A Forgotten Author: Irene Hillel-Erlanger, between Symbolism and Avant-garde

This article is about an unknown author of the French avant-garde, Irene Hillel-Er-langer, and her main work, Voyages en kaleidoscope, an unusual poetic novel, published in 1919, belonging to the genre of the "Scientific-marvellous", the proto-science-fiction developed in France between 1900 and 1930. As a result of the hybridisation of the languages of symbolism and avant-garde experimentalism, the novel shows the tensions between these two movements, which will be studied through the analysis of thematic and formal aspects, such as allegory, hermeticism, fragmentarism, or visuality, as well as textual and discursive plurality. Finally, we will address the poetics of the gaze underlying the utopian invention of the kaleidoscope, in the context of the end of the First World War.