-
Forms, Fragments and Fractures in Contemporary Women's Life Writing: Spain, Portugal, and Italy
Convenors: Raquel Fernández Menéndez (University of Salamanca, ES) & Hannie Lawlor (University of Oxford, UK)
First Seminar:
Ursula Fanning (University College Dublin) ‘Sibilla Aleramo: Fracturing Forms, Negotiating Self-Representations’
Xon de Ros (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford) ‘Filiation through Affiliation: Mother-Daughter Bond in C20th Women's Autobiography’
Christina Bezari (Université Libre de Bruxelles) ‘Fractured Lives: Women’s Biographies in Iberian Avant-Garde Periodicals (1915–1936)’
Click here to register.
This series explores the diverse forms that women’s life writing has taken in the shifting socio-political contexts of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Southern Europe. It draws into dialogue works from three countries that remain underrepresented in Anglophone discussions and theorisations of life writing and whose twentieth-century history is marked by dictatorship: Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Taking a comparative approach, the series seeks to demonstrate the richness and importance of these autobiographical practices and to explore the relationship between formal choices and contextual challenges. Through the focus on ‘forms’ , ‘fractures’ and ‘fragments’ , it considers the evolution of life-writing practices alongside socio-political developments and investigates how the slippages, divergences, and obfuscations that have contributed to the underrepresentation of these literatures in autobiography theory to date might in fact broaden the methodological and theoretical frameworks for the analysis of life-writing across different national and cultural contexts. Proceeding chronologically, the five sessions move from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, considering representations of the self across memoirs and magazines, diaries and autofictional experiments. By comparing contexts and case studies between as well as within sessions, the series considers how women’s narratives of the self are transformed by the changing constraints on and new possibilities of expression across the period, and the alternative perspectives that these self-representations offer, in turn, on what we recognise as and understand by life writing today. The series builds on the success of previous comparative initiatives developed at the CCWW, such as Un/Doing Queerness in the European South: Crises/Critique/Grammars of Resistance, and on the interest in French- and English-language autobiographical writing at past CCWW conferences and events. In making Spain and Portugal a central focus, as well as Italy, it turns the spotlight on languages and contexts that have featured less or not at all in seminar series to date. It also dedicates one session to women’s life writing in minority and minoritised languages in Spain, showcasing the importance these literatures hold for international discussions of autobiographical practices and gender theory.