We are pleased to announce the following Women in French guaranteed session and two non-guaranteed sessions. Please send a 250-300 word abstract in English or French along with a short biography to the following chairs no later than March 6, 2020.
MLA 2021 Women in French Guaranteed Session: "She Persisted Across Borders: Transnational Women's Writing in French"
How do women writers represent the transnational? How do they create works that span borders and/or that blur the boundaries between nations? How do they create literary texts that resist easy categorization into national literatures? Since transnational writing is currently a major area of academic enquiry, it is timely to examine how women writers negotiate this terrain.
This panel will compare writing by women authors from diverse parts of the Francosphere and, since it is important to historicize transnational writing, from different time periods. The panel will be open to proposals that discuss all literary genres.
Proposals may analyse, through a gendered lens, topics such as:
- forced and unforced migration;
- refugee narratives;
- translingual and multilingual writing;
- the differences between postcolonial, migrant and transnational writing;
- the impact of publication practices upon transnational writing;
- the career trajectories of transnational writers;
- the reception of transnational writing;
- transnational writing and translation;
- the preponderance of transnational writing at a time of increased nationalism.
Chair: Natalie Edwards, University of Adelaide (natalie.edwards@adelaide.edu.au)
MLA 2021 Women in French 2 Non-Guaranteed Sessions:
1. "Persistance de la jeune fille (1850-2020)"
Qu’il s’agisse des affaires Polanski ou Ruggia pour le monde cinématographique, voire de l’affaire Matzneff pour celui des lettres, la jeune-fille semble le point central de ce que serait un effet « Me-Too », sinon Weinstein en France. Au cœur de débats de société qui reposent sur les témoignages de femmes adultes qui reviennent sur ce qui leur est arrivé lorsqu’elles étaient jeunes filles, scintille donc le concept, toujours complexe et instable de la « jeune fille ». De fait, la jeune-fille est-elle cet être qui se définit par négation sinon soustraction, et qui est marginalisée tout en étant célébrée et mythifiée par un certain regard masculin, voire par la publicité. Aussi, cette session se propose-t-elle de donner à entendre ce qu’est une jeune fille. Des interventions revenant sur ces affaires et sur les témoignages récents sont attendues, mais une réflexion transhistorique sur la notion de « jeune fille », ainsi que des analyses des romans de jeune fille au XIXème siècle, des travaux sur leur place dans le cinéma français des années 1960 ou de Sophia Coppola, voire sur la manière dont Tiqqun ou Despentes traitèrent la question seraient tout autant bienvenues.
Chair : Virginie A. Duzer, Pomona College (virginie.pouzet-duzer@pomona.edu)
2. "Secrecy as Survival and Resistance in French and Francophone Literature"
To whom are secrets revealed, and from whom are they concealed? How can secrets ensure survival, or threaten it? Do practices of secrecy aid marginalized cultures to resist erasure? Those who inherit, harbor, or disclose secrets do so for various reasons. The “secret of secrecy” constitutes the mystery of not only what it means to be fully human, but also what it means to persist despite threats to cultural and linguistic survival, especially for marginalized or subjugated individuals and communities: people of color, refugees, and peripheral cultures. Women, too, adopt practices of secrecy to protect themselves.
For Derrida, the absolute "secret" that "has to do with not-belonging" and "the sharing of what is not shared" is integral to memory and storytelling (Derrida and Ferraris, 58-59). Derrida articulates his thoughts on secrecy in The Gift of Death (1992), and again with philosopher Maurizio Ferraris in A Taste for the Secret (first published 1997). In The Gift of Death, Derrida re-narrates the story of the sacrifice of Isaac to uncover an original constitutive trauma, a secret that humans inherit, which imposes a violence at the origin of all discourse. When Derrida writes about le secret in French, the word contains polysemic meaning for both the object as secret, hidden, confidential, and the concept and practice of secrecy, keeping things unknowable. But what happens when the unknowable or unknown becomes known? This panel will explore the inevitable trauma associated with secrets and the self in French-language literature, and how secrecy is related to what we do to survive.
Derrida, Jacques. Trans. David Wills. The Gift of Death. U of Chicago, 1996.
Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Polity, 2001.
Co-chairs:
Lisa Karakaya, Graduate Center, CUNY (lkarakaya@gradcenter.cuny.edu) and
Antoinette Williams-Tutt, Graduate Center, CUNY (awilliams2@gradcenter.cuny.edu)
