Upcoming Africa at Noon Events
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Women’s Fictional Testimonies and the Algerian Civil War
Névine El Nossery
Assistant professor of French and Francophone Literature
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Time and Location: 12:00pm, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI
Description:
In order to exhume the buried memories and through a process of ‘Anamnesia’, Algerian women writers have coped with this inconceivable reality of the civil war by exploring a variety of counter-memories that challenge the ‘whitening’ of history, interweaving individual stories and collective History; past and present ‘folds’ (Deleuze); factual and fictional structures, which recall once again the complex and yet dynamic process of re-membering the past. This paper examines the relationship between writing and memory, literature and history, aiming to discern where the boundaries between factual and fictional representation of reality tend to blur.
Speaker’s Bio:
Névine El Nossery is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Literature in the Department of French and Italian. Her research focuses on women’s writing and historiography, exile, migration, French Canadian literature and Middle Eastern literature and culture. She published several articles and book chapters in international journals and is working now on a book-length manuscript about women fictional testimonies and the Algerian civil war.
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