HRC Events Calendar

Wednesday 20 November: Annabel Kim (Harvard), 'For Sale: The Personal is Political'

This seminar will be a discussion of a pre-circulated journal article, abstract immediately below. Download the article here.

The rise of autofiction in the contemporary French literary landscape coincides with a general evacuation of fiction as the dominant mode of literary creation. Christine Angot and Édouard Louis, who are both associated with autofiction despite their disidentification with the genre, unveil the trauma they have lived through, thus operating, as does self-writing in general, in a confessional mode. Angot and Louis, however, turn confession into complaint, where they assume the position of a plaintiff filing charges against a society put on trial for its hypocrisy and the structural violence that characterizes the authors’ traumatic experiences of class, sexual, and gender violence. This article demonstrates how this transformation of confession into complaint, which is what gives Angot’s and Louis’s texts their political edge, is also what makes them open to being coopted by late capitalism, which has turned the self into a commodity, devoid of political potential.

Annabel L. Kim is Chair and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature. Kim is also the editor of a special issue of Diacritics, "Citation, Otherwise," on the politics of citation, and co-editor (with Morgane Cadieu) of a Yale French Studies volume, "Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig."

This seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams, 6-7.30pm UK time. Click here to join.