Women's Writing and the Canon

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session, dedicated to Laura Colombo, explores the place of women’s writing within the literary canon. It highlights the rediscovery of their work, its interpretation, and the evolution of its reception, up to contemporary choreographic reinterpretations.

The seminar will be held in French.

"The word 'feminism' first appeared in France around 1837, but it wasn’t until the final decades of the 20th century that the feminine 'e' was added to the word 'écrivain'. Before that, people spoke only of 'female authors' particularly 'women of letters', as correspondence was almost the only field in which women’s writing was accepted. This, however, fails to account for the 'underground revolution' carried out in the 19th century by women writing major novels or essays, such as Madame de Staël, articles in newspapers that they sometimes founded, autobiographies, or historical and political works. Admittedly, their output at the time did not carry the same weight as men’s works, and their names are remembered primarily through their artistic connections: Marie d’Agoult with Franz Liszt and their daughter Cosima Wagner; George Sand with Musset or Chopin; and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, finally appreciated by Baudelaire. What is most important, then, is to reintegrate these many women writers into the literary canon, and to do so, research is essential—particularly within the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which, thanks to the legal deposit system, is often the sole repository of these works and a rich heritage of manuscripts that remain unpublished. Next, it is the work of interpretation that matters—of this writing and its cultural and socio-political context—aiming for the intellectual recognition of women and their full citizenship, and which often accompanies contemporary struggles for the emancipation of peoples, slaves, and other oppressed classes. The evolution in the reception of these writings thus contributes to changing the image of women, in which romantic ballet and dance also play a role. The final part of the lecture will therefore focus on choreographic reinterpretations of several archetypes of femininity, again thanks to the collaboration with the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra."

Laura Colombo, who is already an associate professor, is a research fellow in French literature at the University of Verona, where she is also Director of the C.R.I.E.R. (Centre de Recherche Interdépartemental sur l'Europe Romantique) and its journal Romanticismi. In 2005, she obtained a Doctorat d'État (Texte, Imaginaire, Société) from the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, under the supervision of Béatrice Didier. Her research and publications focus on: - women's writing, particularly in the 19th century (Marie d'Agoult, George Sand, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and others), but also in the French-speaking world; - the relationship between literature, music and dance; - literary translation (with translations by Georges Simenon, Mme Riccoboni, Werewere Liking and others)