About the conference
Join us for the annual French Graduate Student conference "Fabrications of Reality" as we examine how storytelling and fiction are not solely found in literature and how prevalent ideologies also tell us stories that determine and shift our perception of reality. There is no objective reality, only fabrications, literary and political. The conference will bring together scholars in thinking of how reality is constructed through history and in this new political era. Presentations and discussions will address Autofiction, Bovarysm, Fabrications of identity, Queer utopias, Orientalism, Reality as text and Semiotics of mapped realities.
Keynote Lecture: Kyoo Lee, Professor of Philosophy at The City University of New York, CUNY.
PROGRAM
9:00 am-9:30 Coffee and Breakfast, Rm. 4202
9:30 am – 9:45 am Introduction, Dr. Francesca Canadé Sautman (Graduate Center, CUNY)
9:45 am – 11:15 am Panel 1 | Otherness/Altérités
Chair: Mariana Goycoechea (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Vanessa Cimon-Lambert (University of Toronto): “Bodies Under Attack: Metaphors and the Deteriorating Self in Hervé Guibert’s À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie”
Michelle Levit (University of British Columbia): “Les réappropriation et redéfinition effectuées par les femmes dans Les Aubes écarlates et Histoire de la femme cannibale”
Marcel Tchatchou (Indiana UniversityBloomington): “Medium littéraire et manufacture du réel : la figure imaginaire du musulman dans La Chanson de Roland”
Daniel J Sander (NYU): “Neo Boys”
11:30 am – 1:00 pm Panel 2 | Inventions of Knowledge/Créations de la connaissance
Chair: Angélique Aristondo (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Carmen Azzalini (University of Toronto) “Du réel réflexif au réel assertorique : une lecture double du Pot-Bouille d’ Émile Zola”
Régis-Pierre Fieu (Université du Québec à Montréal): “Imaginer la possible chute de la France : le cas de Guérilla de Laurent Obertone et Soumission de Michel Houellebecq"
Adrienne Jacaruso (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor): “Objets trouvés: The Loss and Preservation of Knowledge in Raymond Queneau's Les enfants du Limon”
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Lunch Break, Rm. 4202
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm Panel 3 | Imagining Spaces/Penser l’espace
Chair: Marguerite Van Cook (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Fadil Moslemani (University of Chicago): “L’Italie de Madame de Staël comme terrain de fabrication d’un nouveau paradigme littéraire: une analyse de la réception de Corinne par le monde culturel italien”
Nawel Chtourou Kallel (ESSTED University of Tunis): “Le corps du livre, le hors-lieu du corps”
Emma Watson (King’s College London): “Queer Utopia: The phallanstere, communal living and community architecture”
3:45 pm – 5:15 pm Panel 4 | Breaking Reflections/Ruptures
Chair: Frédéric-Charles Baitinger (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Elisa Bernard (Université Lyon 3): “Didier-Georges Gabily : le briseur de palais des glaces”
Zoë Slutzky (CUNY, The Graduate Center): “The Appearance of Disappearance: Travel as a Metaphor for Self-Erasure in The Passenger and La Moustache”
Emily Watlington (MIT): “Love, by the Book: on Clichés and Affect in Sophie Calle’s Double Game”
Cristina Politano (University of California, Los Angeles): “Truth, Illusion, and the Miraculous: A Critic Reassessment of the Episode of the Dragon in Wace's Vie de sainte Marguerite”
5:30 pm – 6:30 pm Keynote Address by Professor Kyoo Lee, “Know Yourselfie: A Meditation on ImMEDIAtion”
Kyoo Lee, a resident philosopher at CUNY, author of Writing Entanglish (2015, Belladonna* Chapbook) and Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (2012, Fordham UP), who also has co-edited journal issues on “Safe” (2011, Women’s Studies Quarterly) and “Xenophobia & Racism” (2014, Critical Philosophy of Race), is a theorist and writer who works widely in the intersecting fields of the Arts & the Humanities. Occasionally, she summer-teaches at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
6:30 – 8:00 pm Reception, Rm. 4202
Cosponsored by the Henri Peyre French Institute, the Doctoral Student Council, the PhD Program in French at the Graduate Center, CUNY
