Dr Ana de Medeiros, Reader in French and Life Writing in the Department of French, is co-organising a conference featuring an on-stage interview with writer Amélie Nothomb. The conference is co-sponsored by Mount Allison University (Canada) alongside the University of Kent.
Belgian by origin, raised principally in the Far East and now splitting her time between Paris and Brussels, Amélie Nothomb, a self-described ‘apatride belge’ questions the links between identity, memory and place not only in her autobiographically inspired works but also in her fictional writings. In 2013, Nothomb published her twenty-second novel, La Nostalgie heureuse. This title, a translation of the Japanese notion ‘natsukashii’, reminds us of the complex relationships that remain to be articulated between emotion and the past, the present and the future in an oeuvre that (re)visits many places and renders identity problematic.
Building upon her ever-growing corpus, researchers are invited to investigate the elements of identity, memory and place either alone or conjugated together. For example, what are the spaces and the topoi – recurrent or unique – of the Nothombian literary universe? How is the relationship between character and time, or character and place written? What is the nature of identity – past or present – in the face of abandoned places or those found again? What function does memory or remembering play for various characters in her œuvre? From narrative to narrative is there a memory of place? Is there a memory of the Nothombian œuvre itself?
Ana de Medeiros and Mark Lee invite proposals of up to 350 words (in English or French) for 20 minute papers to be sent before 1 November 2013 to: nothomb.identity.memory.place@gmail.com
For more details of the conference, please see the page here:
www.kent.ac.uk/paris/events/2014-05-16