The novelists of emigration (1789-1825)
Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.
Michèle Bokobza Kahan is Full Professor in French Culture and Literature at Tel-Aviv University, Department of Literature. She is the incumbent of The Henri Glasberg Chair in Culture of Modern France. From October 2015 to September 2019, she was the Chair of the School of Cultural Studies. Her fields of teaching and research are:
- 18th Century France, literature and culture (libertine novel, theater, gender studies, philosophers of the Enlightenment, religious and political conflicts)
- Fiction and reality: theoretical approaches
- Marginality in text and context
- Testimonial discourses from the 18th century to the 21th century
- The Enlightenment Era, the Libertine Novel, Transgressive and Marginal Literary Discourses, Religious Testimonies, and Theoretical Approaches of Fiction and Testimonial Writings
- Emigration and Hospitality in Novels written by Female Authors.
Presentation of the project
"This book brings together a previously unpublished corpus of women's novels of emigration published up to 1825, some of which have been republished, while others remain forgotten. These women novelists, who themselves lived through the experience of emigration during the revolutionary decade, consider fiction as a writing space conducive to exploring the subjectivity of heroines who question the ways in which they adapt to the customs of a foreign country, in the light of the social, cultural and political factors that had determined their lives before the Revolution. The novels presented in this survey reflect an innovative approach to human interaction in moments of particular conflict and drama. The prominence given to the themes of family, friendship and hospitality testifies to new conceptual developments that are still relevant today. The staging of situations of wandering and displacement, uprooting and exile, as well as the choices made by paper emigrants, bear the seeds of central questioning of the links between what is private and what is public: they aim to reduce the separation of the two registers, to escape their hierarchization and thus perform a different political gesture, a feminine gesture. In this way, the heroines discover potentially emancipating possibilities of agentivity that lead them to revisit their previous framework of thought and belief."
The speaker
- Michèle Bokobza Kahan is a Professor of French Literature in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University.
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