1974-2024: Annie Ernaux’s Years – a Global Perspective,
Edinburgh & St Andrews,
3-5 October 2024
Wednesday 2 October, French Institute, Edinburgh, 6pm (West Parliament Square, Edinburgh EH1 1RN) – screening of David Ernaux-Briot’s The Super 8 Years, organised by the French Institute, with a Q&A with Fabien Arribert-Narce and Elise Hugueny-Léger (information and reservation available here)
Thursday 3 October, French Institute, Edinburgh, 2pm-7pm (West Parliament Square, Edinburgh EH1 1RN)
2pm Conference opening (Stéphane Pailler, Consul General and Director of the Institut français d’Écosse)
2.15pm-3pm Keynote paper: Barbara Havercroft (University of Toronto, Canada), “Trauma and agency in the works of Annie Ernaux”, chair: Elise Hugueny-Léger
3pm-4pm Plenary session, chair: Elise Hugueny-Léger
-Pierre-Louis Fort (CY Cergy-Paris Université, France), “Annie Ernaux: from award to award”
-Michèle Bacholle (Eastern Connecticut State University, U.S.A.), “Annie Ernaux and the U.S.A.”
4pm-4.30pm Coffee break
4.30pm-5.30pm Plenary session, chair: Fabien Arribert-Narce
-Karin Schwerdtner (Western University, Canada), “Readers’ responses to A Girl’s story”
-Ania Wroblewski (University of Guelph, Canada), “Annie Ernaux, theorist of sex and love”
6pm-7pm Conversation with Annie Ernaux (phone discussion), moderator: Catherine Guiat; interpreter/translator: Julia Hartley
Friday 4 October, University of Edinburgh, Paterson’s Land
Conference venues: Paterson’s Land G1 and Paterson’s Land G43
9.30am-11am Plenary session: Intersectional readings (Paterson’s Land G1), chair: Emmanuelle Lacore-Martin
-Matilda Nevin (University of St Andrews, U.K.), “‘Si violent mais d’une violence libératrice’: Violence as tool, strategy and obstacle in Annie Ernaux’s writing”
-Clément Génibrèdes (Princeton University, U.S.A.), “‘Venger ma race et venger mon sexe ne feraient plus qu’un désormais’. The intersection of feminism and class struggle in Les Années and Les Années Super 8”
-Hannah Volland (University of Toronto, Canada), “Annie Ernaux’s Feminist Disclosures”
11am-11.30am Coffee break (Paterson’s Land G1)
11.30am-12.30pm (Paterson’s Land G1) Round table discussion on the translation and reception of Annie Ernaux’s works with Sonja Finck (Ernaux’s German translator) and Julia Hartley (University of Glasgow, interpreter). Moderator: Lyn Thomas
12.30pm-1pm (Paterson’s Land G1) Patti Miller, “Triggering Desire” (creative response), chair: Fabien Arribert-Narce
1pm-2pm Lunch break (Paterson’s Land G1)
2pm-3pm Parallel sessions
Parallel session: Influence and legacy (Paterson’s Land, G1), chair: Susie Bainbrigge
-Christina Ernst (ZfL Berlin/Universität Wien, Germany/Austria), “On the German adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s poetics in contemporary transclasse-literature, and the invention of autosociobiography as a genre”
-Annie Jouan-Westlund (Cleveland State University, U.S.A.), “From reading Annie Ernaux to writing: Didier Eribon and Edouard Louis”
Parallel session: Reading and the author-image (Paterson’s Land, G43), chair: Sarah Tribout-Joseph
-Tommaso Testolin (University of Padova, Italy), “Writing as eavesdropping: Annie Ernaux and the new image of the author”
-Fanny Cardin (Université Paris Cité, France), “‘Une sorte de destin de femme’: Annie Ernaux and anglophone women’s life writings, a specific corpus of intertextual references”
3pm-3.30pm Coffee break
3.30pm-5pm Plenary session: Abortion stories (Paterson’s Land G1), chair: Caroline Verdier
-Sophie Feng (University of Toronto, Canada), “On life-writing as Maieutics: Feminist praxis and a poetics of telling in L’Événement (Happening)”
-Caroline Godard (University of California- Berkeley, U.S.A.), “Abortion as collective creation in Ernaux’s L’Événement and Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu”
-Tamzin Elliott (Durham University, U.K.), “Annie and her avortées: the aborto-socio-biographical afterlives of L’Événement”
5pm-5.30pm Cy Linke, “Future Nostalgia” (creative response) (Paterson’s Land G1), chair: Elise Hugueny-Léger
6pm, French Institute, Edinburgh (West Parliament Square, Edinburgh EH1 1RN) – screening of Audrey Diwan’s Happening (information and reservation available here)
Saturday 5 October, University of St Andrews, South Street
Conference venues: Parliament Hall & St Mary’s lecture theatre 3, St Mary’s Quad
9.30am-10.30am Plenary session: the local and the global (Parliament Hall), chair: Alice Blackhurst
-Morgane Cadieu (Yale, U.S.A.), “The Ys of Annie Ernaux”
-Victoria Baena (Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, U.K.), “Shifting scale: Annie Ernaux’s political geography of provincial life”
10.30am-11am Coffee break (Psychology room 1)
11am-12pm Parallel sessions
Parallel session: Writing in a capitalist world (Parliament Hall), chair: Michèle Bacholle
-Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck, University of London, U.K.), “Everyday time: Ernaux in supermarkets, trains and the métro”
-Sonja Stojanovic (Texas Tech University, U.S.A.), “The end of the cashier or shopping with Annie Ernaux”
Parallel session: Feminist encounters (St Mary’s lecture theatre 3), chair: Barbara Havercroft
-Benoit Monginot, (University of Turin, Italy), “Diary and commitment: Ernaux and the Beauvoirian legacy”
-Claudine Borg and Marilyn Mallia (University of Malta), “Teaching and translating L’Événement in the Maltese Context”
12pm-1pm Lunch break (Psychology room 1)
1pm-2.30pm Parallel sessions
Parallel session: Writing age (Parliament Hall), chair: Karin Schwerdtner
-Sophia Millman (Princeton University, U.S.A.), “Simone de Beauvoir throughout The Years: How Annie Ernaux reinvented her predecessor’s fight against ageism”
-Sarah Tribout-Joseph (University of Edinburgh, U.K.), “Care and attention in Annie Ernaux’ Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit and John Bayley’s Iris: Pathography or carer narrative?”
-Margery Vibe Skagen (University of Bergen, Norway), “Sexual liberation, ageing and the end of love: Reading Ernaux through the lenses of Houellebecq”
Parallel session: The creative process (St Mary’s lecture theatre 3), chair: Elodie Laügt
-Alice Blackhurst (University of Edinburgh), “Annie Ernaux à deux: Dialogues and dualities”
-Betsy Marks-Smith (Institut Catholique de Paris, France), “A novel in twenty-eight pages: Creative process, genre hybridity, and memory layering in Le Jeune homme (The Young Man)”
-Iringó Cora (Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania), “The manuscripts as ‘archi-trace’ of Ernaux’s work. L’Usage de la photo, from manuscript to book”
2.30pm-3pm Coffee break (Psychology room 1)
3pm-4.30pm Parallel sessions
Parallel session: Text-image dialogues (Parliament Hall), chair: Marion Schmid
-Sonia Lagerwall (University of Bergen, Norway), “‘Image-thinking’ in Annie Ernaux’s transpersonal writing”
-Jacqueline Dougherty (University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A), “Auto-photo-filmography: Annie Ernaux’s ekphrastic intermediality”
-François Dussart (Université de Lille, France), “Annie Ernaux and the arts: the becoming-pictorial of photo-literary devices and the painting of hallucinated clothes”
Parallel session: Life-writing forms (St Mary’s lecture theatre 3), chair: Ania Wroblewski
-James Conlon (Mount Mary University, Wisconsin, U.S.A), “Annie Ernaux and Augustine: Life-writing as philosophy”
-Carolina Eleni Theodoropoulos (Johns Hopkins University, U.S.A.), “Annie Ernaux and the form of autobiography: Toward an objective phenomenology”
-Emelyn Lih (New York University, U.S.A.), “Experience and expectation in Les Années”
4.30pm-5pm: Conference close & award of the WIF (Women in French UK-Ireland) prize for best postgraduate paper (Parliament Hall)
5pm-6pm: Drinks reception at the Byre Theatre and launch of the exhibition “Palimpself: A Sculptural Exploration into Materiality in the Works of Annie Ernaux” with artist Susan Diab (Byre Theatre, Abbey St, KY16 9LA)
[the exhibition launch will be photographed. If anyone wishes not to be photographed, they should let this be known to the conference organisers.]
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Conference registration and further details are available at: https://www.annie-ernaux.org/conferences/2024-edinburgh-st-andrews/
Conference organisers: Fabien Arribert-Narce, University of Edinburgh (f.arribert-narce@ed.ac.uk) & Elise Hugueny-Léger, University of St Andrews (esmh@st-andrews.ac.uk)
Conference sponsors:
- Ambassade de France au Royaume-Uni
- Institut français d’Ecosse
- SELF XX-XXI (Société d’étude de la littérature de langue française du XXe et du XXIe siècles)
- The Society for French Studies
- University of Edinburgh
- University of St Andrews
- Women in French UK & Ireland