Chloé Thomas, hybrid is her job

It seems incongruous, this post-mortem meeting between Robert Merle (1908-2004), author of successful saga and novels adapted for cinema (Weekend in ZuydcooteGallimard, 1949), and the academic, essayist, translator very much of our time and almost forty, Chloé Thomas, who devotes a disconcerting literary essay to the writer, Robert Merle : roman. Coming from the genre of literary history, it is nonetheless crossed by a fictional character who resembles the author. This is because hybridity is like the trademark of Chloé Thomas, whose writing attacks all genres and gives the impression of seeking to break down their most impermeable boundaries.

When you are born and raised in Strasbourg, linguistic boundaries are close and easier to cross than those of disciplines. Although she had Parisian ancestors, Strasbourg left her mark. “I learned German there, like everyone thereshe confides to “World of Books”, but while I thought my level was zero, when I arrived in prep school in Paris I realized that I was a solid Germanist. It's a language that I began to love. » She pronounces it with a very exact accent. Will she nevertheless become a specialist? Concerned about“to have an impact on the world”she plans instead to take economics and math courses at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. But the morning schedules then got the better of his resolve. Tapped by a “imposture syndrome” and reluctant to delve into philosophy, despite a master's degree on the German Ernst Tugendhat (1930-2023) about whom she today admits she no longer knows anything, she will be an Anglicist, like Merle. After spending five years at the University of Angers, she recently became a lecturer at Paris Cité University.

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