![](\"https:\/\/new-faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/arton92.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n\n
women’s autobiographies and relationship to the world\/quand les femmes s’\u00e9crivent dans le monde<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
International conference on women\u2019s autobiographies, 14-15 October 2016 keynote speaker: Victoria Stewart, University of Leicester<\/p>\n Dr Stewart\u2019s research interests include the twentieth-century and contemporary novel, war writing and life-writing. She has particular interests in the representation of the First and Second World Wars (including the Holocaust) in both fiction and autobiography. Her book Women\u2019s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Palgrave, 2003) considered the work of writers including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank from the perspective of trauma theory. Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Palgrave, 2006) examines a range of novels and short fiction from this decade, by authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton, focusing in particular on their depiction of the processes of memory. Dr Stewart\u2019s most recent monograph, The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), considers the use of secrecy as both a trope and a narrative device in recent fictional treatments of the war.<\/p>\n programme<\/strong><\/p>\n FRIDAY OCTOBER 14th 9am-9.20 \u2013 Coffee & registration in conference room (V14)<\/p>\n 9.20 \u2013 Opening Address by Professor Cornelius Crowley<\/p>\n WANDERING AND SELF WRITING<\/p>\n Chair: Nathalie Saudo Welby<\/p>\n 9.30-10 Stephanie Genty (Universit\u00e9 d\u2019Evry) : \u2018The Table in the Corner\u2019: Wandering and Writing in Patti Smith\u2019s M Train (2015).<\/p>\n 10-10.30 Catherine Morgan Proux (Universit\u00e9 Blaise Pascal, Clermont 2) : Autobiography, Memoir and Travel Writing: Ella Maillart\u2019s The Cruel Way (1947).<\/p>\n 10.30-11 Pin-chia Feng (National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan) : Culinary and Tourist Memories: Representing Sensecapes in Leslie Li\u2019s Daughter of Heaven.<\/p>\n 11-11.20 Coffee break<\/p>\n WRITING & SURVIVAL (1)<\/p>\n Chair: Claire Bazin<\/p>\n 11.20-11.50 Pnina Rosenberg (Technion, Haifa and Jezreel Valley Academic College, Israel) : Writing herself into the Camp World: Ewa Gabanyi\u2019s Autographic Work Almanac of Memories Auschwitz-Rajsko Concentration Camp, 1944.<\/p>\n 11.50-12.20 Rosalie Ghanem (Universit\u00e9 Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3) : Histoire et m\u00e9moire dans la construction de l\u2019h\u00e9ro\u00efne m\u00e9diterran\u00e9enne dans La guerre m\u2019a surprise \u00e0 Beyrouth de Carmen Boustani.<\/p>\n Lunch 12.30-2pm (b\u00e2t V 1st floor)<\/p>\n WRITING & SURVIVAL (2)<\/p>\n 2pm-3pm Keynote speaker : Dr. Victoria Stewart (University of Leicester) : \u201cThis was the present then. This was true.\u201d Diaries, Autobiography and History.<\/p>\n 3-3.20 Coffee break<\/p>\n FRAGMENTED SELVES<\/p>\n Chair: Stephanie Genty<\/p>\n 3.20-3.50 H\u00e9loise Thomas (Universit\u00e9 de Bordeaux Montaigne) : \u201cMother, you are eighteen years old\u201d: Female Lineage, Fractured Nationalities, and Formal Experimentation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha\u2019s DICTEE.<\/p>\n 3.50-4.20 Shanon Finck (University of West Georgia) : \u2018Not a shade passing\u2019: Meditations on Aging in Patti Smith\u2019s M Train and Christine Brooke-Rose\u2019s Remake.<\/p>\n 4.20-4.50 Rodolphe Gauthier (Universit\u00e9 Paris IV-Sorbonne) : Du mat\u00e9riau autobiographique au discours politique : la question des repr\u00e9sentations dans l\u2019essai King Kong Th\u00e9orie de Virginie Despentes.<\/p>\n SATURDAY OCTOBER 15th B\u00e2timent V ground floor Room V14<\/p>\n THE SELF TRANSCENDED<\/p>\n Chair: Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni<\/p>\n 10am-10.30 Elisabeth Bouzonviller (Universit\u00e9 Jean Monnet, Saint Etienne) : From Self-Writing to National Re-Writing in Louise Erdrich\u2019s Autobiographical Essays.<\/p>\n 10.30-11 Karima Zaaraoui (Universit\u00e9 Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) : Related by herself: Mary Prince\u2019s \u2018Herstory\u2019.<\/p>\n 11-11.30 Sandra Dufour (Universit\u00e9 de Bourgogne) : Correspondence between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell: Shared Autobiographies and Consciousness-Raising in the 19th century in the United States.<\/p>\n 11.30- 11.50 Coffee Break<\/p>\n THE RELATIONAL SELF<\/p>\n Chair: Corinne Bigot<\/p>\n 11.50- 12.20 Floriane Reviron-Piegay (Universit\u00e9 de Saint Etienne) : \u201cOur lives are pieces in a pattern\u201d: Virginia Woolf\u2019s Autobiographical Fragments or the \u201canxiety of influence.<\/p>\n 12.20-12.50 Hajer Elarem (The Higher Institute of applied Languages of Moknine, Tunisia) : The Relational Self In Doris Lessing\u2019s Autobiography: Knowing the Self through the (m)other.<\/p>\n Lunch 1pm-2pm (b\u00e2t V 1st floor)<\/p>\n MEMORY, SPACE AND THE BODY (1)<\/p>\n Chair: Corinne Bigot<\/p>\n 2-2.30 Eleanora Rao (University of Salerno): \u201cI looked with wonder at the tall houses, the paved streets, the street lamps.\u201d Rose Cohen\u2019s Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side<\/p>\n 2.30-3 Anissa Talahite-Moodley (University of Toronto) : Gender, Race and the Question of Autobiographical Authenticity.<\/p>\n 3-3.30 Amaryllis Gacioppo (University of Bologna (Italy), and Monash University (Australia) : Cartography of Emotion: Embodying Personal History through Psychogeographical Methodologies (Rebecca Solnit\u2019s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and A Book of Migrations).<\/p>\n 3.30-3.50 Coffee break<\/p>\n MEMORY, SPACE AND THE BODY (2)<\/p>\n Chair: Val\u00e9rie Baisn\u00e9e<\/p>\n 3.50-4.20 Sophie L. Riemenschneider (City University of New York): \u201cGirly Things\u201d: The Use of Mnemonic Objects in Breast Cancer Narratives.<\/p>\n 4.20-4.50 Maria Tamboukou (University of East London): Writing the Memory of Work: Aesthetics Politics and the Archive.<\/p>\n 4.50-5.20 Dilek Direnc (Ege University, Izmir, Turkey) Poetics and Politics of Self and Place in Terry Tempest Williams\u2019 Refuge.<\/p>\n “Our sweetest existence is both relative and collective, and our true self does not reside solely within us,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques. If autobiography is indeed the reflective act of a remembering self, this self is never an isolated subject and the world is never only a mere stage set for reminiscing. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs wrote, “we never remember alone.” Are not the interior and the exterior worlds simply two faces of the same reality? Annie Ernaux, who borrowed Rousseau’s phrase in her Journal du dehors\/ Exteriors, introduces herself as “crossed by people and their existence like a whore,” since her relationship to the world is not only an objective of her mind, but a physical and erotic link too. Several themes may be explored:<\/p>\n 1) The autobiographical narrative as testimony\/reappropriation\/intervention: how do women participate as witnesses of their time? What narrative strategies do they use to combine\/separate\/mix individual and collective discourses, private and public discourses? How do women write narratives of historical events or of “conditions of being”? Specific genres such as war stories or slave narratives could be studied.<\/p>\n 2) Autobiography and ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch): when second or third generations recount the trauma (war, exile, decolonization, poverty) endured by previous generations in diasporic memoirs, or working class memoirs (Jeanette Winterson, Carolyn Steedman).<\/p>\n 3) The places of memory: what is the relation of women\u2019s autobiography to space-time? How is the place of memory represented (cf the garden world of Jamaica Kincaid in My Garden (Book))? What role does it play in the construction of the narrative identity in narratives of exile and of migration, such as ethnic culinary memoirs (Myriam’s Kitchen)? How are the conditions of being part of several worlds and of the postcolonial self expressed?<\/p>\n 4) Autobiography in the world’s web: the Self in the virtual world. Do on-line journals increase our connectedness to the world or do they leave us more isolated?<\/p>\n 5) Autobiography and the image of (the self in the) world: the referentiality of images tested against writing (photographs inserted into the autobiographical text as visual transmission \/ mediation between the self and the world, graphic memoirs, etc…); the intersection between personal, political and photographic autobiographies (Jo Spence)<\/p>\n Papers will be given in English (preferred language) or French<\/p>\n 200-400 word abstracts (and short bios) to be sent by June 15th 2016 to the co-organizers: Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, Istom, CREA Paris Ouest Bibliography<\/p>\n Buss, Helen M. Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton University Press, 1992. \u201cPast Lives: Postmemories in Exile\u201d, Poetics Today, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1996): 659-690. women’s autobiographies and relationship to the world\/quand les femmes s’\u00e9crivent dans le monde<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-symposiums-conferences"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Webmaster","author_link":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"women’s autobiographies and relationship to the world\/quand les femmes s’\u00e9crivent dans le monde","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":441,"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/faaam.parisnanterre.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Research group FAAAM, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre
Writing herself in the World: Women\u2019s autobiography and relationship to the world<\/em><\/strong>
Co Organisers Claire Bazin and Corinne Bigot, Research group Faaam<\/p>\n
B\u00e2timent V ground floor (room V14)<\/p>\n
Relying on Nancy Chodorov\u2019s argument that feminine personality tended to define itself in relation and connection to other people more than masculine personality did, Mary Mason (1980) stressed that female identity was grounded in relationship and produced textual representations that contrasted with masculine self-representations. In her seminal essay, \u201cWomen\u2019 Autobiographical Selves, Theory and Practice\u201d, Susan Stanford Friedman, who posited that women had more flexible ego boundaries, laid emphasis on women\u2019s relationality and community, as demonstrated by African American female autobiographies.
In How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (1999), Paul John Eakin encourages us to demystify the self-referential narrative seen as autodiegetic, where the first person subject would first and foremost refer to itself. Eakin states that the first person of autobiography is truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation. He proposes the terms “relational self” and “relational life,” arguing that all identity is relational and all self-writing is at the crossroads of biography and autobiography, which positions the narrating subject in a larger context\u2014that of the family, the community and the ethnic group. A writing of inwardness may also be perceived as an inscription of otherness and of \u201cformerness.\u201d To write is not only to become an individual, but also to recognize the presence of others in the making of the self.
Autobiography, which is traditionally associated with a certain subjective idealism, is not expected to fully engage with the world, while memoirs, a genre preferred by Anglo Saxon women, position the writing subjects in a larger environment. As Nancy Miller insisted, memoirs do not draw a clear line between the public and the private since emphasizing the role of the outside world amounts to some socio-political, cultural or ethical risk. It means inhabiting and reappropriating the public space, becoming visible, sharing one’s experience and offering a reflection on history and society. For Helen M. Buss, memoirs are not only representations of women\u2019s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women\u2019s stories have not mattered.
From this perspective, the autobiographical project is akin to sociology or history, which it completes without replacing. What historical value can we attribute to autobiography? What is the relation between autobiography and cultural memory? Between autobiography and counter-memory? Autobiography and photography?
Beyond the traditional (written) forms of autobiographical narrative, we are interested in other, more contemporary, forms of autobiographical projects.<\/p>\n
Claire Bazin cbaz1@wanadoo.fr and Corinne Bigot corinne.bigot@wanadoo.fr<\/p>\n
Val\u00e9rie Baisn\u00e9e, Universit\u00e9 de Paris Sud, CREA Paris Ouest
Val\u00e9rie Baudier, CREA, Paris Ouest
Claire Bazin, CREA, Paris Ouest Nanterre
Corinne Bigot, CREA, Paris Ouest Nanterre
Elisabeth Bouzonviller, Universit\u00e9 de Saint Etienne
St\u00e9phanie Genty, SLAM, Universit\u00e9 d’Evry-Val d’Essonne
Nathalie Saudo-Welby, CORPUS Universit\u00e9 de Picardie Jules Verne<\/p>\n
Mason, Mary \u201cThe Other Voice: Autobiographies by Women Writers\u201d Autobiography, ed James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
Eakin, John Paul. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Cornell University Press, 1999.<\/p>\n
\n
Ernaux, Annie, Exteriors. Seven Stories Press, 1996.
Friedman, Susan Stanford, \u201cWomen\u2019s Autobiographical Selves\u201d, in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women\u2019s Autobiographical Writings, ed Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1988, p.34-62.
Halbwachs, Maurice. La M\u00e9moire collective. Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.
Hirsch, Marianne and Smith, Valerie (eds). \u201cFeminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction.\u201d Signs, Vol. 28, No. 1, Gender and Cultural Memory Special Issue (Autumn 2002): 1-19.
Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography Narrative and Postmemory, Harvard UP, 1997.<\/p>\n
\n
Miller, Nancy K. Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death. Oxford UP, 1996.
Ric\u0153ur, Paul. La m\u00e9moire, l\u2019histoire, l\u2019oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Whitlock Gillian, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, The University of Washington Press, 2007.
Zanon-Davis, Natalie and Randoph Starn, \u201cIntroduction,” Representations 26, Special Issue: \u201cMemory and Counter-Memory\u201d (1989):1-6.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"