CfP: Colliding Women. Womanhood Narratives in the Modernisms of Central and Eastern Europe (1870-1970)
Organization Committee:
Naïma Berkane, Mateusz Chmurski, Cecile Rousselet & Clara Royer
When/Where: June 4-5, 2026, Paris
Scientific Committee:
Biljana Andonovska, Arnaud Bikard, Mateusz Chmurski, Alessandro Gallichio, Petra James, Luba Jurgenson, Jean-Francois Laplenie, Jasmina Lukic, Lena Magnone, Jelena Petrovic, Alexandra Wojda
Submission Guidelines:
Your proposals (in French or English), in the form of a title, a summary of around 300 words and a bio-bibliographical note, should be sent by December 1, 2025 to: femininenarratives@gmail.com
Feminine elements have been investigated as narratological concepts, as conceived of by feminist narratology (Prince, [1987] 2003; Page, 2006; Lanser, 2010, among others). As Susan S. Lander states, “the field of gender and narrative stakes its diverse approaches on the shared belief that sex, gender, and sexuality are significant not only to textual interpretation and reader reception but to textual poetics itself and thus to the shapes, structures, representational practices, and communicative contexts of narrative texts” (2013, § 3). At the margins of narrative constructions, feminine figures and motives have evoked imaginaries of deviation (eroticization, exoticization, racialization, etc.). When leading, these figures represent one of the arenas—or rather, bodies—through which the arts and artists have negotiated their relationship to the narrative.
This conference is the fourth of a cycle dedicated to “Women and Clash(es) of Emancipation” organized by Eur’ORBEM (Paris) and CEFRES (Prague). It aims to tackle the narratological consequences induced by feminine figures and motifs in modernisms. The previous works have contributed to the writing of women’s history: questioning canons and their formation, they offer tools to reread the texts and reevaluate their reception. Our goal is to probe the aesthetic specificities of womanhood narratives, thus analyzing the role of the feminine in the creation and development of narratives, insofar as they establish specific relationships with them.
“Narrative womanhood” will be investigated from a transmedial perspective. Following Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s study of narrative processes, our enquiry seeks to encompass literature and images, whether still or in motion. This narrative turn highlights that while the “co-presences” and “spatial contiguities” of still images cannot produce an “event sequence,” they still “narrativize” and “temporalize” (Schaeffer, 2020). Consequently, we include all mediums that develop narrativity through their own temporal and/or spatial means, or their “demonstrative” or “representational” potentials. We will therefore examine, through this lens, media as diverse as the visual arts, dance, literature, performing arts, theater, erotic novels, and pornographic images (see Preciado, 2011), but this list is by no means exhaustive.
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