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.

In her novel Couleur chair (2022), Bianca Joubert takes an autobiographical look at her family tree, which is a mix of European, Indigenous, and African-Canadian roots. The exploration of her family ’ s past provides a pretext for revisiting the history of Quebec, a land of European conquest, but also of intermingling between representatives of dominated and minority groups, which is also part of the great migration patterns of peoples on a global scale. Apart from this effort to fill in the gaps in the grand national narrative of Quebec, the discovery of the vagaries of family history and attempts to reconstruct it become a way for the narrator of Joubert ’ s novel to heal her own wounds. In this article, we propose to examine Joubert ’ s novel as a rewriting of family and national histories and as a form of both individual and collective therapy, while emphasising the importance the author gives to the affirmation of an identity that is not only heterogeneous, but also incomplete and forever lacking.

This article examines the relationship between writing and self-healing in the work of Roger Brien, focusing on his mostly unpublished Prométhée, dialogues des vivants et des morts. Drawing on biographical, stylistic, and narratological approaches, the study argues that Brien constructs himself simultaneously as poet and character within his own fictional universe. Rather than functioning as a therapeutic practice, his writing exposes a tension between inherited literary traditions and his marginal position within the Canadian-French and Québécois literary fields. Through an analysis of the dialogue’s structure and its Promethean imagery, the article shows how Brien’s creative process becomes a site of both self-projection and self-wounding. Ultimately, the study suggests that Brien’s work exemplifies a paradoxical form of literary self-fashioning in which the act of writing deepens rather than heals the author’s inner fractures.

Nancy Huston ’ s Lignes de faille (2006) explores the transmission of trauma across four generations through an inverted chronology and the voices of six-year-old children. This narrative architecture examines how the body, language, and silence become vectors of wounded memory. By interweaving stories from contemporary America, the Shoah, exile, and the Iraq War, Huston reflects on invisible forms of inherited suffering and the protective or avoidance mechanisms developed in childhood. This article interrogates manifestations of “impossible care” between generations while identifying micro-gestures of repair — often discreet, sometimes unconscious. Through an interdisciplinary reading crossing trauma studies, care ethics, and an approach to the child ’ s body as living archive, we examine tensions between heritage, vulnerability, and reconstruction in a diasporic context marked by History. The article demonstrates how literature itself can become a space of symbolic repair.

The aim of the article is to analyze the role of art in the face of historical tragedies in Le Dessinateur by Kokis. The novel is set in a Soviet gulag, where the eponymous character is imprisoned for refusing to paint a portrait of Stalin. Set against a backdrop of totalitarian repression, the narrative contrasts this regime with the artist ’ s sensitivity and freedom. The act of drawing portraits of his fellow prisoners thus becomes an ethical gesture that restores their humanity. Moreover, creative work in a concentration camp setting appears to be a therapeutic activity for the artist himself. Finally, by drawing portraits, the artist seeks above all to bear witness to the tragedies and suffering he has seen and experienced in the camps. The article thus examines how art functions as a medium of healing: towards others, towards oneself, and towards memory, in the face of systemic violence.

In 2023, Christina Wong and Daniel Innes published Denison Avenue, a project that emerged from the desire to document the gentrification of Toronto ’ s oldest Chinatown and the endangered Toisan dialect. The multilingualism of this graphic novel is the main focus of this study: the tension it creates, the realities it depicts, and the ways it affects the reader. The coexistence of English and Toisanese has an effect on the narrative pact, and the tension between the languages extends to the human relationships within the novel. Linguistic inequities become political ones. Focusing on the role of the Toisan dialect in the book and its impacts, this analysis explores the relationship between language and vulnerability. Combining literary analysis, care ethics, and sociopolitical context, the article shows how the graphic novel gives visibility to marginalized Chinese Canadian communities and offers a powerful reflection on cultural preservation, empathy, and the lived experience of aging immigrant women.