Tuesday 25th May 2021, 5:15-6:30pm
Online
Hannah Scheithauer (Jesus) - Writing Gender into Multidirectional Memory: Ingeborg Bachmann and Assia Djebar
My M.St. Dissertation will integrate discussions of gender into Michael Rothberg's theory of 'multidirectional memory' through a comparative analysis of texts by the Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the French-Algerian writer, translator, historian, and filmmaker Assia Djebar (1936-2015). The two authors share an acute awareness of the historical burdens borne by language, which makes it a fundamentally problematic means of self-expression for the narrators of Bachmann's novel Malina (1971) and Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia (1985) alike. Denounced as patriarchal in structure, language is shown to alienate, exclude, and objectify its female speakers. This gendered alienation, however, also opens up the individual narrator's case to a wider, historical horizon, providing a starting point for discussing multiple other, violent memories. In Malina, patriarchal oppression is framed within a post-Holocaust context, as the narrator's dreams disturbingly blend visions of her violent father with concentration camp imagery. The opening of Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia, on the other hand, gives a gendered inflection to the French-Algerian colonial relationship. It figures the French conquest of Algiers as the unveiling of a woman's body, problematically poised between seduction and rape. For both authors, gendered identities intersect with dialectical models of conceptualising traumatic pasts, theoretical reference points represented by the Frankfurt School's enlightenment dialectic for Bachmann and by Frantz Fanon's account of Algerian colonialism for Djebar. As both authors call into question the binaries of selfhood and otherness, of victimhood and perpetration, these models propose, the discussion of gender transforms the dialectic into an ambivalent, triangular constellation. This initial refraction, then, opens up new, expansive and 'multidirectional' conceptions of memory, as Bachmann enters postcolonial spaces in her unfinished Todesarten project, while Djebar, in her turn, records Holocaust memories in her 1997 novel Les Nuits de Strasbourg. Reading the two authors' mirroring trajectories in conjunction promises to yield a productive triangulation of post-Holocaust, postcolonial, and feminist discourses, carving out a space for gender within Rothberg's model while questioning the ethical issues arising from the memorial intersections which structure it.
