Bochum, May 2009
Theorizing Narrative Genres and Gender
An international two-day conference will be held on this theme at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), on 15 and 16 May 2009.
This conference will discuss:
- the ways in which certain narrative genres (novels, short stories, fairy tales, autobiographies, personal diaries, travel writing, etc.) have been gendered,
- the impact that these texts have had on readers, both men and women,
- the question: what consequences have readers’ reactions and the gendered critical discourse had for the formation and development of narrative literary genres?
Recent research, on the feminocentrism of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and English novel, on narratology or on the differences between female and male reading, has shown that not only is the literary discourse tied to issues of gender, but the metadiscourse is equally imbued with it; the ‘querelles des femmes’ were frequently intertwined with literary disputes.
In keeping with the NEWW’s objectives, the conference will cover a relatively long time period, extending from 1400 to 1900, and will also present contributions treating European literatures that are considered ‘marginal’.
PROGRAMME
Keynote-Lecture:
- Vera Nünning (University of Heidelberg)
Gender, Authority and Female Experience in Novels from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: A Narratological Perspective
Section I: Appropriations de genres
- Geneviève Patard
Les Mémoires de Madame de Murat (1668?-1716): une réplique à la dérive misogyne du genre.
- Irène Zanini-Cordi (Florida State University):
Defying Genres to Find a Voice. Giustiniana Wynne and the Birth of the Italian Novel
- Hendrik Schlieper (Ruhr-Universität Bochum):
A madhouse of one's own. The representation of mad women as a strategy of subversion and poetological stimulus in the novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán
- Hanneke Boode (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen):
The Image of Margit Kaffka in Hungarian literature
Section II: Créations de genres nouveaux
- Joan DeJean (University of Pennsylvania).
Section III: Fiction vs Non-fiction
Section IV: Supposed female preference for the novel
Section V: Le Paratexte
Section VI: Les femmes lectrices
Conference languages: French and English.
Organisers: Suzan van Dijk, Universiteit Utrecht and Lieselotte Steinbrügge, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
SvD, January 2009
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