Literary Borderlessness and Crossings: Marie HéLène Poitras’s Early Fictions

Marie Hélène Poitras, a contemporary author from Quebec, has published several works of fiction. Her versatility has enabled her to develop an original and thoroughly literary fiction. However, her narratives have not yet, to my knowledge, received any academic attention. My article aims at reviewing the significance, and particularity, of Poitras’s oeuvre for contemporary francophone literature, especially as developed in her fist two publications: Soudain le Minotaure and La Mort de Mignonne. Thematically and aesthetically, her writing borrows from international literature, as well as artistic forms as diverse as popular music and visual art. Consequently, I argue that Poitras first two books build on borderlessness and/or boundary crossing. The first section will be devoted to Soudain le Minotaure and will explore how Poitras crosses cultural and aesthetic borders, particularly with her protagonists’ relationship with foreign cultures and her use of synesthesia. The second part will focus on La Mort de Mignonne and its aesthetic borderlessness, especially through the use of intertextuality with fairy tales as well as fables and intermediality with popular music.