‘Curiouser and curiouser’: Childhood Figures to Live By, in Writings in French by Lydia Flem and Philippe Forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article analyses selected writings in French by Lydia Flem and Philippe Forest, with a focus on the intertextual presence of literary figures from well-known sources, identifications with figures from imaginary worlds and their relationship to the writing project. These authors’ curiosity about the place of storytelling in understanding selves and lives extends to the question of how literature connects with experiences that otherwise remain inaccessible or elude conscious awareness. The formal and thematic functions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan are examined in Flem’s Comment je me suis séparée de ma fille et de mon quasi-fils and Forest’s L’Enfant éternel. The article argues that via the perspectives of the (parental) narrators in both texts, these literary figures mobilize the creative expression of experiences of change and loss. The (re)turn to literature takes place not because it saves, or consoles, these writers insist; rather, they describe the compelling and paradoxically sustaining functions of reading and writing even as they precisely fail to offer up any certain resolution. Literature’s capacity to enliven curiosity about human experience means that writing is life; literary figures live with and in them. In a similar spirit to Deborah Levy’s description of ‘living autobiography’, the article argues that Flem and Forest attest to the need and desire to write in an ‘engaged’ way, characteristic of a writing practice that encompasses concrete and imaginary worlds, reality and fantasy. From explorations of transition and loss, Flem’s ‘bébé de papier’ and Forest’s ‘être de papier’ emerge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".