Tuesday 14th November, 2017
5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room
Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College London) - 'The Representation of Clinics, asiles, and maisons des femmes in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Writing'
My
doctoral project focuses on embodied responses and reactions to
original, and ongoing traumas as represented in contemporary francophone
women’s writing. It
will explore how female trauma survivors attempt to control their past
and ongoing suffering through forms of bodily self-harm and deprivation.
My project will initially investigate how supposed curative
institutions attempt to control, contain, and marginalise
the bodies of female trauma survivors. This paper will present an
overview of my research thus far into the representation of clinics,
asiles, and
maison des femmes in works by Maïssa Bey, Chloé Delaume, and Linda Lê.
This
paper will examine the purpose and objectives of each type of
institution within their cultural, historical, and socio-political
contexts, and it will explore
how and why female trauma survivors are sent to these places. It will
also investigate the ways in which the institutions re-inflict pain and
suffering on the female detainees through their location, spatiality,
and atmospherics, as well as through medical
and non-medical treatment. It will analyse the impact of living in the
institutions through the psychological and corporeal actions and
reactions of the female inhabitants, while nuancing the concepts of
agency, control, and survival. Indeed, this paper will
ask how women attempt to survive, and even subvert, the societal powers
that contain, marginalise, and re-traumatise, their bodies and minds.
In this vein, it will explore the forms of resistance and solidarity
that arise within the gynocentric communities
of the institutions, while nuancing the role of the reader who becomes a
privileged witness to the inside of these non-curative sites.
Hannie Lawlor (Wolfson College) - ‘Ventriloquising Voices in (Auto)Fiction of the Extrême contemporain'
Marianne Hirsch conceives postmemory as the
consequence of traumatic recall at a generational remove; how inherited
memories of trauma suffered by their parents affect the second
generation and risk eclipsing their own (life) stories.
In this paper, I consider how Lydie Salvayre’s
Pas pleurer can be read as interweaving the self-other
relationship that this creates with that of autofiction. Whilst in
postmemory, the second-generational self becomes the mouthpiece through
which the suppressed story of the other is voiced, autofiction
casts the other as a stepping stone by which the author’s story might
be told. In
Pas pleurer,
Salvayre tells a story that long precedes her, but that perpetually
alters her mother’s life and thus irrevocably impacts upon her own; that
of the Spanish Civil War. I contend that by
mobilising two oppositional sets of self-other dynamics, Salvayre
addresses and reworks the antagonistic pairs so often in play in
relational life-writing.
This paper explores how Salvayre renegotiates
generational binds at the level of narrative voice, intertwining the
voices of mother and daughter to replace the self-other binary with
simultaneous selves. By analysing the fluid rather
than fixed subject positions she creates, I aim to illustrate how
Pas pleurer depicts boundaries between different generations as
porous and in flux. In doing so, I will argue that its
second-generational ‘narrator’, Lydie, consciously cedes her place in
the narrative as a means of telling not only her mother’s story,
but also an indispensable part of her own.
