The conference is bilingual, but it will take place mainly in French.
Participants may give a paper in English but must understand French.

Call for papers / International Conference

"Elusive faces of the feminine. Writing and photography, face to face"

3-5 May 2007

This conference is about the relationship between photography and
writing, and the places where they meet, dialogue, cross and flee
each other. In this relationship between the photographic and the
literary, we are interested in the importance of the female face, an
alterity that neither medium can capture.

The goal of this conference is to question, via contemporary literary
and photographic works the different faces of the feminine. We can
think of Marguerite Duras's photo du bac in The Lover, or the various
female faces in Marie Ndiaye's Autoportrait en vert, or again the
absent faces of Annie Ernaux's L'usage de la photo, but also (amongst
others) we recall Gillian Wearing's masks, Cindy Sherman's self-
portraits, Orlan's performative use of plastic surgery… These
stagings and performances of the female face (or of its absence) by
means of narrative and/or photography will allow us to question not
only the female face but what it says of the relationship, largely
studied these last few years, between text and photography.

Amongst the questions that we are interested in: What place does
writing occupy inside a book where photography is a sign of the real?
How can one read the photographic cliché when it is inserted in a
narrative? How is the book transformed by it, and what new face of
the feminine is then made to appear? Are new forms of expression born
from the meeting between literature and photography? How is
literature submitted to visibility and invisibility? How is
photography brought to speak?

Proposals (approximately 250 words) as well as a bio-bibliography
must be submitted to Martine Delvaux (delvaux.martine_at_uqam.ca) and
Catherine Mavrikakis (catherine.mavrikakis@ umontreal.ca) before
September 20 2006.

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
         ==========================================================
Received on Sat Sep 09 2006 - 10:52:38 EDT