Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Date: 18 November 2009

Lucille Cairns (Durham University) – Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov

As Thomas Nolden has averred, ‘among today’s Jewish writers in France, Myriam Anissimov is the most engaged in reminding the reader of exactly what happened in the past’. Anissimov is by far the most prominent Jewish woman writer in post-WWII France consistently to foreground traumatic postmemory of the Shoah. Born in a Swiss refugee camp in 1943 to Jewish parents whose other family members were slaughtered in the Nazi death camps, Anissimov has commented that ‘je me suis toujours demandé pourquoi, moi, j’ai survécu et pourquoi les autres sont morts. Je me suis demandé aussi si vraiment j’avais le droit d’existence et si je n’étais pas coupable de quelque chose’ (‘I’ve always wondered why I survived and why the others died. I also wondered if I really had the right to exist and whether I wasn’t guilty of something’). Whilst Anissimov’s third novel, Rue de nuit (1977) sets a certain template for her later works, the most recent of which appeared in 2007, the mediation of second-generation symptomatology is complicated by a particular narratological choice that actually demarcates it from the rest of Anissimov’s oeuvre. Whereas most of that oeuvre is largely if not exclusively mimetic, Rue de nuit is cast in an ostensibly realist framework of post-war (early 1970s) Paris, but is in fact a dystopic, oneiric first-person narrative which provokes lectorial oscillation between belief and disbelief. Indeed, it has been justly qualified by celebrated Jewish writer Gilles Pudlowski as ‘très kafkaïen’ (‘very Kafkaesque’). In its exegesis of Rue de nuit, my paper will foreground the strengths of that departure from mimeticism in the forging of post-Auschwitz structures of feeling.

This is the inaugural event in the ‘Trauma Fiction History’. Colin Davis will introduce the session with a short paper, ‘Why Trauma?’, outlining the significance of trauma studies for work in the Humanities and laying out some of the aims of the series. This will be followed by a paper by Professor Cairns, entitled ‘Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov’.

series website HERE

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Colin Davis – Why Trauma

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Lucille Cairns – Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov

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handout (pdf)

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questions:

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7 March 2009
Contemporary Women’s Writing in French: Recent Fiction
New Perspectives
A Celebration of Professor Elizabeth Fallaize

Garden Quad Auditorium – St John’s College, Oxford, OX1 3JP

The Contemporary Women’s Writing in French Seminar is celebrating Professor Elizabeth Fallaize’s retirement and her important contribution to the field.

You are warmly invited to join us via this sound recording.

The day draws and builds on some of the insights on 1970s and 1980s writing in Elizabeth’s 1993 volume French Women’s Writing: Recent Fiction. It provides the opportunity to establish a bilan of women’s writing in French in the 1990s and post-2000 in relation to the perceived shift from the impact of second wave feminism to that of a putative postfeminism.

The first two sessions focus on recent works by two of the authors Elizabeth featured, Annie Ernaux‘s Les Années (2008), led by Diana Holmes and Alison Fell; and Marie Redonnet’s L’Accord de paix (2000) and Diego (2005), led by Ruth Cruickshank and Sarah Fishwick. Adopting the format of French Women’s Writing, they are structured around short excerpts of these writers’ most recent fictions, identifying ways in which Ernaux and Redonnet reflect the realities and challenges of gender, sexuality and identity and of being a woman writing in French in the twenty-first century.

The third session is devoted to a round table session on 1990s and post-2000 women’s writing in French, featuring CWWF members at different career stages and with complementary areas of expertise (Lucille Cairns, Amaleena Damle, Shirley Jordan, Gill Rye and Helen Vassallo; chaired by Margaret Atack). It is loosely structured around a set of questions which build on those raised by Elizabeth, considering developments in notions of gender, sexual and racial identity; in the condition of women and women writers; and in the field of Francophone women’s writing.

Supported by the Department of
French at Royal Holloway, University of London
and St John’s College, Oxford
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Contact:
Dr Ruth Cruickshank

The Contemporary Women’s Writing in French Seminar is based at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, Senate House, University of London. The Seminar is a forum for the discussion and promotion of contemporary women’s writing in French (from either metropolitan France or elsewhere), the main focus being new and recent texts.
See: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CWWF/Index.htm

CWWF-SEMINAR Newsletter archives can be found at:
http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/research/CWWF/Index.htm

AUDIO:

Part 1:

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Part 2:

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Part 3:

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