"This novel allowed me to invent a new society in concrete terms.” Interview with Antoinette Rychner

Author(s)

  • Colin Pahlisch Université de Lausanne
  • Gaspard Turin Université de Lausanne

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief17714

Keywords:

Antoinette Rychner, science fiction, collapsology, teaching, feminism, didactics

Abstract

In her 2020 novel Après le monde (no English translation yet), Antoinette Rychner describes the decline of Western civilisation in the wake of an economic crisis with apocalyptic repercussions. It has been a great success, particularly with French-speaking swiss teachers, who are beginning to include it in their syllabuses. This interview took the form of a written exchange between August 15 and September 9, 2023. In the answers she gave us, Antoinette Rychner went back over the conception of her novel, questioned its generic identity and the relationship to the contemporary world that it implies. She also discussed the difficulties she was experiencing in furthering the transmission of its ideas, including on a political level. Finally, she shows the extent to which this work has changed her life. We would add that it has also definitely changed the lives of her readers. We would like to extend our warmest thanks to Antoinette Rychner for her availability and generosity.

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Author Biographies

  • Colin Pahlisch, Université de Lausanne

    Colin Pahlisch is a doctoral student at the University of Lausanne, attached to the Centre de compétences en durabilité (CCD). He coordinates the new Observatoire sur les Récits et Imaginaires de l’Anthropocène (ORIA). He specialises in conjectural literature (science fiction, utopias, dystopias, extraordinary voyages). His work focuses on the imaginaries and narratives of ecological transition from an eco-poetic perspective. He has published numerous articles and is co-author of a book on the poetics of Alain Damasio, La Croisée des souffles (Archipel, 2013).

  • Gaspard Turin, Université de Lausanne

    Gaspard Turin is a research fellow at the University of Lausanne, as part of the DiNarr SNSF project (Didactics of Narratology) directed by R. Baroni. His work focuses on a contemporary literary and cultural corpus from a didactic perspective, as well as on questions of poetic and esthetic form. In 2017 he published Poétique et usages de la liste littéraire. Le Clézio, Modiano, Perec, (Droz). He is the author of numerous articles, notably on Georges Perec, Marie NDiaye, Édouard Levé, Éric Chevillard, or Michel Houellebecq. He is a regular contributor to journals such as Genesis, Cahiers Perec, Transpositio and Fixxion.

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Published

2023-09-15

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 1 (2023): Science fiction and the teaching of politics

Section

Interviews

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Turin, Colin Pahlisch

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Pahlisch, C. and Turin, G. (2023) “"This novel allowed me to invent a new society in concrete terms.” Interview with Antoinette Rychner”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 17(1), pp. 157–166. doi:10.51777/relief17714.