L’abject sublime dans la transcréation au Canada

Dr. Marie Pascal, assistant professor in the UPEI Department of Modern Languages, has published a new book titled L’abject sublime dans la transcréation au Canada.

Written in French, L’abject sublime dans la transcréation au Canada is the first of two volumes on the “abject sublime.” The abject sublime is an aesthetic experience where feelings of horror, disgust, and filth (the abject) blur with awe, majesty, and transcendence (the sublime). Transcreation, which is not the same as translation or adaptation, is the process of creatively adapting content from one medium to another—from writing to film—while maintaining its intent, tone, and content.

For this book, Pascal analyzed 15 Québecois, English Canadian, and Indigenous books, and the film adaptation of each book, to see how the language and the content in the original and the adapted forms complement each other. In selecting the books and films for her study, she tried to represent as many genres as possible, including horror, realism, science fiction, autofiction, poetry, ecofiction, and more.

“While it goes without saying that films and novels transport us to unexpected worlds, featuring unsettling characters and sometimes unacceptable endings, it’s harder to understand why we willingly seek out fear, tears, or indignation within them,” says a translation of the publisher’s summary. “Could it be that the terror and disgust we feel are a way of proving that we are indeed alive? Through the spectacle of the abject sublime, these works provoke a powerful emotion, which our initial reflex is to suppress. Yet, these representations, which lure us with their imagined stories, often do so with the aim of shaking us up, providing an aesthetic shock that compels us to emerge from apathy. And the resulting emotions linger within us, sometimes despite ourselves. It is this project of revitalization through art that the author unveils in this work by analyzing some thirty Canadian works, including the television series The Night Laurier Gaudreault Woke Up (Xavier Dolan), the film Crash! (David Cronenberg) and the story Kuessipan (Naomi Fontaine).”

Pascal joined UPEI’s Department of Modern Languages in 2024. In addition to her professorial role, she directs a journal titled Transcr(é)ation that she created in 2022. She published her first book, De l’exclusion à l’abjection, with Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal in 2023.