Research project Women’s writing and translating (2025-2026)
The main aim of the project is to examine the creative process among multilingual women writers and translators in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
State of the art:
While multilingual writers have come to the fore in recent years, particularly thanks to major literary prizes in France and Germany, multilingual women authors and translators are often less known to the general public. Indeed, for a very long time, these creative women were confined to the status of ‘minor’ / 'peripheral' / 'marginal' authors.
The aim of our project is therefore to shed light on women’s extraordinary creativity in both literary writing and translation. We will explore how, in the face of imposed monolingual canons, female authors and translators unravel and remake language(s), crossing linguistic, identity and cultural boundaries.
These research questions are heavily under-studied, certainly not from an interdisciplinary approach that brings together genetic criticism, literary studies, digital humanities, cognitive science, and translation studies.
Project description
Methodology and corpus
The archives of these creators on which the project members will be working have been identified: Anne Weber, Irène Némirovsky, Clarice Lispector, Amelia Rosselli, Silvia Baron Supervielle, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Hélène Cixous, Alejandra Pizarnik, Victoria Ocampo, Margo Glantz, Elsa Triolet, Elisa Chimenti, Marina Tsvetaeva, Cécile Wajsbrot, Ludmila Savizky, Nella Nobili, Nicole Brossard, Anna Akhmatova, Lucia Morpurgo Rodocanachi, Yoko Tawada, Nancy Houston, Marika Stiernstedt, Judita Šalgo and Dubravka Ugrešić. These are the corpora that will be studied by project members from a genetic perspective. Consequently, all the research carried out as part of this project will be based on archival material (drafts, letters, notes, etc.).
Some of the archives studied are located in France (BNF, IMEC), others can be consulted in various international institutions (USA, Brazil, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, Serbia...). Research stays devoted to exploring these archives will be covered by participants’ own institutional or externally acquired funding.
The researchers involved in the project specialize in different linguistic areas: this will enable comparative studies to be carried out within the monthly research seminar, as well as at an international scholarly conference organized as part of the project in June 2025 in Stockholm.
The periods covered by the project - the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries - will enable us to observe how the status and activities of women writers and translators are viewed by society and by the authors under consideration.
More about this project
Seminar during 2025: http://www.item.ens.fr/seminaire-multilinguisme-25-26/
Participants : Stijn Vervaet (University Oslo), Olga Anokhina (CNRS, ITEM), Mickaëlle Cedergren (Universitet Stockholm-ITEM), Alice Duhan (Universitet Göteborg)