ in the personal (Mbembe, 2003), may help us mitigate some social scientific limitations on the study of Africa, and may aid us in understanding relations of power within the post-colony. I seek to show how contemporary Sudanese literature has already moved beyond the fixed social categories, lines, and limits which dominate some of the social scientific literature on Sudan. Literature …
