CALL FOR PAPERS
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London
Cross-Cultural Seminar to be held on 20 March 2015, 2-6pm, Senate House, University of London
‘New Perspectives on the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Contemporary Women’s Writing’
The mother-daughter relationship is much more than simply a common theme in women’s writing – it could be argued that it is a constant one. Indeed, the ‘Motherhood in post-1968 European Women’s Writing: Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Dialogues’ conference, which we held in October 2013, confirmed that mother-daughter relationships are still a major theme.
Much has been written about the topic in twentieth-century literature and, in line with Marianne Hirsch’s influential analysis in The Mother-Daughter Plot (1989), the principal trajectory is generally found to be a return to the mother on the part of the daughter, who is most often the narrator. With some exceptions, the daughter’s narrative of the mother-daughter relationship has, then, tended to be foregrounded. Hirsch, however, did point to an evolution in literary representations of the mother-daughter relationship in the latter part of the twentieth century, whereby the mother’s voice was beginning to be heard, in dialogue with that of the daughter. This was borne out in the essays on Western European national literatures collected in Writing Mothers and Daughters (ed. Giorgio, 2002). It appears that in recent Italian literature the mother’s perspective has increasingly taken centre stage.
This cross-cultural seminar aims to explore recent perspectives across a range of language areas, in order to assess how the mother-daughter relationship is currently being represented in contemporary women’s writing. It is anticipated that papers will examine texts which demonstrate new trends in the representation and narration of mother-daughter relationships in their national literatures, while possibly adopting new theoretical frameworks. Papers should aim to respond to some of the following questions:
· How have narratives centred on the mother-daughter relationship evolved in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century?
· Do recent works offer new perspectives? If so, what are they?
· Have new contexts and new maternal practices, such as migration, transnationalism, same-sex parenting and reproductive technologies, led to new mother-daughter dynamics?
· Have these new dynamics brought about new themes, narrative forms or rhetorical devices in literary representations of mother-daughter relationships?
· How can new sociological and/or psychological perspectives, if any, illuminate classic and recent mother-daughter narratives?
We already have a paper on Italian women’s writing – ‘The “Return of the Mother” in Italian Women’s Writing: Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura (2006) [The Lost Daughter] ’ by CCWW Visiting Fellow Claudia Karagoz (Saint Louis), and we would welcome proposals for papers on this topic from French, German, Hispanic and Portuguese studies. Titles and abstracts (approx 250 words) should be sent to Gill Rye ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Adalgisa Giorgio ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by 15 November 2014.
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