Stockholms universitet

Alice Pick DuhanPostdoktor

Om mig

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in French and Comparative Literature in the Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University. My research interests include literary multilingualism, self-translation, world literature theory, and contemporary French and Francophone fiction. 

My doctoral dissertation, Les langues du roman translingue (Dec 2021), examined the contemporary translingual novel in French. A close reading of the novels of Nancy Huston, Vassilis Alexakis and Andreï Makine allowed me to examine three different contemporary understandings of literary translingualism: as a mode of translational storytelling, as an ambilingual writing practice based on the alternation between two languages, and as exophony, an adventurous voyage outside of the mother tongue. During my doctoral research, I also participated in the RJ-funded research programme, Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures, a large-scale collaboration involving over 25 researchers from six Swedish universities.

Between 2021 and 2022, I was a researcher within the project, Mediating the Maghreb: Literary Creation, Institutions, Circulation, a collaboration between Stockholm University and Mohammed V University in Rabat, funded by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (Stint). I was a visiting scholar at Mohammed V University in Rabat in May 2022 and contributed a chapter to the forthcoming volume, Le Maghreb revisité: la littérature et la culture maghrébine francophone en mediation. I also taught an undergraduate course on Francophone North African Literature at Stockholm University. 

My most recent projects reflect my broad research interests. The book, Literature and the Work of Universality (2024, De Gruyter), co-edited with Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg and Paul Tenngart, considers how literature – and literary modes of thinking – may contribute to articulating renewed forms of human commonality in a contemporary setting. Another forthcoming anthology, Francographie au féminin: l’écriture translingue des autrices suédoises (co-edited with Mickaëlle Cedergren), examines translingual writing in French by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Swedish women writers.

During the autumn term of 2024, I have been conducting archival work at the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) for an ongoing project exploring how genetic (self-)translation studies may be helpful for studying the creative processes of translingual authors who translate their own work prior to publication. The results of this latter project will be presented over the course of the next two years at a conference and two workshops within the research network “Écrire et traduire au féminin”, a collaboration between the team "Multilinguisme, Traduction, Création" at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM, CNRS), the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions at the University of Oslo, and the Department of Romance Languages and Classics at the University of Stockholm (2025-2026), with funding from the Fondation Maison des Science de l’Homme and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

As from January 2025, I will begin a new, individual three-year project, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR), Translingual Writing post-1945 and the Multilingual Spaces of French Fiction (2025-2027).  (Swedish description here).

I am Assistant Editor of Revue nordique des études francophones/Nordic Journal of Francophone Studies.

I have taught a range of undergraduate courses in French at the University of Stockholm, including Frankofoni: språk, kultur och litteratur (Francophonie: Language, Culture and Literature), Modern fransk litteratur (Modern French Literature), Litterära genrer (Literary Genres), Fransk fonetik med uttalsträning (French Phonetics), and Förberedande kurs i franska (Preparatory Course in French). 

 

Forskningsprojekt

Publikationer

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

  • Literature and the Work of Universality

    2024. .

    Bok (red)

    In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is by now a wide repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end of the spectrum, world literature confronts us with the spectre of homogenisation and the commodification of difference under a regime of global capitalism, at another end renewed forms of philological, anthropological and ecological attentiveness to the particulars of languages and texts within the crucible of connected histories allow for defamiliarising perspectives both on received historical narratives and aesthetic practices. Vernacularity emerges here as a central point of reference for constructing the universal from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity. 

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  • Ett forskningsprograms livsbana

    2022. Alice Duhan. Världslitteraturer: kosmopolitisk och vernakulär dynamik, 79-85

    Kapitel

    Världslitteratur har ofta framställts som en utmaning för dagens litteraturstudier: ”Vårt filologiska hem är numera jorden, inte längre nationen”, deklarerade Erich Auerbach redan på 1950-talet. Samtidigt undrade han vad detta egentligen innebar för litteraturforskningens traditionella prioritering av djupa språkliga och kulturella specialistkunskaper. Mer nyligen föreslog Franco Moretti i en tongivande artikel från 2000 att vi framför allt skulle betrakta världslitteratur som ett problem som behöver lösas. I artikeln inbjöd han till att utveckla nya metodologiska och teoretiska förhållningssätt till litterära studier. 

    Men om nu Moretti uppmanat världslitterär forskning att vara ”en nagel i ögat” på litteraturämnena inom de nationella språken, skulle man inte i stället kunna vända på saken och snarare se en möjlighet till samarbete och nya arbetssätt? I och med att världslitteratur tenderar att leda oss till frågor som inte kan lösas enskilt utifrån våra egna specialise­rade kunskaper uppmanar den till samverkan och dialog. Med andra ord, världslitteratur är inte bara ett problem; den är också och kanske framför allt en möjlighet. Den öppnar upp en interdisciplinär mötesplats utanför våra traditionella universitetsämnen, där forskare gemensamt kan ägna sig åt vetenskapliga frågor som har relevans både inom och bortom det individuella specialiserade studieområdet. Forskningsprogrammet ”Världslitteraturer: kosmopolitisk och verna­kulär dynamik” kan ses som ett försök att ta vara på denna möjlighet. 

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  • Les langues du roman translingue

    2021. Alice Duhan.

    Avhandling (Dok)

    Although literary translingualism, defined as the practice of writing literature in a second language, is by no means new, it is only in the past two decades that a specialized research field has emerged around the phenomenon. Synthesizing recent developments and drawing on several existing research strands, this study sets out to examine translingual writing in French in its contemporary expressions, with a particular focus on the novel. Do contemporary writers understand their translingualism differently from their predecessors? Can translingual studies be productively put into dialogue with developments in world literature studies? And how should we understand translingual writing in relation to the theoretical “translingual turn” affecting literary studies more broadly? This dissertation argues that contemporary translingual writing in French must be understood as part of a wider shift affecting both creative and critical practices, as the forces of globalization prompt us to reassess the relationship between literature and its language(s).

    Following a theoretical discussion, the analysis chapters aim to shed light on contemporary understandings of translingualism as articulated in the poetics of three major authors. The chapter focusing on Nancy Huston’s bilingual novel, Danse noire, investigates forms of novelistic self-reflexivity that demonstrate a renewed attentiveness to translation as it underpins literary mimesis. What is here called her translational storytelling not only foregrounds the representation of diegetic languages, but also draws our attention to the hermeneutic processes and ethical implications of writing and reading stories which potentially reach beyond our own linguistic, geographic and social realms. The following chapter turns to the linguistic autofiction of Vassilis Alexakis. After establishing how Alexakis’ ambilingual practice – his alternation between writing in French and Greek – leads him to interrogate his own position within world literary exchanges, it analyses both his novel, Les Mots étrangers, and his collaboration on the bilingual anthology, Âtënë tî Bêafrîka. Paroles du cœur de l’Afrique, within the framework of an “uneven translingual event” (Helgesson & Kullberg). The final chapter considers the fact that Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français has come to be viewed as the archetypal French translingual novel. A reading of this novel alongside Makine’s pseudotranslations and pseudonymic works prompts an examination of the notion of translingualism as exophony, a voyage outside of the mother tongue, and of how such writing positions itself in relation to national, monolingual literary space.

    Previous studies of translingualism in a French context have tended to view translingual authors as language migrants, who abandon their mother tongue in favour of a monolingual literary production in French. Recent work has brought the focus back to the multilingual processes informing translingual creativity, but may have overestimated the capacity of such writing to transgress the monolingual paradigm. Drawing on work by critics such as Apter, Beecroft, Gramling and Yildiz, this dissertation shows how contemporary translingual poetics can be understood as at once the result of homogenizing forces which favour monolingual and “translatable” writing in major world languages, and as partaking in the emergence of new aesthetic practices seeking to register and respond to linguistic diversity in literature.

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  • Danse noire de Nancy Huston et le narcissisme du texte translingue

    2018. Alice Duhan. Interfrancophonies 9, 13-25

    Artikel

    À partir de la lecture de Danse noire (2013), récent roman de Nancy Huston qui se caractérise par une approche introspective et parfois ludique de l’écriture translingue, cet article invite à réfléchir sur les points de convergence entre les tournants « translingue » et « mondial » de la littérature contemporaine. En nous souvenant de l’usage qu’a fait Hutcheon (1980) du terme « narcissisme » pour désigner la tendance du genre romanesque à s’intéresser à ses propres processus textuels et créatifs, nous appellerons « narcissisme translingue » les diverses façons dont ce roman se regarde – par sa forme et par ses thèmes – comme fiction et comme écriture à la croisée des langues. Par son narcissisme diégétique et plurilingue, ce roman se montre sensible à l’hétéroglossie mondiale à une époque où la littérature commence à se penser en langues, au-delà des contours des cultures nationales particulières. 

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  • L’Écriture en langue étrangère comme pratique et comme poétique

    2017. Alice Duhan. Nottingham French Studies 56 (2), 212-226

    Artikel

    This article examines the claims made by translingual writers Nancy Huston and Andreï Makine about the literary function of the foreign language, and also analyses how the poetic potential of foreign words is thematized in their fiction. It focuses on two novels which portray artistic trajectories in search of a language distinct from the imperfect words of everyday expression, be it through a nostalgically opaque language of childhood as in Le Testament français, or through an exploration of the meeting point of music and language as in Lignes de faille. While both writers emphasize the defamiliarizing function of the foreign language which, for Huston in particular, draws attention to its material form, their novels shift the site of linguistic defamiliarization from formal linguistic innovation to bilingual perception, which is likened to a ‘magic’ of words, an ‘optical illusion’ which serves to preserve childhood wonder and sensitivity.

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  • Le lieu du Nord: vers une cartographie des lieux du Nord

    2015. .

    Bok (red)

    Comment proposer une « cartographie du Nord » par l’analyse de lieux ou d’espaces qui concentrent une ou plusieurs formes de mémoire, tout en étant parfois laissés à l’abandon, voire condamnés à l’oubli ? Comment ces « territoires discursifs » se sont-ils constitués et, s’il y a lieu, ont-ils été abandonnés ? Comment ont-ils été réinventés ou convoqués par l’art, la photo­graphie, la politique, la muséographie, le tourisme, la musique, l’architecture, le cinéma, la littérature ? Sont-ils partie prenante d’une mémoire septentrionale commune à plusieurs cultures du Nord ou d’une mémoire universelle ? Sont-ils aujourd’hui l’objet de visées prospectives ? Les articles qui composent le présent ouvrage, provenant d’une dizaine de pays, se veulent une réponse, bien partielle, mais tout de même nouvelle, à toutes ces interrogations.

    Avec des articles de Stéphanie Bellemare-Page, Jan Borm, Daniel Chartier, Florence Davaille, Alice Duhan, Tiffany Johnstone, Sabine Kraenker, Paul Landon, Brian Martin, Carmen Mata Barreiro, Odile Parsis-Barubé, Manon Regimbald, Jette Rygaard, Katri Suhonen, Ulla Tuomarla, Stéphanie Vallières et Maria Walecka-Garbalinska. 

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  • "Les différentes voix qui chantaient dans les noms de ton pays": Une carte de l'Alberta à plusieurs voix dans Cantique des plaines de Nancy Huston

    2015. Alice Duhan. Le lieu du nord

    Kapitel

    À l’image de la carte de l’Alberta à plusieurs voix qui ouvre le livre, Nancy Huston refuse dans ce roman des formes de mémoire « monophoniques » et cherche une écriture qui saurait incorporer la mémoire de plusieurs individus, peuples et cultures pour produire un « cantique des plaines » polyphonique, qui chante les joies et les souffrances des êtres humains dont le destin se lie à ce lieu nordique. L’auteur de cet article étudie d’abord la façon dont les thèmes de la mémoire, du temps, et de l’identité sont mis en relation dans le roman, pour ensuite examiner l’importance de l’idéal du récit polyphonique dans le projet littéraire de l’auteur diégétique Paula.

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  • Présentation: Le lieu du Nord

    2015. Stéphanie Bellemare-Page (et al.). Le lieu du Nord, [VII]-XIII

    Kapitel
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