You are cordially invited to a talk Ania Wroblewski will be giving on Monday, April 26, at 5 pm EDT, for the Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center’s France and the World seminar.
To register for the talk, you may do so at:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUlc-qsrj8uHN3IQ1IQU3a705l_A2z60NOU.
Ania Wroblewski (University of Arizona) – Immersed in Desire: Nicole Brossard’s "Le désert mauve" and Its Transmedial Afterlives
Since its publication in 1987, Nicole Brossard’s postmodern novel Le désert mauve has come to be considered an important feminist text that presents a complex vision of what a lesbian utopia could look like. It is also a book about translation. While most scholarship has focused on translation as a theme and process within the novel, this presentation will read Brossard’s text as an invitation for transmedial collaboration that is fueled by desire. I will examine American media artist Adriene Jenik’s 1997 computer art project Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation as well as Québécois poet Simon Dumas’ multiple engagements with the work in the 2010s (including the website mauvemotel.net and a theatre adaptation featuring Brossard herself) in order to explore what happens when words become images within the ecosystem invented by Brossard. Set in the American Southwest, Le désert mauve is a highly visual text that follows Mélanie, a fifteen-year-old girl who frequently takes her mother’s car and drives through the desert into the blazing heat of the day or the startling cold of the night, in her angst-filled quest for self-determination and meaningful connection. As Jenik’s and Dumas’ immersive works reveal, bringing Mélanie into the virtual realm activates the transformative possibilities of literature and allows us to reflect upon how one’s sense of self can be boldly fashioned or refashioned in the face of patriarchal hegemony.
Ania Wroblewski is Assistant Professor of Contemporary French Studies at the University of Arizona. A specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century French literature, art, and visual culture, her research centers on the meeting point of literature and its audiences. Her book, La vie des autres. Sophie Calle et Annie Ernaux, artistes hors-la-loi (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016), was a finalist for both the Canada Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2017 and the Prix du meilleur livre de l’APFUCC 2017. Her current research project, titled Les femmes en cavale, studies representations of women on the run by Nicole Brossard, Virginie Despentes, Albertine Sarrazin, and Josée Yvon, among others, and explores concepts of freedom, migration, and justice through an intersectional and feminist lens.
