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Dear colleagues,
The Politics of Culture and Memory Cluster of the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, invites you to the following event:
Narrating the Self No. 2: Women Writing Experience across Frontiers
22 November 2018, 16.15-19.05, Room 1W 2.104
Wine Down with Cheese
The event is free but please book on: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/narrating-the-self-no-2-women-writing-experience-across-frontiers-tickets-52156760274
Speakers
Natalie Edwards, University of Adelaide and Society for French Studies International Visiting Fellow 2018-19
‘The Bilingual Life Writing of Franco-Australian Author Catherine Rey’
Abstract: In this paper, I read the work of Franco-Australian writer Catherine Rey through the lens of translanguaging. Rey lived in France and wrote seven novels before moving to Australia in mid-life. Her move heralded a change in her writing as she inscribes English, and particularly Australian English, into her texts. Focusing on her life writing, I show that Rey does not merely switch back and forth between French and English as two separate languages but weaves them together in transformative ways. These expressions add another layer of meaning to Rey’s texts and indicate her inability to express her selfhood within the confines of one language alone. This innovation transforms the two languages, producing new meanings and creating a unique approach to narrating a self in words.
Dr Natalie Edwards is Associate Professor/Reader in French and Director of Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts, University of Adelaide. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University, USA, and specialises in contemporary literature in French. She has published two books: Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Francophone Women’s Autobiography (2011) and Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French (2016). She is currently completing her third monograph: The Life Writing of Bilingual Women Writers: Translingual Selves. She is the Society for French Studies International Visiting Fellow 2018-2019.
Christopher Hogarth, University of South Australia
‘Female Tales of Franco-Italian Afropean Experience in works by Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego’
Abstract: This paper discusses the literary portrayals of lived experience between Europe and Africa by two well-known female writers based in Europe. Originally from Senegal, to which she often returns both in person and in her literary work, Fatou Diome has published a wide range of novels, short stories and a recent polemical essay in which she challenges French notions of national identity. Similarly, Igiaba Scego has recently directed her pen against the racist rhetoric of Italy’s far-right Lega. Although she insists on calling Italy her home, she argues that her specific identity has nodes beyond Europe, coloured especially by her Somali heritage and member of a widely-spread Somali diaspora. I thus investigate discourse on identity in writers who have been described as “Afro-European” (Brancato) or “Afropean” (Hitchcott & Thomas).
Dr Christopher Hogarth (MLES, 1999) is Lecturer in Comparative Literature/French at University of South Australia, where he teaches World Literature and several other classes in Creative Writing
and Literature. His research focuses particularly on the intersections between Anglophone, Francophone and Italophone African and European literature. He has published and edited several articles and volumes on topics surrounding life writing
and migration in Australian, Francophone and Italian literature in journals such as
French Cultural Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and
Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe. He has taught in five countries across four continents, including the United Kingdom, the USA and Italy.
Katie Brown, University of Exeter
‘Crossing the Mexican Border: Physical, Cultural, and Linguistic Border Crossings in the Work of Valeria Luiselli’
Abstract: Valeria Luiselli has been lauded as one of the leading voices of contemporary Mexican writing. However, both her life and her work challenge what she calls ‘the falsity of the tempting dichotomy between the cosmopolitan and the local’. While her collection of essays, Tell Me How It Ends, deals with the pressing issue of child migration across the Mexican border, her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, examines what happens when we translate, and The Story of my Teeth explores the contradictions of an international art gallery funded by the profits of a juice factory in a poor Mexican suburb. In all her work, Luiselli presents a nuanced understanding of the tensions between the local and the transnational, counteracting the nationalism she witnesses in both Mexico and the US.
Dr Katie Brown (MLES, 2011) is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Exeter, having taught previously at King’s College, London and University of Bristol. Her main research interests are the
circulation of people (travel, migration and exile) and of texts (publishing, cultural policy and translation), with a particularly focus on contemporary writing from Venezuela and Mexico. Katie’s first book,
Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012, will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2019. Katie is also a Spanish-English translator, and co-editor/co-translator of the collection
Crude Words: Contemporary Writing from Venezuela.
Adalgisa Giorgio, University of Bath
‘Dissolving margins between self, life and writing: Double acts of female creativity in Elena Ferrante’s
Neapolitan Quartet'
Abstract: This paper examines Ferrante’s quadrilogy as a story of female friendship and creativity that challenges the patriarchal sexual, social and linguistic order of post-world war II Italy. I read the intertwined lives of the protagonists, Elena and Lila, as the space, complementary and agonistic, of co-creation that attempts to destabilize this order. This entails Elena finding inspiration in, and using, Lila’s words and life for her writing, a strategy that recalls Hélène Cixous’s argument not only that no writing is possible without accepting the other in oneself but also that ‘stealing’, from male discourse, is a necessary strategy for women to make space for themselves in the symbolic. Ferrante, however, appeals to women to recognize the power of, and utilize, women’s words to create this space.
Dr Adalgisa Giorgio is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, University of Bath. Her main areas of research are post-1968 Italian women’s writing, the mother-daughter relationship and motherhood, post-1993 narrative on Naples, and Māori-Italian and Italian identities in New Zealand. Her most recent work has focused on motherhood and migration, with a co-edited Special Issue of Women’s Studies International Forum (2015), motherhood and work in Italy, with a Special section of the Journal of Romance Studies (2015), and the interdisciplinary co-edited volume Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (Routledge 2017).
We look forward to seeing you.
Sandra Daroczi ([log in to unmask]) and Adalgisa Giorgio ([log in to unmask]), organizers