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.