A New Language – a new life? Translingual literature by contemporary women writers

This symposium will bring together scholars working on translingual women’s writing in the language fields of Italian, French and German. We will explore the particular richness of texts produced by writers in languages that are not their mother tongues. Among the questions we will explore are the following:

• Is translingual writing perceived by the authors in question as a liberation and a new beginning, or as a requirement demanded by the literary market?
• How does the particular attention to language required in translingual writing affect the text?
• What are the distinctive literary and linguistic strategies employed in translingual writing?
• Does writing in a foreign tongue go hand in hand with establishing a new identity?
• What can translingual writing achieve that goes beyond the possibilities of texts produced by mother-tongue writers?

The symposium is conceived as a springboard for a larger international conference on women’s translingual writing, which is being planned for 2019. It is part of the AHRC-funded Open World Research Initiative project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics – Reshaping Communities’, generously supported by the Cassal Trust Fund and co-organised with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW).

Programme

14.00 Welcome
14.10 Anne Fleig (FU Berlin): New Language and Female Voice – Heteroglossia in the Writings of Özdamar and Tawada;
Maria Cristina Seccia (Hull): Translingualism as Reparation in Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s Nuvole sull’Equatore
Loredana Polezzi (Cardiff): Sharing Spaces, Translating Voices – Shirin Ramzanali Fazel and Compagnia delle Poete
15.40 Tea / Coffee
16.10 Godela Weiss-Sussex (IMLR, London): Translingual Creativity and Belonging in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)
Mary Gallagher (University College Dublin): Nancy Huston on Othering the Mother-Tongue
Anna-Louise Milne (University of London Institute in Paris): Plural Subjectivities, or ‘Writing With’

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This event is generously supported by the Cassal Trust Fund.