Frictions: Europe, America and global Transformations - Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Creator: Chaudet, Chloé
Title: From Europe to the United States
Subtitle: Transatlantic Circulations of Conspiracy Fiction
DOI: 10.15457/frictions/0008
Description
Chloé Chaudet, lecturer in comparative literature at Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique (CELIS) at Clermont Auvergne University, was a visiting researcher at the ScienceCampus in June 2021. In this piece, she outlines her ongoing research on works of literature and other forms of cultural production that feature conspiracy discourses. In particular, she explores what she calls mega-conspiracies which have a transterritorial dimension to them. Exploring the form from its origins in nineteenth-century literature to its current transmedia manifestations, she traces the transnational and in particular transatlantic dimensions of such narratives. She argues that even though conspiracy theories are familiar to all and are indeed closer to fiction than reality, literary and cultural studies still lacks a suitable framework to explore their cultural representations together with their social significance. Her aim is to develop a transmedial narratology of conspiracy discourses produced in the Atlantic region. The study of Joseph Balsamo by the French writer Alexandre Dumas (1846) and Atlas Shrugged by the US-American Ayn Rand (1957) offer an indication of how this can be put into practice.
Date of publication: 2021-07-28
Subjects: Ayn Rand, Dumas, Research Notes, conspiracy theories, counterfactual history, counterfactual narratives, culture, film, literature, research fellow, transatlantic, transnational
Section: Research Notes
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