Amaleena Damlé – författare

Following a long tradition of objectification, 20th-century French feminism often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in writing. Amaleena Damlé addresses questions of bodies, boundaries and philosophical discourses by exploring the intersections between a range of contemporary philosophers and authors on the subject of contemporary female corporeality and transformation.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana HolmesPART TWO: Society, Culture, Family4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie EdwardsPART THREE: Body, Life, Text9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon KempPART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

Experiment and Experience is a collection of critical essays on twenty-first-century women-authored literature in France. In particular, the volume focuses on how contemporary women’s writing engages creatively with socio-political issues and real-life experiences. Authors covered include well-established names, the ‘new generation’ of writers who first came to the fore of the French literary scene in the 1990s and whose work has now matured into an important œuvre, as well as new emerging writers of the 2000s, whose work is already attracting scholarly and critical attention. Within the overarching theme of ‘experiment and experience’, the contributors explore a range of issues: identities, family relations, violence, borders and limits, and the environment. They consider fiction, autobiography, writing for the theatre, autofiction and other hybrid genres and forms. Their analyses highlight difficult issues, refreshing perspectives and exciting new themes at the start of the new millennium and moving forward into the coming decades.

The composition of aesthetic beauty and its necessary correlation with the counterparts of ugliness and monstrosity have been the primary concerns of artists and philosophers through the ages. This collection of articles, selected from the proceedings of a conference on the theme of The Beautiful and the Monstrous that took place at Cambridge University in April 2008, seeks to reassess conceptualizations and representations of beauty and monstrosity and offers a timely critical evaluation of the relationship between the two. By means of a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies, the authors provide rigorous analyses of philosophical and artistic expression from medieval to contemporary literature, thought and culture from France and across the French-speaking world. Throughout, they seek to challenge traditional approaches by addressing a diverse range of questions that relate to the beautiful and the monstrous: from formal, metaphysical and ethical considerations of aesthetics, to the threat of the monstrous in realms of psychoanalysis and politics; from figures of beauty and monstrosity as prescriptive social and identitarian categories, to transformations and metamorphoses which challenge the boundaries between human and monstrous other. Engaging with discourses on aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, psychoanalysis, feminism and postcolonialism, and discussing a spectrum of figures from angels to zombies, this collection offers a fresh range of perspectives on a fundamental transgeneric and transdisciplinary topic.

Dans ce nouveau millénaire, le champ littéraire en France continue à nous offrir des écrivains et des écrivaines étincelant(e)s, qui ne craignent pas de provoquer et de prendre des risques littéraires et philosophiques. Plus que jamais, les écrivaines, qui ont longtemps lutté pour être reconnues comme artistes et penseuses égales aux hommes, se trouvent au premier plan des expérimentations littéraires contemporaines.Aventures et expériences littéraires identifie et explore les mouvements clés de l’écriture des femmes au cours de la première décennie du vingt-et-unième siècle, regardant en arrière afin de remarquer l’évolution des thèmes féminins et féministes précédents, et s’ouvrant à de nouveaux horizons et à « l’encore à venir ». Les aventures et expériences des femmes sont explorées ainsi que les parcours littéraires suivis par des écrivaines reconnues telles que Christine Angot, Nina Bouraoui, Virginie Despentes, Régine Detambel, Annie Ernaux et Marie NDiaye au côté de nouvelles voix comme Gwenaëlle Aubry, Chloé Delaume ou Sumana Sinha.