Events

earlier events

January 2010

February 2010

March 2010

Gender, Agency and Violence: European Perspectives from Medieval Times to the Present Day
18-19 March 2010
Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe (CISSGE) Annual Conference
IGRS, London

April 2010

Gender and Memory in European Literature, Film and Visual Art
22-23 April 2010
 Birkbeck College, University of London
Conference venue: Room B04, Main Building, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E 7HX.
Please note that there is no registration fee for this conference but we would ask you to fill out the registration form provided and return it to us as soon as possible. Tea and coffee will be provided but lunch and dinner will be at participants own cost.
For further information please contact: Joanne Leal (j.leal@bbk.ac.uk) or Silke Arnold-de Simine (s.arnold-de-simine@bbk.ac.uk)
For programme and registration form please click here

May 2010

Cross-cultural Seminar on Women's Writing: Writing Childhood
Friday 7 May 2010
Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies
Event is free, but please register by emailing igrs@sas.ac.uk by 23 April 2010

June 2010

July 2010

August 2010

September 2010

Hybrids, Monsters, Aliens and Other Creatures in 20th and 21st Centuries Writing
9th-11th of September 2010
Senate House, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2010

October 2010

November 2010

December 2010

Events

CCWW Launch Event: Writing Childhood

Readings by
Ana Luísa Amaral
Anna Mitgutsch
Nicoletta Vallorani

16 October 2009, 2pm - 5.30pm, Room 274/75
IGRS, Stewart House, 32 Russell Sqaure, WC1B 5DN

funded by the John Coffin Trust Fund and in collaboration with the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature

We are delighted to launch our new Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing with a reading by three writers representing three of our languages: Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral, Austrian novelist and essayist Anna Mitgutsch and Italian novelist and children's book author Nicoletta Vallorani will be reading from recent works treating the theme of childhood. They will also discuss their work with Professor Abigail Lee Six and there will be opportunities for questions from the audience. Join us for an afternoon of exhilarating, disturbing, beautiful and provocative literature. Readings will be in the original language and in English translation.
To listen to a recording of the event please click here.

Cross-cultural Seminar on Women's Writing: Writing Childhood
Inaugural meeting 7 May 2010, Room G35, Senate House
IGRS, Stewart House, 32 Russell Sqaure, WC1B 5DN

The first meeting of this seminar series develops the topic of the CCWW launch event, held on 16 October 2009, when three authors (from Austria, Italy and Portugal) came to London to read from and discuss their work on ‘writing childhood’.
All Welcome. There is no charge for attendance. Refreshments and lunch will be provided, so we would be grateful if participants could register by emailing igrs@sas.ac.uk.
Deadline for registration: 23 April 2010

Programme
Abstracts of papers

11-11.25 Arrival and coffee

11.25-11.30 Introduction

11.30-1.00 Session 1: 

Laura Rorato (Italian, Bangor), ‘Writing for children/writing about children: depicting childhood in contemporary Italian fiction’

Abigail Lee Six (Spanish, Royal Holloway, London), ‘Writing childhood in the Gothic mode’

Claire Williams (Portuguese, St Peter’s, Oxford), ‘“O gosto do mal” [The taste of evil]: the cruelty of children in Clarice Lispector’s shorter works’

1.00-2.00 Lunch (sandwiches provided)

2.00-3.30 Session 2:

Amaleena Damlé (French, Exeter College, Oxford), ‘“L’enfance est un pays aussi” [childhood is a country too]: writing childhood in Nina Bouraoui’s work’

Debbie Pinfold (German, Bristol), ‘The Zonenkinder speak out: post-Wende accounts of growing up in the German Democratic Republic’

Debbie Martin (Latin American, Bath), ‘Feminine adolescence, the uncanny, and the representational uses of the child: some theoretical perspectives’

3.30-3.45 Tea

3.45-4.45 Roundtable/general discussion and future meetings of the seminar


Abstracts of papers

Amaleena Damlé (Exeter College, Oxford)
‘“L’enfance est un pays aussi” [childhood is a country too]: writing childhood in Nina Bouraoui’s work

A great deal of Nina Bouraoui’s largely autofictional oeuvre is concerned with the evocation of childhood experiences and memories. Speaking in an interview, her assertion that ‘L’enfance est un pays aussi’1) designates childhood as a landscape to be explored, and indeed in many ways childhood appears to be as much a departed land as the postcolonial Algeria she grew up in. As such, many of the complex and ambivalent attitudes of loss and fracture that Bouraoui draws out in relation to Algeria and to her half-French, half-Algerian identity are reflected in her notions of childhood, as feelings of uprooting, displacement and alienation that emerge from moving between Algeria and France coincide with, and mirror, the violence of the corporeal and emotional transition between child and adult. This paper is interested firstly in exploring the complex relationship between childhood and landscape, or territory, in Bouraoui’s work. However, it will go on to consider the implications of this close relationship in the terms of writing of childhood, the past, and memory. The paper will argue that by presenting childhood in such spatial and relational terms, Bouraoui offers a sideways rather than backwards glance towards childhood. Instead of creating a vertical axis with the past, then, either in terms of regression or recuperation, Bouraoui’s autofictional writing maps out geographical spaces and cartographic encounters that create transversally regenerative links to childhood. Drawing on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as Homi Bhabha, this paper demonstrates how Bouraoui’s Le Jour du séisme2)  and Mes mauvaises pensées3)  spatialize and open up the operations of the past and memory inherent within the notion of writing childhood, allowing for a ‘Third Space’ of writing in which childhood exists without referent to a fixed and stable past but in a state of perpetual becoming.

1) Entretien’, Delirium http://delirium.lejournal.free.fr/interview_nina_bouraoui.htm [last accessed 2 November 2008].
2) Nina Bouraoui, Le Jour du séisme (Paris: Stock, 1999).
3) Bouraoui, Mes mauvaises pensées (Paris: Stock, 2006).


Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway, London)
‘Writing childhood in the Gothic mode’

This paper will discuss the impact of narrating from a child’s point of view in the two Gothic novellas which made Adelaida García Morales’s name, El Sur and Bene. In both cases, an adult narrator is recounting events of her childhood as she understood them at the time; in El Sur these include her parents’ unsatisfactory marriage and an extra-marital affair her father had, her father’s and her own supernatural water-divining powers, and his suicide when she was an adolescent; in Bene, a different child describes the eponymous housemaid’s effect on the household, leading eventually to her brother’s death and her own encounter with a ghost. I will consider the effect of reading the texts from these two girls’ first-person perspectives in three key interlinked areas: the depiction of the supernatural, of sex, and of death, all of which loom large in both novellas. I will explore possible answers to the following questions. To what extent can the reader see over the head of the child? To what extent can the adult recounting her experience as a child see over the head of her own child self? How does the author’s decision to deny her readers a reliable omniscient account contribute to the creation of the haunting atmosphere which is the hallmark of all her fiction? Finally, looking at the texts as ones produced by a woman writer, what does using a child’s perspective contribute to the debate around gender and the Gothic?~


Debbie Martin (Bath)
‘Feminine adolescence, the uncanny, and the representational uses of the child: some theoretical perspectives’

This paper will consider new ways of thinking about feminine childhood and adolescence, in particular drawing on (feminist engagements with) the Freudian uncanny. Considering the ‘close alliance of the woman and the child in terms of their uncertain categorisation as “proper” subjects’, and the uncanny as a crisis of the proper, we might posit that the female adolescent, on the border of personhood in more ways than one, is an uncanny figure par excellence. Her embodiment of anxiety about categorisation and subjectivity makes her centrality to gothic and horror narratives unsurprising. Perhaps more radical is a consideration of her experience as at odds with itself, an insight which we can trace back to Freud, but which has been re-worked by scholars in the emergent discipline of girls’ studies. Drawing on Kristeva’s elaborations on the uncanny/foreignness, as well as queer theorists’ positioning of the uncanny, the paper will consider whether the acquisition of feminine sexuality – patriarchal requirements for a contradictory experience of sexuality and rivalry with/desire for the mother – can itself be understood as an articulation of the uncanny. If the female adolescent (and the child more generally) has traditional representational uses which tend towards the symbolic or allegorical (for example within national contexts), the paper will also propose that the exploration of childhood experience (for example as uncanny) is a challenge to dominant modes of constructing meaning which would reinforce the child’s status as subaltern and vehicle of futurity.


Debbie Pinfold (Bristol)
‘The Zonenkinder speak out: Post-Wende accounts of growing up in the German Democratic Republic’
Since 2000 a number of accounts of growing up in the GDR have appeared on the market. Written mainly by authors who were born into the GDR in the 1970s and were still in their teens when the GDR ceased to exist, they tend to focus more on the everyday experiences of childhood rather than political oppression, and have therefore sometimes been interpreted as mere exercises in ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the east). However, they might also be interpreted as providing a wholesome corrective to the western image of the GDR as ‘Stasiland’, and as offering those who were relatively unaffected by political oppression in the GDR a more recognisable image of their former home. In this paper I will focus on three such texts, Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder (2002), Claudia Rusch’s Meine freie deutsche Jugend (2003), and Michael Tetzlaff’s Ostblöckchen: Neues aus der Zone (2005), and argue that the transitional generation which grew up in the GDR but has come to adulthood in the new Germany is united by a desire to map its individual biographies onto the German national narrative. I shall suggest that accounts of individual childhoods thus both reinforce the prevailing national narrative but also assert the importance of the former east within it.


Laura Rorato (Bangor)
‘Writing for Children/Writing about Children: Depicting Childhood in Contemporary Italian Fiction’
This paper will focus on recent debates on the notion of children’s literature in order to establish how modalities of narration have affected the representation of childhood in recent years. The paper will analyse the works of four Italian women writers, two of which write both about children and for children, Nicoletta Vallorani and Susanna Tamaro, and two, Fabrizia Ramondino and Sandra Petrignani, who have never written children’s books but whose works frequently engage with the theme of childhood. The paper will also reflect on questions of language, how childhood is depicted through language and the role of memory in writing about childhood.

Claire Williams (St Peter’s, Oxford)
‘“O gosto do mal” [The taste of evil]: The Cruelty of Children in Clarice Lispector's Shorter Works’

Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) wrote a number of short stories that address the way that children experience and question the world as they approach the threshold of adulthood. In semi-autobiographical stories and chronicles from 'Felicidade Clandestina' [Clandestine Happiness, 1971] she describes growing up in the north-eastern city of Recife but in most cases she uses style indirect livre to indicate her characters' trains of thought. Curious or troubled schoolchildren, both boys and girls, are very present in the collections 'Laços de família' [Family Ties, 1960] and 'A Legião Estrangeira' [The Foreign Legion, 1964], learning how to interact 'successfully' with adults. This paper will address the ways in which Lispector's young characters test the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, discovering that they often cause casualties in the process.