A Decade of Women's Writing in France: Trends and Horizons 2000-2010

A Decade of Women's Writing in France: Trends and Horizons 2000-2010

10^th anniversary conference of the

Contemporary Women's Writing in French Seminar

to be held on 14-16 October 2010 at

Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London,

Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, U.K.

This international conference will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Contemporary Women's Writing in French (CWWF) Seminar. As such, it aims to identify the main trends and horizons in women's writing in France in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The conference will look both back, in order to highlight what is new about new women's writing, and forwards, in order to evaluate which trends are likely to be trendsetting and to identify those that are emerging as new horizons. Trends and horizons may relate to content or literariness, themes or issues, as well as to style, genre, language and writing. Writers covered should be at least partly living or working in France (papers on migrant writers are welcome). Writers may be established authors or have published for the first time in the last ten years, but the texts discussed should have been published between 2000-2010.

The first CWWF conference held in 2000 on the 1990s generation of women writers in France brought to light dominant themes such as family relations, the body, memory and the past, gender identity, sexual transgression, experimental genres, etc., in which a new dark side to women's writing came to the fore – trauma, violence, suffering, loss. In focusing on the trends and horizons of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the 2010 conference will endeavour to map the developments, evolutions, schisms, new turns, differences, diversifications, cross-fertilisations, and radical changes between women-authored literary production (of all kinds) in France in the last ten years and the previous decade(s).

A book publication is planned.

Proposals of approximately 350 words for a 20-minute paper, together with an 80-word bio-bibliography, should be sent to the organiser, Dr Gill Rye, gill.rye@sas.ac.uk by the first call deadline of 30 September 2009. The trend(s) to be discussed in the paper should be clearly identified and justified; writers and texts to be covered should be situated in relation to relevant literary and/or socio-cultural contexts; and main theoretical approaches should be referenced. Papers may be presented in either English or French, but those to be considered for the main publication should be in English.