NeMLA 46th Convention
Toronto, Ontario
April 30-May 3, 2015

We invite contributions to a session entitled “From Medieval to Modern: New Approaches to French Women and Authorship” to take place at the next NEMLA conference (Toronto, April 30-May 3, 2015). The session will explore new approaches to French women writers and concepts of authorship in a range of periods. It will also serve as a springboard for an edited collection of essays that considers the history and social significance of the French woman writer as a figure with a specific, if shifting, cultural valence, directly related to the values, history, and ideology of the society that constructed her. We are particularly interested in intersections between the study of women, gender difference, authorship and other current scholarly topics and approaches, eg. discourses of embodiment, race and ethnicity, religion, politics, popular culture (including media and celebrity), biography, ecocriticism, science, material culture, class / family relations, queer studies, disability studies.

As the study of gender has been integrated into other modes of French cultural studies, recent scholarship has tended to focus away from the woman writer as a category of inquiry in her own right. This session aims to recover the figure of the woman writer (broadly conceived) and her specific struggles by exploring recent methodological approaches that bring new kinds of questions to bear on the study of women writers. While we seek a broad view of female authorship and the multivalent ways that it has been interpreted, constructed and embodied over the course of French history, we also would like to bring into dialogue scholars who may be working on shared questions and intersecting methodologies but who might otherwise have little contact with each other due to the period-specificity of their work. Both the NEMLA session and the related volume seek to interrogate a mythology of progress, and bring to light the repeated conflicts faced by French women writers over time as well as the ways in which these writers reflected and refracted the broader social conflicts of the specific historical contexts in which they lived and wrote. Abstracts for 20-minute presentations must be sent via this link on the NeMLA website. Feel free to contact Rachel Mesch, mesch@yu.edu, or Leah Chang, lchang@gwu.edu, with any questions about the session and/or the related volume.

Rachel Mesch
Yeshiva University
500 West 185th st
New York, NY 10033
Email: mesch@yu.edu
Visit the website at http://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15466

Source de l’information : H-Net