From the Literary Treasure to the Ninth Art： La Princesse De Cl?ves and the Graphic Adaptation in the 21st Century – Examples of Christian Lacroix and Catel & Bouilhac

This project focus on the graphic adaptation of the 17th-century French novel “La Princesse de Clèves”. Since the Vanitas style graphics have always been employed in the cover design and the illustrations of the classic work, which reflected the ideology of Jansenism tradition, however, a French couturier Christian Lacroix has designed a series of picaresque illustrations for this novel in 2018. Next year, the cartoonists Catel Muller and Claire Bouilhac have made the graphic-novel adaption from the original 17th-century text. In this research project, we will focus on exploring the creativity in the acts of adaptation, the motivation, the background characteristics of times related to the social-politics trends, as well as the strategies of graphics, the effects of the mise en abyme, and the question of multimodal narration. According to Régis Debray, “Any art shall do what the other art can’t do, that is where the originality of art lies.”, our main axe of research aims to reconsider how does the graphic adaptation with its singularity in visual meaning represent human condition and reflect the problems of nowadays.