https://doi.org/10.31261/RS.2026.29.01
This paper examines the ways in which post-pandemic literature seeks to “unlock” fiction and to “heal the world,” through two novels by the Québécois writer Paul Serge Forest, Tout est Ori (2021; Everything is Ori) and Porter le masque (2024; Wearing the Mask). Treating the pandemic as a semiotic crisis that disrupts meaning and language, and drawing on Olga Tokarczuk ’ s concepts of Bizarre writing and the Tender narrator, I show how Forest responds to the unrepresentable through an experimental, playful, and self-reflexive poetics. Unlocked fiction refers here to a mode of writing that blends genres, multiplies intertexts and heterolingual strategies, and blurs the boundaries between sign, reality, body, and text. This formal dynamic can be read as a gesture of tenderness and relational care that renews forms of interdependence between the human and the non-human in
a wounded world.
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2026
Published: 2021-12-20
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